Twinkle Twinkle little wet star

Horoscope: "Even if you woke up with a frown, you will end the day with a smile as you realize a certain problem is, in reality, opportunity in disguise. A modicum of creative thinking is enough to produce a miracle." The Star

Well... I could definately use a miracle, so I guess I should start digging for that modicum of creative thinking. I guess buying a lottery ticket is pretty uncreative... but has the potential to make for a nice miracle.

Yesterday brought another 20 odd mm of rain and today we've had a few showers and thunder storms, but I"m not sure they'd be hitting the weather station I've been watching. I guess we'll have to see what else the day brings in terms of rain. The sky is still grumbling and dark - so who knows.

Day by Daylily

This one is another stray daylily hanging out in the front yard and being a nice mix of yellows and oranges.... as for the rain we've officially smashed the June-July record for this area with 8 days left of July. At last check, the total for the airport was at 159.4 mm for just the month of July - but that was before this mornings 3 or four rainfalls being added. Here is the Star Article.

Party on the Nasturtium

Ah.. the things I've forgotten - I'm going to call them mosquito hawks, but I'm certain that they have a real name that I should know...and have long since forgotten.

Another Daylily

This one is not actually in the daylily bed - its hanging out with the big kids in the center bed. In fact, I must, with embarassment, admit that I didn't really realize that this was a daylily when I bought it. I think I thought it was a dwarf lily - which I suppose amounts to the same thing - but its nice and it is little realative to the others.

Brown-Eyed Girls

Actually, this post should be tittled - musings about blogging.. but hey, this one should get more hits. These aren't the ones I planted last year, these are new ones procured on sale from Canadian tire - mine are nearly open, but still not much to photograph, although I did take a picture anyways.

Back to musing about blogging. I started blogging because two of my brothers were blogging and I guess I wanted to join the club. When I started, I had these aspirations about creating these wonderful mini essays on important issues - but the kind of time commitment that entails would have limited my posting to oh say - once every 5 years if I remembered how to post after that length of time. In fact, its the ease of posting from Picassa coupled with my purchase of a digital camera that has allowed me to keep blogging for just over 3 years. Someone might notice that the archieves here only go back to November 2005, but in actual fact my first blog entery is dated June 10th, 2005 - and is located on my MSN space blog that I have finally given up writing in - because for the last 2 years I've mostly written - please go read my real blog. For the most part, I blog for my own benefit. Occassionally, I blog to share pictures with folk I know - but all along - I write whatever is in my head and not likely to come back and haunt me - save for the occasional proof that I really do better when I have access to a spell checker (but using it through Picassa has tended to crash my attempts at blogging and while they likely fixed that bug years ago - after losing a few too many posts - I just am out of the habit of checking.) [So... I don't fel the least bit guilty if I'm currently boring your to tears, since mostly I expect that folk look at the pictures and ignore my writing] In fact, blogging has accomplished something that all my grade school teachers failed to do.... get me to willingly keep a journal of sorts. Wouldn't my grade 8's have a laugh to know that I secretly had sympathy for their journal loathing, but it was one of the best tools I had for getting writing out of them and as I continued in school - I actually came to appreciate journal writing. At least in Gr. 12, Mr. Ellis had us do really cool things with journal writing. The one that stands out in my mind is the day that he played the song Northwest Passage by Stan Rogers and then told us to write about whatever thoughts the song had inspired in our pretty little heads. I have no idea where my grade 12 journal is - I most certainly haven't thrown it out - but as to which box it is carelessly filed, I have no idea. Little did he know, I would spend my final year of highschool playing that song on my guitar and singing it over and over while dreaming of moving to Thunder Bay. My heart still soars when I hear that song - and here I am headed ever closer to the NW passage myself. Maybe I should give just a little bit of credit to Mr. Ellis - easily the coolest English teacher I ever had - for pointing my footsteps in this direction at some point in my journey or at least for exposing me to Stan Rogers.

I'm well aware that I account for a stunning porportion of the hits on my blog - partly because I use it as a bookmarks folder and flip to it when I want to visit various places - particularly other blogs - but also because I often find myself flipping through my archieves - sometimes just for fun and sometimes when I want to find a particular picture that I've moved to storage and sometimes just for the trip down memory lane. Its good to remind myself about those rare times I've escaped the vicinity of my computer to places where there is wind and trees and stuff. I also like to read the statistics on my blog - particularly the keywords that have led people here - lately mostly flowers and provincial parks - but occasionally stranger things. There are a few pictures that get a lot of hits too. One of the more disturbing is a picture from a childhood sleepover - I don't know what keywords got folk their as it comes through google images usually - but the picture itself is more interesting for the 80's paraphenelia than it is for the sake of a bunch of kids in their pj's. There are constructs, jelly bracelets, bracelets made of plastic lacing, an alvin and the chipmunks sleeping bag, a national geographic picture book, some fisher price toy and a 110mm camera.... and 5 kids making stupid faces at the camera, which is amusing enough.

Okay.. enough musing for one day... it all sounded better in my head when I was musing about it in the first place while walking the dog... now it just sounds goofy.

Mystery Wildflower #6 or 7

Okay. I guess I've lost count and truely I haven't a clue what this is - although aster of some variety is my first guess with a guess of buttercup family for the second - although that accounts for a good chunk of what is out there. Its been so wet that everything is a bit floppy. I really really need to get some more twine and actually stake some flowers or rather tie them to the stakes I've so carefully placed. My zebra mallows, in particular, need this to be done before they wound themselves flopping over ever time they get wet and the ditto for the pink mallows.

Ding Dong The Hosta Bells

I had fun trying to take this picture squatting with an umbrella.....

A brave new lily

This little red daylily picked a wet day to join us. I went out in hopes of getting some pictures of a rainbow, but in spite of heavy rain mixed with blueskies, there was no luck for me.

Pummelled with Rain Again

This graph was borrowed from Environment Canada's Real Time Hydrometric Data Website to show you that we got enough rain to raise the water surface of a nearby stream by 0.8 m over 3 days. Today we had two more serious rain events. The website is lots of fun. There are a tonne of streams across the country with data and its actually quite useful in a flood situation. I recall a prof nervously keeping an eye on it the last time that I was in Fredericton around flood season, owing to a low lying cottage downriver.

Yesterday, only a trace amount of rain was recorded at the airport, but here there was a good bit more - in fact after quickly checking all the local meteorological stations I was actually quite surprised by the variation in recorded amounts of rain. The day we go 50 mm - some nearby stations got about 25 while one recorded a total of 69 mm. Weather is cool - what can I say and definately no need to water for a few days.... its pretty soggy here. I picked the stream above because I knew it would be dramatic - this particular stream has a tendancy to flood - although - aside from some agriculture and roads - the stream is fairly unscathed. Nearby 16 Mile Creek on the other hand is highly chanalized through Milton (i.e. - flowing through a not-so-natural- concrete structure) - and doesn't appear to have a station.

Anywho... for those of you up north... there a good chance of northern lights tomorrow night and maybe even tonight - so look up if the clouds will let you.

The Dangers of Drinking

Drinking can be the death of you, particularly if you are a slug or an earwig guilty of devouring my daisies, roses or devestating my lupines. So, I set my trap using Lakeport Beer. This is not because Lakeport Beer is unpleasant tasting, but because a can of Lakeport is cheaper than anything else available in the store and it isn't so foul that I can find somewhere to dispose of the leftovers. I've only set my traps twice, but the Lupine's are starting to recover now - so I'm feeling good about it. I did find it more effective on slugs compared to earwigs. I think I only caught 1 or 2 earwigs - everything else was slugs.

The final total for precipitation yesterday was a whopping 51.2 mm, after 28.2 the day before bringing us to a grand total of 130 mm for July (the average for July over 30 years is around 74.4 mm). This follows a June that saw about 110.4 mm (average is 74.2 mm) and a May with 68.8 (average is 72.4 mm) which is a touch low, but probably not all that statisically significant. So, there are 10 days left in July... it will be interesting to see what that brings - there is still a fair bit of rain forcast. What makes this a bit interesting is that the EC 6 month forecast suggested a slightly hotter and dryer than normal summer and so far, this hasn't come true. (which is great for my lawn because I refuse to feed it potable water unless there is a dire temporary need.) So, everything is looking great. The asian lillies are fading out, but the day lillies are fading in and the echinacaea is putting on a real show, soon to be joined by lots of brown-eyed susans.

The advice to everyone from my favourite horoscopian is to "steer clear of self-criticism and excessive worrying about problems that cannot be solved." I suspect that this is good advice in general, but I'm particulary guilty of both lately, so I'm going to try to take it to heart.

Cheers

Hosta-ile Software and other news

In happy gardening news - most of the hostas are in varying stages of flowering and one of the neatest parts of having a variety of hostas is seeing just how different their flowers can be. The one above has a bud that looks like pinapple, and individual flowers pop out from the bottom out. There were also 2 new wildflowers, however I didn't get good pictures yesterday when they came out and the rain last night pretty much ruined them. One of them in particular was a really neat looking carmine and white poppy, while the other was a simple, but elegant white poppy. Of course, the really neat looking one fell apart this morning when I tried to take a picture. So, I'm hoping that that there will be another one later that I promise I will take a picture of. Otherwise, there wasn't a whole lot going on in the garden this morning... except that I did manage, in a record half an hour, to finish planting all but 2 of the remaining plants to be planted. I would have planted them, but they were in the front and I totally forgot about them. I have a few other chores building up too - the lawn needs mowing (although with up to 30 mm of rain in the next 48 hours - I think that'll have to wait) - my mystery weed that I am concerned may be poison ivy needs to be dealt with very soon to prevent whatever it is from becoming a permanant visitor and since I'm still unsure - I'm going to have to assume it is poison ivy and to the gloves thing and hope I'm not allergic or that it isn't poison ivy. I'm holding the squirrels responsible if it is though. :P I also should actually tie some plants to the carefully placed stakes and improve the staking of my tomatos before some disaster occurs.

In space news, yesterday, after almost a month of being spotless a cycle 23 spot was confirmed (#1000). Unfortunately the solar cycle that is supposed to be spotting up the sun any time now is solar cycle 24... so... I guess we'll still have to wait. See the link for details and pictures and stuff.

In earth weather news, Baker Lake reached 29 C yesterday - not a record, (the highest recorded temperature in the last 30 years was 33.6 C) however it was higher than the max here 28.7 C and 11 C higher than the normal maximum temperature for the date. Definately not a day for wearing parkas and big winter boots.

Lastly, I'm trying, a bit anyways, to learn a few words of Inuktitut. So, here is the word for today:

Qanuippit? meaning "how are you?" and pronounced something like con-hwheat-peat. If you click on the link it will take you to a Inuktitut Language Learning Site - Tusaalanga Inuktitut - where if you click on the words - then a recording of how they sound will play.

Cheers,

Jennith

Polly Wog in a Bog by BNL

I sort of thought that this song went with the theme of my blog - I picked it up from the BNL webpage.

These guys played one of the first concerts I ever went to - which involved sitting on a blanket in the pouring rain on the grass seats at Canada's Wonderland. While I've moved around a lot in my music tastes over the years - I still give them credit for being one of the most original and interesting bands ever. And heck, who else sings about Pollywogs in bogs...

Blog Tag, I'm it.

Well, this is my first time ever been blog-tagged or even part of a blogging community and I have to say its kind of cool.

So the original challenge was to ask "your significant other to tell you three things that they know about you and then publish this information on your blog. You also have to pick more victims and then go to their blogs and leave them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged. The comment must end with the word ‘pthththth’", but its transmuted to leave the significant other part out or at least make it optional. I was tagged by Kennie from Tales of the Arctic.

So... 3 random factoids about me:

1. I can actually touch the tip of my nose with my tongue. Unfortunately, this was my only weird talent as a child which was tough because my best friend could roll her tongue, cross one eye, shake her eyeballs and dilocate her shoulders at will - leaving me just a little outclassed.

2. I, with the help of various friends, created no less than 4 languages and 3 alphabets as a youth, and I can still speak a bit of NOYB and a bit of Yamish. I do have to admit that one alphabet was an adaption of Tolkein's Rune's and the other based on the idea of Ogham, but I rearanged the pattern to make it easier to remember.

3. I have stood in a stream on a dark and freezing winter night wearing nothing, but chest waders (and long underwear, jeans, 3 pairs of socks etc) and a tshirt with my arm in the water nearly to my armpit, all in the name of science.... Now I know -26 C is warm for Nunavut in January... but its ruddy cold for playing in a stream.

Now the last part, who to tag?

Way Way Up for being one of the first Nunavut Blogs I started following
Shelley from The Big Move for having an excellent appreciation of flowers
Gabriel from What a Life because its been way too long since he's posted anything
Geoff from Coast of Araska because he got me into blogging in the first place
and Colin from Grog! for aiding and abetting him.

I guess I should go leave some comments now...

Daylily of the day

And here is the new one for today!

Yesterdaylily

Okay.. new colour that opened up yesterday.

Wildflower from seed #4

A nice red poppy :D

Wildflower from seed # 5

Forget-me-not?? I'm not sure.. but here it is.

Bees on Blanket Flower

:D...

Hello Yellow

The last major job for the year was to clean up an area along the fence and plant it with purple and yellow coneflowers - its almost done - I'm just short about 2-4 plants, but it looks much better with all the weeds gone :D.

Welcome to the Bee Buffet

On my lunchtime tour of the garden to see if there is anything (mostly wilting) that required immediate action I snapped a bunch of pictures capturing the action at the Bee Buffet - although this large fuzzy bee (I know - I'll have to as my SIL for the scientific name) was hanging out on this lovely purple coneflower - the catmint and beebalm are far more popular - but also harder to get a picture of...

There is some concern about massive declines in bee populations in certain areas of North America.. so I'm glad I can do my bit and provide some good eats - and I appreiciate their pollination of my flowers in return... :D