Weird Week Activities

This is the weird week between Christmas and New Year's.  We might reflect on the last year and the last decade with the passing of 2019.  I looked through the photos of the year from the Associated Press.  I recommend not doing that -  disasters are the prime topic - political, social, and environmental.  So enough said on reflecting and reviewing the events of 2019. Instead, I looked for weird things to do on this weird week.  I found them.   1. Babyfoot treatment.   "Dry skin in the winter is one of the top three worst things about winter (static cling being number two, obviously), but a good food treatment like Babyfoot can keep your soles as baby soft as the name promises. It's an ideal thing to do over the course of several days, because it takes a few days for all of the dead skin to flake off after you put on the treatment.  Get it from Amazon for $22.99." 2. Start a Habit like Jade rolling "Jade rolling is soothing, helps with lymphatic drainage, and might just make your skin look even better, so why not get into the habit of doing it now? If that's not your thing, maybe an acupressure mat or meditating is more your style."  Find out about it HERE.  Our picture today was taken a few weeks ago during the ice storm. These are the delicate branches of Fallopia or Japanese Knotweed (the variegated variety).

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Emoji Dick

It seems to me that Emoji are everywhere.  They have been with us since the late 1990's, and originated in Japan on Japanese mobile phones. Apple included them in 2011. In 2015, Oxford Dictionaries named an emoji the Word of the Year.  There is an Emojipedia, which was created in 2013.  There's a World Emoji Day on July 17th each year.  Here a most remarkable Emoji implementation:  In 2014, the Library of Congress acquired an emoji version of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, created by Fred Benenson". Here's how he did this: "Emoji Dick is a crowd sourced and crowd funded translation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick into Japanese emoticons called emoji. This is what the Emoji Dick website says about the book: "Each of the book's approximately 10,000 sentences has been translated three times by an Amazon Mechanical Turk worker (a marketplace of web workers). These results have been voted upon by another set of workers, and the most popular version of each sentence has been selected for inclusion in this book. In total, over eight hundred people spent approximately 3,795,980 seconds working to create this book. Each worker was paid five cents per translation and two cents per vote per translation." The funds to pay the Amazon Turk workers and print the initial run of this book were raised from eighty three people over the course of thirty days using the funding platform Kickstarter." Isn't this stranger than truth, and fancier than science fiction?  So perhaps today's pictures fit the theme.  They are 'made up' with the Topaz Glow filter.  Can you guess what they are?  Scroll to the last picture and original source can be seen to be branches and twigs.   Our giggling emoji concludes the post.

Countdown to Christmas

Is it time to put the countdown clock on your desktop?  Look no further than the xmasclock for your second by second tracking.   Perhaps we should keep the Countdown to Spring clock on the desktop instead. Today's photos show the contrast between what Spring brings and what Winter has in store. Here's the start of the Boys' Life Magazine Christmas jokes: Will: Where do snowmen keep their money? Bill: Beats me. Will: In a snow bank.   Pedro: What has a jolly laugh, brings you presents and scratches up your furniture? Ordep: Beats me. What? Pedro: Santa Claws. Teacher: Johnny, define claustrophobia. Johnny: Fear of Santa Claus?

Winter Gardens

I submitted a few photos to Lee Valley for their Newsletter.  Here is one in the February issue of the Gardening Newsletter.  This image is from my garden, where the Sweet Autumn Clematis climbs over the Lavender Twist Redbud.  Redbuds are beautiful in the spring, with their small fuchsia coloured blossoms.  In the autumn, the Sweet Autumn Clematis flowers are in full display.  And for the first part of the Winter, the seed heads are pretty as well.  Now just for Spring to come our way, to repeat the cycle.  See the Gardening newsletter here:

http://www.leevalley.com/en/newsletters/Gardening/9/2/Article1.htm

Niagara's Snow Blossom Trail

Yesterday's snow day in Niagara was spectacular.  The trees on the escarpment were completely covered in snow, revealing magical patterns and structures.  It was a warm day here with little wind, so the snow stayed in these lovely patterns all through the morning. 

This orchard is at the top of the escarpment on the Road to Beamer Park.  It's the Hawk Park where the annual hawk migration count takes place. From Beamer one can easily see all across Lake Ontario with Toronto the central jewel.  

You will likely see these trees again.  This is the first time I saw them - they have a bonsai sensibility.  There's the big thick trunk of an old tree.  THen, the shape is a perfect fan with branches evenly spaced and fanning out with great symmetry.  They reveal themselves  as orchard trees - with the little branches sticking straight up.  These 'whips' will likely be gone before winter is finished.

WIth the snow caught in the branches, the structures became clearly defined.  I thought they had the appearance of snow blossoms, so I did a pink version.  I guess this would be the winter blossom trail.