Dec 19 2022 -True North

 

Up North goes a long way in Canada - right to the North Pole, as far as we're concerned.   "Canada's north is a vast area, the three territories alone, Nunavut, Yukon and Northwest Territories, encompass approximately 40% of the total area of Canada."   Moreover, as soon as you travel north of Toronto by 100 kilometres, we call that Up North as well.  That's because most of live in that very narrow strip along the U.S. border.  SO everything North is part of Up North.   It could be that Canada is considered Up North by other places.  We have vast Arctic and subarctic territories, the land of ice and snow.  We may part that are on the same latitude as northern California and Italy, but really we are known as a far north country.   Here's what we said in a recent poll (2021). The other sense we have of  Canada and the North is  "True North".  The reference is repeated many times.  It is to Alfred Tennyson, as he was the first to describe the country as "that true North" in his poem To the Queen.  He meant being loyal to the British Crown.   And that made it to the national anthem as "true north strong and free". We have the sense of the North Pole and its magnetic "truth".   The Magnetic North Pole is located in Ellesmere Island, which is about 500 miles from the Geographic North Pole.  Canada made an official claim in 2019. The closest town is Alert, 820 kilometres away.  That proximity puts us in charge of Santa, his village, and his post office box at H0H 0H0.   Don't mind that Finland is identified as having a Santa's Village.  When I was a child we would travel to Bracebridge which we considered "Up North" and visit Santa at his summer home.   Another village, Strasbourg, in France, lays claim to being a real life Christmas village.  But we have the North Pole. CBC had an article in which I found out that Santa Claus is a legal Canadian citizen. He was declared a full Canadian citizen in 2008 by Canada's immigration Minister.  He was issued a Canadian passport in 2013, and he and Mrs. Santa received the 2,999,999th and 3,000,000th ePassports.   So there we are with at least one benefit of having so much Up North in our country.   Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblog.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

July 3 2022 - Summer Bugs

 

I assume that Millie ate something disagreeable for her at the July 1st party as she hasn't felt well the last two nights.  She had to go outside in the middle of the night, and I stood on the porch watching her.  An amazing firefly was out - it was making streaks in the night - like a tiny shooting star.  I'd never seen streaking fireflies before.  It got me considering how our summer is so active.  It is bug time.  There are great bugs, ok bugs, irritating bugs and terrible ones - that would be ticks.  And that's just a human view.  Plants must have a more extreme reaction to the bugs that take care of them vs the bugs that eat them.   I was watching the fly on the kitchen counter and there's all that foot rubbing that they do.  House flies taste with their feet, which are millions of times more sensitive to sugar than the human tongue. House flies also generally stay within one mile of where they were born.  Darn! They keep coming back into the house. But house flies are small things,  just irritants.  I was thinking about all the bugs that are in cottage country.  That brought up  dock spiders.  There is a video of a gigantic dock spider being hand fed.  The spider's name is Larry.   It isn't "hand feeding" actually, but a stick is used to feed it a grasshopper, and then a fly on a stick, and then another.  And so on.  Larry likes to eat and it is bigger than the signal reflectors on the dock.  Here it is in its own video.   One becomes aware of how many bugs there are in cottage country.   There seem to be more of more varieties - horse flies (the biggest), deer flies, moose flies, mosquitoes everywhere.  Itchy!  That's one of the cottage country experiences.   So it seems to me that we are lucky in Niagara to have some insects and not a lot.  I'll take the Monarch butterfly in the front garden yesterday.  It was flying around the Milkweed plants.   If we had a true Carolinian climate here, there would be many more bugs and mosquitoes.  I read that the early settlers did a lot of clearing of the land to get rid of all the bugs.  It worked. Daylily season has started.

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