Marilyn's Photos - Feb 22 2026 - Snowdrop Sighting

 

Enough snow was gone yesterday to reveal the leaves and grass, and that means the garden.  I looked and looked and finally found some tiny leaves coming up - Snowdrops. This is late for them.  I guess being buried under snow gives them the sense that they can have a long winter nap.  Snowdrops are considered our earliest spring bloomer. I went looking for blooming cherry trees in Victoria but alas, the internet has lost its retrieval tools.  It wants to show me things from whenever and wherever.  I got to thinking that we went to Vancouver in February many years ago, and then went to Victoria. We visited Sooke Harbour House. Early spring was everywhere.  Sooke got my attention because it was a boutique hotel with a pioneering culinary approach of the 100 mile diet, a garden-to-table approach which included edible flowers. Since then, we have visited every so often whenever we were on the West Coast.  Sooke Harbour House went through a few years of financial and legal controversies - all with much news coverage. In July 2025, restauranteur Luke Evanow purchased it after a $14 million dollar renovation. Here’s what it loos like from the air - far larger than the last time we were there.   Here are some of my pictures from February 2006.  I remember the Erica (Heather) everywhere, and Rosemary was a perennial in the gardens. This is likely an ornamental plum tree blooming beside the wood storage.  And of course, the beautiful view of the mountains and ocean.

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Marilyn's Photos - Feb 21 2026 - Who is related to who?

 

My initial thought about former Prince Andrew being removed from the line of success to the throne is about the immediate Royal family dying in some catastrophic event, and there he is - the next Royal standing.  More of a plot from the 1500s or 1600s, don’t you think? Or not, given the urgency there seems to be to remove him. We focus greatly on the Royal succession.  Then I wondered this question?  Who walk among us today as the living relatives of some of our most revered humans throughout history?  Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, William Shakespeare? Let’s start somewhere and find the closest living relative to Leonardo da Vinci.   From the Smithsonian Magazine:   Fourteen people (men) alive today, ranging in age from 1 to 85 years old have a direct genetic link to the famed Italian Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci.  Only one of these knew about their link to da Vinci.  There are other relatives that are mostly indirect from the female line - that includes Franco Zeffirelli. They can’t help with information about Leonard’s DNA - particularly on the Y-chromosome which is transmitted to male descendants and remains almost unchanged for 25 generations. Narrowing down the list of Leonardo’s blood relatives is time-consuming, complicated work. Leonardo never married or had children, so there are no direct descendants. The scientist and artist was born out of wedlock to Ser Piero, a Florentine notary, and Caterina, a young peasant woman, in 1452. All told, Leonardo had an estimated 22 half-siblings, including 17 from his father’s multiple relationships.  So the next question is:  So what? That means:  What is there to learn in this DNA revelation? The project doing this gruelling research wants “to understand how his extraordinary talents, such as visual acuity and creativity, may have been influenced by his genetics…The project’s findings could reshape the way the art world thinks about authenticating works and provide a deeper understanding of da Vinci’s genius.”  There’s an idea that his elusive DNA may be right here in his art work. I finished my presentation on Great Public Gardens in Your Own Backyard.  Then I realized that I had omitted a very important but tiny garden in St. Catharines.  This is the Harriet Tubman Memorial Garden at the Salem Chapel, BME Church on Geneva Street.  The picture is from 2014 when I was a garden volunteer taking care of the tiny Memorial Garden that held this statue of her.  This was her church from 1851 to 1858.

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Marilyn's Photos - Feb 20 2026 - Yosemite Horsetail Fall

 

Seeing Yosemite’s Horsetail Fall now is complicated with permits and restrictions.   And then recommendations:  “From mid to late February, the waterfall begins to light up 5 to 15 minutes before sunset. However, you should plan to invest several hours to get to the right place in time.”  That would be referring to “you” in the thousands. No reservations for 2026, so I guess it will be a Photographers Shove-Fest. That’s because it is an alignment of sun, waterfall and the Viewer.  Alternatively, we can sign into one of the webcams - such as  the El Capitan Webcam to check the water flow in Horsetail Fall before you make the trip. That’s funny for us here in Niagara to think that would be useful.  At the same time, we get to see what’s going on for ourselves with many webcams positioned around  Yosemite.  The webcams are all  HERE.   Some of those thousands jostling for a view will get to stand where Galen Rowell stood when he took the first photo that was published and revealed the astonishing phenomenon.  Ansel Adams got the photograph earlier - but it was in monochrome - too bad.  So it has only been since 1973 that we have had this marvel available to us through photography. Here it is.  Doesn’t it look like lava or fire!  And the second photo is just one of many of his that brings home the reason why Yosemite has been a sacred place since humans have experienced it. John Muir referred to it as a sacred temple. Lincoln protected it in 1864, the first time the U.S. government protected land. We can marvel at the every-day reflections.  Here’s Main Street Grimsby with the red light reflected on the wet pavement, giving a shimmering effect. Not Yosemite, but a little reminder there are beautiful things all around us every day.

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Marilyn's Photos - Feb 19 2026 - Snow Melting

 

With the snow  receding, I’ve been doing dog duty in the back yard for the last week.  With each few  inches, another clean-up can occur.  I’m not sure how much of a melt we will get. to complete the clean-up.  Likely I will be cleaning up till March.  And then a new season starts. I notice Millie never stepped in her own poop.  I would watch her in the yard covered in snow, and she made zigs and zags along her route to avoid things.  I am not so lucky.  The human foot is attracted to a dog poop like a metal to a magnet.   While dog poop is the normal sort of every-day find after snow and ice melt, there are many more interesting things found as glaciers melt. Poor 5,300-year-old Iceman Otzi, found in the Alps.  He received a severe arrow wound causing rapid blood loss, and then a severe, potentially fatal head injury.  No accident there.  And the remains look too real to show you here.  This is breakfast time when I am writing. And likely there’s no time that seems the right time.   Besides finding people under the snow, there’s a history of the mundane. Take mittens.  A 1,100-year-old-mitten was found in Norway.  I wonder what the history of lost mittens through the ages might be.  AI is at the ready:  A famous lost mitten dating to 16th-17th century in Sweden had the “two-end” knitting technique.  Supposedly that was a lost practice.  Seems strange to me - it is just normal to tie two mittens together with a string.  There’s no genius involved. Did you know that scientists left a message in a bottle in 1951 on a glacier under a rock cairn on Ward Hund Island in the Canadian Arctic?  It was to document the retreat of the ice between the rock cairn and glacier edge. In 1959 it was 4 feet, and in 2013 when found, the distance was 333 feet. The 2013 team left the note in the bottle, and added their own asking to continue the experiment.  Here are some mittens showcased on a previous year’s Fantasy of Trees wreath.

Marilyn's Photos - Feb 18 2026 - Olympic Style

 

Have we looked at 2026 Olympic style?  It seems there are some things to see. Here’s the “funky” Norway curling pants.  They decided to wear the style to honour one of their curlers who died of cancer in 2022:  “We thought one game honouring the old team and wearing the full Norwegian outfit there on the ice would be just amazing.”  I guess the Ukrainian skeleton athlete should have decorated his pants, and he’d still be competing. The predominance of dark colours along with a lot of red, white and blue shows in the pictures.  But that’s not the case for Haiti.  Take a look at these two outfits.  There are only two athletes, maybe that explains it. Since I can remember, every country has  name brands designing the uniforms/outfits.  Then the public gets to wear a bit of history during and after the games.   As I went searching for articles, I found many more YouTube videos being retrieved.  I took a look at a  top 10 one HERE, but the white female presenter (who is on screen more than the clothes) was wearing a black durag.  It got my attention more than the attire so was distracting at best and a creepy at worst.  (We’ll look at that more separately.) Finally, I found coverage of every team.  It is on yahoo HERE.  If you aren’t a persistent researcher, you can go with AI and what it gives you.  Descriptions like “features fashion-forward, sustainable, and culturally inspired athlete uniforms.”   I guess I should get used to this “breezy, know-it-all, too-many-adjectives, hyphenated-word-expression kind of writing.”  If I parody it too much, I might start writing like that. A bank of fog rolled in yesterday overwhelming the sun.  It was quite dramatic on the escarpment horizon.  Today?  A severe weather warning for freezing rain and a winter snow storm.  And the fog? It has mostly gone south. What do you think of this garden sculpture?  My quick answer is that it is not here in Niagara. To my mind - only in places like the U.K. with its mist and rain.

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