Marilyn's Photos - Apr 13 2026 - That Big Rat on board

 

The massive rat seems to be staying with me - one of the headlines from a few days ago.  It was on a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Aruba before Christmas 2025.  There are curtain rails in a KLM Airbus A330 and people saw it running along the top and into overhead storage units while over the Atlantic Ocean. It was caught on video HERE.  A rat is a rat.  I don't think it looked massive, but then what is a headline for? And can a rat compete with bringing on peacocks as pets, birds of prey (they have their own passports in the UAE), with one flight having 20 birds (in 2017).   Here's a good news weird story. On one flight,  Pope Francis married two engaged flight attendants after they told him an earthquake had destroyed the church that they'd planned to marry in.  That's a very sweet story.   Here's the opposite - an overhead locker overflowing with maggots when a passenger in 2010 from Atlanta brought some spoiled meat on board. Or what about a scorpion on board a U.S. flight in 2015 - it was spotted after it stung a passenger. And how big can a rat get? The biggest rat in the world is the Bosavi woolly rat from Papua New Guinea - up to 32 inches long and 3.5 pounds.  The pictures shown are pets - complete with collars and leads.   And don't confuse that massive rat with a Ram Air Turbine or RAT - which is commonly up to 64 inches in diameter.  Part of an airplane.   We got this picture of Millie when we were visiting friends last weekend.  She spotted something on the table in the centrepiece and was beserk over it. Here it is turned into a Birthday Greeting (of sorts).

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Marilyn's Photos - Mar 12 2026 - Crocks, Gomers and Gorks

 

We know that there are colour codes for various situations in hospitals.  It seems like a Pantone colour wheel - there are too many colours for me to get them all straight.  Code Blue - adult cardiac arrest requiring immediate resuscitation. Code Pink: Medical Emergency - Infant/Child (Pediatric Cardiac/Respiratory Arrest). Code Red: Fire. Code White: Violent/Aggressive Individual. Code Black: Bomb Threat or Suspicious Object. Code Grey: Infrastructure Failure (Power failure, IT system loss, water failure) or External Air Exclusion. Code Green: Evacuation (Internal or External). Code Orange: Disaster (Internal, such as fire, or External, such as mass casualties/train crash). Code Amber: Missing/Abducted Infant or Child. Code Yellow: Missing Patient. Code Silver: Person with a Weapon/Active Attacker. Code Purple: Hostage Taking. Code Brown: Hazardous Material Spill.  And those are the colours. Then there are numeric codes that are regional or specific - like code 77 in BC is stroke. That’s what is considered standard hospital procedure.  Then there are all the slang codes used by staff.  I guess it is like pig-latin, once you start it just keeps going.  These are just for patients: Frequent Flyer / Frequent Fliers: A patient who returns to the ER frequently, often for non-emergency issues. Gork (or Gorked): A patient who is comatose, neurologically devastated, or in a persistent vegetative state. GOMER: Acronym for "Get Out of My Emergency Room." Refers to patients, often elderly, with chronic, incurable, or complex conditions that are frequently admitted and hard to "fix". Crock: A patient who complains of many symptoms but has no organic disease (often implies hypochondria). Walkie-Talkie: A patient who is functional, ambulatory, and able to communicate, requiring minimal assistance. Beemer: A patient with a high body mass index (BMI). Yellow Submarine: An obese patient with jaundice caused by liver failure. FOOBA: "Found on Orthopedics, Barely Alive." A patient who had a joint replacement but developed critical, unrelated, internal complications. Trainwreck: A patient with multiple, severe, and complex, concurrent medical problems. Princess/Prince/Diva: A demanding patient who uses the call bell constantly for minor requests. Sundowner/Sundowning: A patient (usually with dementia) who becomes confused, agitated, and combative, typically in the evening. Swallower: A psychiatric patient who has ingested dangerous objects or substances. FLK: "Funny Looking Kid." Slang used by pediatric staff to refer to a child with dysmorphic features suggesting a syndrome.  There are many more terms - for staff, for procedures, and so on.  And at the end of this extensive list?   Disclaimer:  Many of these terms are considered pejorative or unprofessional and are used behind closed doors to cope with stress rather than in direct patient care.   So I am ahead of myself - it isn’t until next week that Sunshine Express opens and we can luxuriate in the early spring blooms in this gigantic greenhouse.  This is from a few years ago.

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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 - Jan 7 2026 - Don't Toss That Out

 

We throw things out every day.  It is an ordinary activity.  Every so often we clean things out and take them to the dump.  We generally know what our own stuff is and isn’t.  And then there is another category of things tossed out.. but not for long. A first-generation Apple computer valued at over $200,000 was dropped off at a recycling center. A Jackson Pollock painting purchased for $5 at a thrift shop was later authenticated and valued at $50 million. A winning lottery ticket worth $1 million was found in a trash can outside a convenience store. A valuable Van Gogh painting was found in a Norwegian man's attic after being lost for over 100 years, initially thought to be a fake print. A human kidney was once accidentally mistaken for medical waste and tossed out by a nurse. A prosthetic leg was recovered from a dump after being mistakenly thrown out by a man's wife. An entire batch of expensive modern art (which included cookies and was meant to make an environmental statement) was thrown away by a cleaning lady who thought it was trash. In 2014, James Howell was cleaning up his office when he deposited one of twoi dentical hard drives into a trash bag — identical except in that one of them contained his Bitcoin wallet. When he realized he’d thrown away the wrong one, he immediately tracked it down to a landfill owned by the city council, but they won’t let him search it. He’s suing for access, but in the meantime, he’s watched his bitcoin fortune surge to over $600 million that he can’t touch. The next time you’re having a super bad day, just be thankful you’re not that guy. In 2015, while helping their boss move to a new floor of the New York jewelry store where they worked, some flunkies threw out three beaten-up wooden boxes that turned out to contain $5 million in diamonds. They were found by a building security guard, who turned around and sold several of them to another store in the same building.  Declaration of Independence Copy: A Pennsylvania man bought a painting for a few dollars at a flea market solely because he liked the frame. When he removed the ripped canvas, he found one of the 25 known copies of the Declaration of Independence, printed by John Dunlap on July 4, 1776, tucked behind it. It later sold for $2.48 million at auction. Fabergé Egg: An unsuspecting buyer purchased a rare Fabergé egg at a flea market for a small sum, intending to sell the accompanying gold for scrap. It was later identified as a missing Imperial Fabergé egg that once belonged to the Emperor of Russia and had been missing since 1902. It was valued at an astonishing $33 million. This is a picture of our garbage container - it is done with multiple images in camera.

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April 27 2025 - Hold a Plank

 

In my youth - and consider that decades - it never occurred to me to "hold a plank."  We had more cultural and intellectual pursuits to measure.   Today, though, the Hold a Plank headline says - based on your age - so they've come to get people like me.  On the other hand, I am more attracted to how long to boil an egg which volunteers itself as one is typing.  So the answer?  It is 10 to 30 seconds. And what's the maximum?  "Hold a plank for 2 minutes maximum. Experts note that after 2 minutes, you’ve reached the maximum benefits that the plank can give you. If you can hold it for 2 minutes straight without wavering, you’re building muscles and burning calories to reach your fitness goals." And then it wants you to do 1 to 56 reps every day.  That's for "us."  And what about "them?" Here's what "Them" has accomplished: "The longest time in an abdominal plank position (male) is 9 hours 38 minutes 47 seconds, achieved by Josef Šálek (Czech Republic also known as Czechia) in Pilsen, Czech Republic, on 20 May 2023." For a woman it is 4 hours 30 minutes, 11 seconds by a 59-year-old.  The big gap seems to me to be more motivation than capability.  I don't envision nearly as many women worrying about a six-pack.  What do you think? Flowering season has started.  Not these blossoms, though. This is later orchard season. Isn't that such a nostalgic picture?  With the orchard added leaning against the tree.

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