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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Marilyn's Photos - Feb 16 2026 - Playing with Money

 

The news recently covered Valentine’s bouquets that were unlike our North American versions.  Not red roses gathered by the dozens into a bouquet.  The flowers were replaced with paper money in decorative shapes.  With the different colours of bills, these are most attractive.  They are named “cash blooms.” East Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, South Africa and Eastern Europe all have this tradition.  Each culture uses different techniques.  They are popular gifts at weddings, and now growing in popularity for Valentines.  It doesn’t appear to be a long-time tradition, but a recent surge with younger generations.  Countries with high inflation or cash dominant economies are the hot spots.  Zimbabwe keeps coming up in the news as one of the African countries that has issued warnings against defacing banknotes to make bouquets.   The ones below look very spendable to me. Origami shapes are most popular in Japan.  The roses look so realistic.  There are many tutorials on YouTube to get one started.  European countries, including Britain have a growing interest in the bouquets. Our North American cultural tradition remains with flowers and cards. Sentiment, personalization and the aesthetic beauty of traditional flowers - these are our calling.  We consider gift cards, digital transfers and cash in a card as superior.  And perhaps we are less inclined in Canada with no more one or two dollar bills.  Starting at 5 dollars might make for an expensive bouquet.   There are many origami choices below -  butterflies, unicorns, a tulip bouquet.  I was thinking of St. Patrick’s Day four-leafed clovers.  That would astonish people. Isn’t this what we’d like every snow fall to look like. There’s nothing like the sun to make those little flakes dance and shine.

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Marilyn's Photos - Feb 17 2026 - On This Day

 

Every day has some historical event.  History has been recorded for thousands of years.  The earliest recorded, specific event is in 3100 BCE - a transaction for barley.   It seems to me that it would make sense for us to have a favourite historical event(s) associated with our birthday.   We would choose from history what events should be associated with our birthday.  Maybe or maybe not.  here are some notables for February 17th, in 1876 Sardines were first canned by Julius Wolff in Eastport, Maine.  In 1878 the first telephone exchange in San Francisco opens. Or in 1904 Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly premeired at La Scala in Milan. Otherwise, it is all about wars, catastrophes, and dramatic deaths. Since it is Gerry’s birthday today, we would take a theme approach and choose cars.  There’s a big historical milestone for this date: on February 17th 1972, the Volkswagen Beetle became the world’s best-selling car, surpassing the Ford Model T’s record.  Ford’s record had lasted over four decades.  This seems to be the only historical car moment that historians consider worthy of record. Perhaps we could turn to car racing events. There’s NASCAR’s Daytona 500 each year - it always includes February 17th so one could pick milestones from there.  We would prefer to find something in the Grand Prix range.  Here are a few. In 1960, Stirling Moss won the Cuban Grand Prix.  In 1901, the second edition of the Circuit du Sud-Ouest in France took place.  In 1962 the Oran Park Raceway in Australia was established for motorsport.  The site formulaonehistory.com has a few more milestones.  It is HERE.   This is a start.  It would be nice to have a few more events on this day.  One can turn to the national celebration day calendar. That’s the let’s celebrate something - really anything - for a day.  As today is National Random Acts of Kindness Day and National Cabbage Day, one could give a cabbage leaf to people randomly and persuade them it is an act of kindness. Here’s my favourite  steam train Birthday card.

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Marilyn's Photos - Feb 15 2026 - Big Plants

 

Arum Titan is the biggest “plant” on the planet.  One tall stem and leaf structure - 20 feet tall.  One big 6 to 10 foot tall flower that is very stinky.  I’ve got the miniature versions in my garden.  Very stinky - rotting flesh is the smell. That smell attracts flies who pollinate the plant.  It must work as there are always little bundles of red berry-looking seeds at ground level each year.  And more stinky plants coming up in various places.  That’s our current largest plant.  Before that in the far distant past, preserved in fossils are the Prototaxites.  It was almost 30 feet tall and 3 feet in diameter. It would look like a tall tree trunk on the horizon. And that was before trees existed. It was a complex fungal rhizomorph rather than a towering, upright structure. Yet it was distinct from fungi in physiological functions. It is proposed that it was a completely new and extinct lineage, separate from plants, fungi and other eukaryotes.  I guess we should just call it a living organism.   Remember last week’s story of the oldest evidence of sewn fabrics lying in a museum for 50 years before being dated.  Here’s the similar story for Prototaxite.  A fossil specimen collected by Charles Darwin’s friend, Joseph Hooker, was mislaid for 163 years at the British Geological Survey offices in London.  That would have collected a lot of dust.  Don’t on’t you think they might notice? There are fantastic renderings - beautiful drawings full of mystery and intrigue of the landscape with Prototaxites present.  Here are a few. This seems more botanically inclincled. Here’s the Titan Arum in Niagara Falls. Could this be a Ringling Circus rendition of man during the Prototaxite era?

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