Showing posts with label white. Show all posts
Showing posts with label white. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Mar 18 2025 - White Farm Houses

 

I remember a garden friend giving me directions to a plant pop-up stand.  She said it is the white house on Fourth Avenue.  Driving west on Fourth Avenue out of St. Catharines, one will find dozens off white farm houses.  Most of the old houses are white.  Only newer houses are brick.  Recent new houses are "stone" - the grand mansion type that seems to be the trend on rural roads.

The story of white farmhouses is the story of whitewash which is a lime paint. It prevented mildew, was a disinfectant, odour disguiser and insect repellent.  It was an easy material to work with and dried quickly.  No expertise was needed to apply - consider Tom Sawyer.

So then why weren't barns white?  Why were they red? The answer is that farmers used a cost-effective and readily available mixture of linseed oil  with rust added, to protect the wood from decay and weathering.  The rust - ferrous oxide - prevented the growth of mould and fungi.

So there were we are with white houses, red barns and, of course, black cars.

 

 
I forgot about horses and buggies.  Here's one in Niagara-on-the-Lake. 
 
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Monday, January 22, 2024

Jan 22 2024 - Each Day, Same Spot

 

Monday to Friday there are three vehicles parked out front.  They are workers who are building the new hospital, two streets over.  The same vehicles park in the same spots, arriving at the same time, each day.  I expect this is occurring all over the neighbourhood - I see streets parked up all around the hospital.  

I wonder what makes us choose exactly the same time and same spot each day.  And the cars park in their spots even if other cars are not present.  No one changes position.  

One neuroscientist explains that the recognition of actions with large duration is hindered by the capacity of our memory.  So we choose a simple solution and set up repetitive actions to solve this limitation..

So we are set up to develop repetitions or habits for most things.  Pick any topic and put habit after the word and you will find recommended ways of doing that activity.

I found an article that explained why people park next to each other every day - even in company parking lots.  The rationale is given as being "out of habit".

Another question that pops up a lot is "why do people park right next to a car in an otherwise empty parking lot?"

Rationales and habits are curious things.

There's nothing like a summer flower in the field - this is Queen Anne's Lace.

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Thursday, January 11, 2024

Jan 11 2024 - Colouring the Year

 

The colour of the year.  Why do we care about this?  How did it get to be a significant thing. And who is the authority?  Is it Pantone or Benjamin-Moore? 

Pantone's colour is 1023 Peach Fuzz.  Here's their introduction: 

"PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz captures our desire to nurture ourselves and others. It's a velvety gentle peach tone whose all-embracing spirit enriches mind, body, and soul.

In seeking a hue that echoes our innate yearning for closeness and connection, we chose a color radiant with warmth and modern elegance. A shade that resonates with compassion, offers a tactile embrace, and effortlessly bridges the youthful with the timeless."

It all about warm and cuddly with that colour.  Pantone isn't the first to come up in the list.  Benjamin-Moore has definitely put more dollars into sponsoring their retrievals to the top 5 or more. Hope over to their website and their colour is Blue Nova CC-850.  I certainly enjoyed the video of Blue Nova CC-860 mixing up.  It is calming like thick, creamy waves on the shore - red, pink, gray, aqua, mid-blues all come together. Watch the paint swirl HERE.  

Benjamin Moore says this: " With Blue Nova leading the way, depth and intrigue are balanced by an undercurrent of reassurance. This alluring mid-tone features an enchanting duality, capturing the spotlight with endlessly classic appeal.

New horizons are sought by exploring disparate places, thoughts, and colours to form endless creative possibilities. Softly saturated with a nuanced approach to contrast, the Benjamin Moore Colour Trends 2024 palette takes inspiration from the hues experienced through travels and moments that span beyond routine. On adventures near or far, we encourage collecting poignant colour moments with verve and personality that are unexpected and boundlessly magical."

 Somehow these press releases read like Horoscopes.

Here is another of the Christmas images - this poetic Poinsettia was at the Niagara Falls Showcase Greenhouse. 
 

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Friday, December 8, 2023

Dec 8 2023 - Christmas Songs

 

There are almost 10,000 Christmas Songs.   As far as music statistics go, there are over 900,000 Christmas tracks representing over 180,000 songs by over 60,000 artists. 

Who is the number 1 artist for highest count of songs?  Bing Crosby, next is Frank Sinatra, then Elvis Presley, and Nat King Cole.  Finally, in position 5 comes Johann Sebastian Bach.  Then the list returns to artists of the 20th century and all American.  Maybe not Mario Lanza.  

Bing Crosby's White Christmas has nearly a million Christmas tracks with just over 2,000 being the actual Bing Crosby classic.  That's 2,000 different albums that contain Bing's version of White Christmas. 

What is the next highest released Christmas track?  Earth Kitt's Santa Baby at around 1200.

What about those Christmas carols?  Silent Night has almost 20,000 recordings.  And what would be next? White Christmas is next at almost 16,000 recordings. 

And if we all love to sing Christmas carols, then Karaoke Christmas songs contribute to the list.  Over 23,000 tracks of them.

Perhaps my generation is allowed to be a little weary of Christmas and its music.  Or maybe we are the generation that keeps it going so strong.  All those nostalgic hits from the early to mid 20th century.

Here's a different version of White Christmas.  It seems a bit eerie.

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Tuesday, November 7, 2023

Nov 7 2023 - White Trucks

 

This morning the parking in front of the house consists of two white trucks on facing each other in a sort of square-off on opposite sides of the street.  So we'll see if it is ok to drive between them or if they obstruct too much of the road.  Trucks are very big.

How did we get to so many trucks on town and city streets and so many white trucks?  Here's what I found:

1) White makes objects appear larger, making it more visible to other motorists and pedestrians.
2) White reflects light and heat, keeping the vehicle and contents cool.
3) White is the best background to display your company logo and brand on.

Here's another one I found:

White trucks save more fuel because it takes 17% more fuel to cool a black truck vs.a white truck when parked in the sun.

That makes sense for commercial vehicles.  Yet, we mostly see non-commercial trucks - and with nothing in the back being "hauled".  It looks like not once, ever.  Like the friend who visited an acquaintance in a Toronto condo and admired the stove.  When they opened the oven, the paper instructions were still inside.  The person had lived there for three years.

And what percentage of Canadians drive pickup trucks?  A whopping one-quarter. And what else do they get?  

"A lot of it is image, a toughness."
 

Trucks are popular in the wineries as display focal points.

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Tuesday, February 28, 2023

Feb 28 2023 - Weathering Spring

 

We move into meteorological spring tomorrow.  I go with the weather version when it suits me.  For example I think winter comes December 21st. But I definitely go with spring on March 1st.

Being in the know seems to be important.  What about this?  Motorcyclists can soon be safe thanks to airbag jeans.  The picture is hilarious - it looks like someone in a fat suit.  And I guess that's what it is.  

"The garment is made from the strongest denim on the planet. Even more unique are the airbags that activate via small CO2 cartridges whenever the rider falls from their bike.

The trigger mechanism is a tether connecting the jeans to the motorcycle. When the equivalent of a road accident occurs, the tether creates a puncture in the cartridges that inflates the airbags.

If the rider is thrown from the bike, a protective air cushion is instantly deployed. Afterward, the CO2 cartridges are replaceable.

While the airbag handles the impact forces, the single-layer denim fabric called ‘Armalith’ handles the abrasion forces, according to officials from the Swedish company Airbag Inside."

The story is here in the good news network. The product is airbag jeans.

 

This is a display that astonishes one.  This is only one view of the orchid.  Masses of these beautiful trailing flowers. 

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Monday, January 9, 2023

Jan 9 2023 - Silk Journeys On

 

I have a continuing complaint about the poor quality of fabric used in clothes today, so thought I would find out about the timeline of these significant changes in 50 years.  I started with silk.

Excerpts from retinkdisruption.com Dropping Silk Stockings Created an Oral Health Revolution from June 30, 2022 by Bradd Libby HERE:

"The leading export from Japan and China from 1850 to 1930 was silk. 

"According to Debin Ma of Hitotsubashi University, scientifically produced hybrid silkworm varieties, which accounted for less than 10% of Japanese silk production in 1914, were more than 80% just eight years later and over 90% of production by 1924. The Lower Yangtze region of China saw a similarly dramatic change in silkworm varieties, albeit about thirteen years after Japan’s transformation, going from less than 10% hybrid in 1928 to more than 90% in 1937.

"Japan’s lead in both the mechanization of silk reeling and in the adoption of hybrid worm varieties gave it the edge to outcompete China. In 1873, China was exporting three times as much raw silk as Japan. By 1930, the situation had completely reversed, with Japanese exports tripling those of China.

"The is another part of the ‘pattern of disruption’ we have seen: new technologies are often adopted by outsiders, and the winners from one era of technology can become the losers in the next. Japan adopted machine-reeling of silk fiber before China, and led the development of scientifically bred varieties of silkworms, and so dominated the silk market by the early 1930s.

"But this new era would not last long. DuPont first brought Carother’s nylon fiber to market in 1938. DuPont’s nylon stockings first went on sale in May 1940.

"But the attack on Pearl Harbor brought Asian exports of silk to a sudden halt. Soon after the introduction of nylon stockings, the sales of all women’s stockings collapsed as both the supply of Japanese silk abruptly ended and as DuPont diverted all nylon production to the manufacture of parachutes, rope, aircraft fuel tanks, flak jackets, hammocks, mosquito netting, and other products.

"Nylon became known as “the fiber that won the war.” For four years American women had to ‘make do’ the best they could with substitutes like leg make-up, a cosmetic painted onto the legs to make it look like the user was wearing stockings.

"When the war ended, there was such a rush to buy nylon stockings again that fights broke out over the limited supply, the so-called ‘Nylon Riots’. The sales of silk stockings never recovered."

And silk today?  

"Several companies, including the San Francisco Bay Area’s Bolt Threads, are attempting to use genetically modified microorganisms to produce silk proteins.

According to Virginia Postrel, “if the endeavor succeeds, silk won’t need to come from insects. It will be brewed in giant fermentation vats like beer. And the process has implications beyond silk. Wool, too, is a protein polymer. So is cashmere. So are countless other fibers we can barely imagine.”

And that's just silk!



Perhaps it is the silky petals of Dahlias that make them so beautiful.
 
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Tuesday, September 6, 2022

Sep 6 2022 - Tiffany time in the lab

 

Jewellery ads on our radio stations advertise lab grown diamonds.  This sounds interesting and exotic.  Things "grown" in labs.

They used to be known as synthetic diamonds. They are created in a laboratory environment. These diamonds can be a more ethical choice than natural diamonds, as mining is not needed to produce them.   Here's what the BBC had to say in their article on lab-made diamonds:

"On a grey January morning in 2019 Meghan Markle emerged onto a London street on her way to a meeting. She wore a smart coat and heels, but it was not her clothing that caught the attention of the world. It was a pair of glittering drop earrings embedded with diamonds that had been grown in a lab.  It took just five days to grow the diamonds adorning Markle’s ears according to Sidney Neuhaus, co-founder of Kimaï, the company that made them. Based in Antwerp."


A lab-grown diamond is a diamond: chemically, physically and optically identical to a mined diamond.  There are two ways to grow a diamond. Both involve starting with the “seed” (a flat slither) of another diamond. The first lab diamond was made using a High Pressure High Temperature (HPHT) system, where the seed is then placed amidst some pure graphite carbon and exposed to temperatures of about 1,500C and pressurised to approximately 1.5 million pounds per square inch in a chamber.

More recently, another way to grow a diamond was discovered, called Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD). This involves putting the seed in a sealed chamber filled with carbon-rich gas and heating to around 800C. Under these conditions the gases begin to “stick” to the seed, growing a diamond carbon atom by atom.

The article goes on to demonstrate how mined diamonds are unethical making lab-grown diamonds a likely better choice.  So did the comics and Superman making a diamond out of a lump of coal foretell that lab-grown diamonds would happen?   I look this up and have to be reminded that neither process for forming natural diamonds nor synthetic diamonds uses coal.  Diamonds created in laboratories are formed using graphite. 

Here's the conclusion:  " If you hand Superman a stocking full of coal, best case scenario, he can make some real low-grade diamonds that really aren’t gonna fetch you much. A more realistic outcome is that he’s gonna hand you back a fistful of black powder. The good news is if you have an aunt or a grandma that gave you a pack of pencils for Christmas, now we’re in business."
 

And definitely ice crystals will not result in diamonds in the lab.  These ones looked wonderful to me, inspiring the title of the image

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Tuesday, April 17, 2018

While the weather is always a subject of conversation, our recent weather has demanded widespread attention.  Our daily average in April is between 8 - 12 degrees celsius.  That's in the 40's - 50's fahrenheit.  Today, though, we have a high of 4 degrees. There's  promise that next week will be in the range of the averages.  

The 'potentially historic' storm for Southern Ontario is moving on slowly. There were power outages and hundreds of accidents. Ice fell from the CN Tower causing damage to the Roger Centre roof.  Most institutions were closed. That was the weekend. Here we are on Tuesday, and we're nearing the end of the bad weather.

Toronto's historic storm was in 1999 with 39 and then 27 cm of snow.  The army was called in to help clear the roads. The rest of the country was amused.  That may be because in comparison in 1999 Tahtsa Lake, B.C. set the record for the largest one-day snowfall with 145 cm falling within a 24-hour period.  It delivered more snow than Calgary, Edmonton or Winnipeg see annually.

Niagara's greatest blizzard was in 1977. There was a combination of 60 cm, with gusts of winds up to 80 km/hr.  In some cases drifts covered over houses. There was a state of emergency in Ontario, and New York was declared a federal disaster area.  


What should you do in bad weather? Here are today's suggestions from wise bread.com...

1. Plan your summer vacation
2. Make an awesome breakfast
3. Nap
4. Make Candy
5. Take an online class or tutorial
6. redecorate
7. Fireside camp out
8. Pajama day in bed
9. Take a luxurious bath
10. Shop your closet
11. Indoor fort
12. Check out some good blogs
13. Afternoon tea
14. Catch up with family and friends


Our picture today is the centre of a white Ranunculus at Sunshine Express Garden Centre.

Monday, October 5, 2015

It's Black and White

This was a sign outside a store in Niagara-on-the-Lake, and I looked for it this year, but the store has changed and the sign is gone.  It made for wonderful abstracts with its distinct black and white curves and circles.

Monday, June 23, 2014

Monday, February 17, 2014

Marvelling the Mushroom Series

Hi everyone,
Here are a few more images in the Marvelling the Mushroom Series.  These are macro images of the underside gills of mushrooms.  They reveal the rich patterns and textures in nature's micro landscapes.






Saturday, April 14, 2012

The Blossom Trail

Here are some of the flowering trees in the Niagara region this week!

Royal Botanical Garden Arboretum:


Lakeshore Road, Niagara-on-the-Lake:


 Royal Botanical Garden Arboretum:

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Lily Season and the Martagons are Blooming

It's the start of Lily season - with flowers blooming from June through to the end of August, and that's just Liliums.  If you also grow Day Lilies, you can have bloom through September.

Here are two Martagons from my garden this week.

Oh Mirror, Mirror



Lily My Love

Sunday, October 31, 2010

Marvelling the Mushroom...continues

Today’s post is an image that continues the Marvelling the Mushroom series.  I think this is a Bearded Tooth mushroom – it comes from the Mushroom Grower at the Etobicoke Farmer’s Market in Toronto.  They are a few inches wide and look like little shaggy brains.     



Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Dahlia Season

Dahlia Season...It's here and the flowers are as big and beautiful as last year.  Here's the start of dahlia portraits.  Two very different dahlias with different treatments.  


The first is like an exquisite wedding dress.  Each petal in the centre is folded like some expensive silk handkerchief.  As the petals mature, these folds disappear into gorgeous curls that open up into beautiful spirally tubes.  I chose a colour treatment that would make this white dahlia look like an antique white silk.



This second portrait pays homage to water lily dahlias.  I haven't been able to shoot my own water lilies, as the racoons buzz the top of the flower petals each time one comes close to blooming, and it's not nice enough for a traditional floral portrait, nor funky enough for something on the pop art side.  So here's my water lily portrait, with a deep blue ocean in the background to this lovely pink and green water lily dahlia.





Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Cosmos Wedding Dress

June is the month of weddings and flowers and I've taken on the challenge of creating dresses out of flowers.  This is a close-up of a white cosmos, and with the pleats and billowing lines, it seems to be right in line with the monthly theme!

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Bleeding Hearts


I went to Plantworld (Royal York and Eglinton in Toronto) on the weekend and came home with a new hybrid Bleeding Heart.  You can see from the photo that it's striking in its colour combination of the deep pink and white, and that it's not down-facing but out-facing.  Makes the poor grandma bleeding hearts turn their heads even further down!  I looked the plant up in Wikipedia and it was brought to the west from Japan by Robert Fortune for the Royal Horticultural Society in 1846.   

Enjoy this new hybrid of an antique and ancient plant!