Rrrring!

I have a busy day behind me, another ahead. And I've been wasting time (Oh, I am soooo good at procrastination!) looking at spider photos on BugGuide, instead of setting alarms and packing the cell phone for the morning.

Speaking of phones, here are a pair from days gone by:

In Arnt Arntzen's shop.

In the downstairs hallway of the Big Green House. (Where Ruth Scheuing works.)

And now, to set three alarms to make sure I don't sleep through, and off to bed.

'night, all!
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Bugs in the alley

Post # 4 about the 2008 Eastside Culture Crawl. Previous posts: Crawling at the Wilder Snail, Sweeping nudes and other mix-ups, and Scrambled Birds.



Nadia Baker is a biologist by day and an artist by night. She creates prints, mainly in black and white, with the occasional touch of red or blue; ears, maybe, or antennae.

She is intrigued by the forgotten machines of urban life; those awkward-looking electrical transformers atop old power poles, the tangles of pipes and apparatus hidden in the weeds alongside buildings. They "call to me," she says.

And she transforms the transformers. She brings them to life, discovers those ears, some eyes and mouths (and arms, too) , gives them personality. (Click here to see a pair of transformers in love.)

Laurie took this photo, an aquatint hanging on the wall of her display in a back-alley garage:

The afore-mentioned tangle of pipes. Better copy (Nadia's) here.

I was smitten by the prints inspired by her daytime incarnation: the biologist.

Phyllium siccifolium, etching

Yes, she labelled it with its Latin name. I looked it up, later. I found it on Wikipedia. In German, which I couldn't read. From other links, I learned that it is a Phasmid or a leaf insect, also called Linnaeus' Leaf Bug, and is found in West Malaysia. And that it is often sold as a pet. It eats blackberry and salmonberry leaves. Luckily, they need a warm climate, or an escaped female could devastate our coastal shrubbery.

Brahmaea wallichi, aquatint

This one is the larva of a moth, the Owl Moth, which can be found from Japan to Africa. I couldn't find a photo of the larvae. That face looks contrived; such a surprised, worried expression! Does Nadia indulge in "imaginative interpretation" with her invertebrates, too? (Maybe not, or if she does, I'm prone to the same habit.)
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Scrambled birds

Post # 3 about the 2008 Eastside Culture Crawl. Previous posts: Crawling at the Wilder Snail, and Sweeping nudes and other mix-ups.


A few Crawly birds for your consideration:

The crow is an appropriate place to start; it is, perhaps, the signature bird of Strathcona. Look any direction for a minute or two in the daytime, and you'll see one. And often, it is doing something like this:

"Stealing Time", by Sandra Bilawich

Of course, most of the crows work on something a bit more organic than old clocks.

Sandra Bilawich combines stone, metal, and wood in imaginative sculptures. Most, like this crow, are made with reclaimed materials. Many, again like the crow, pull objects out of their customary contexts.

Her Crawl display filled her living room and kitchen. I loved the coffee table and candlestick:

Recycled boards, rusty metal "teeth", rock. Insulator and gears.

Not all is rustic, though. The display included polished sculptures in luscious marbles:

"Camouflage", Vancouver Island marble

But I promised you birds. The small sculpture on the coffee table is a loon, in Italian marble.

And here's a cuckoo clock, in the kitchen:

Reclaimed metal parts, beach stone, with barnacles (click for full size)

Sandra writes,

"The creation of the cuckoo clocks began as a joke. Friends would come to visit and express frustration at never knowing the time. So I built something based on the old barber's clock where the face and movement are backwards and must be looked at through a mirror."

A bird needs a bird bath. We took this photo in Sandra's garden last summer:



Her website is Elemental Designs. Beautiful work!

On with the Crawl.

Passing the schoolyard, I heard the sounds of children at play. The squeak of swing chains, of bent bicycle wheels, the dying groans of battered skateboards (I've seen the remains, decently interred in a garden across the street). But it was Saturday, and the playground was empty. Ghosts?

No. Starlings. Hiding in the evergreens on the corner and spooking the passersby.


A few came out for air and perched on the bare branches. Mystery solved. (I didn't believe in ghosts of skateboards, anyhow.)

Around the corner, we stopped in Kathleen Barrett's house to see her work. More on that later, but since we're looking at birds, can you identify this one?

Collage of found objects. With bird skull.

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Sweeping nudes and other mix-ups

Walking the Culture Crawl this year, I noticed a common way of seeing the world, expressed differently in each artist's work. Many take an object or a scene, possibly something simple and commonplace, and superimpose it on another, seemingly entirely unrelated. But through their careful blending or contrasting, an idea emerges, a relationship, an insight into the nature of things, an understanding that sneaks up on you and persuades without words.

Imagine, if you will, a bicyclist with a GPS unit on the handlebars. Now a field of flowers. Now a cosy shawl. Put them together.

Or a leaf. A dried, dead leaf, stripped down to the veins. Imagine a loom, threaded with vibrant colours. Now add a bit of history; Charles Babbage inventing a "Difference Engine".

Ruth Scheuing has done this. She creates awesome fabrics on her loom, finishes them on a computer-driven sewing machine. Let her tell you about one of her designs:

These lines were captured as tracks with a hand-held GPS. They represent simple daily activities, driving to work, shopping, visiting friends, walking around the neighborhood or riding a bike around the park. Some ordinary trips create interesting lines, while some beautiful journeys create tracks lacking visual interest. The emerging patterns anchor my memory and trace narratives with simple lines. With the absence, in most cases, of specific representational imagery, the simple line creates a memory track, The imagery used then represents more imaginary spaces, equally real representations of places and ideas, facilitated by the Internet and other tools of mediation.

... As in my earlier work I am still interested in the reconstruction of nature and a blurring of lines between global perspectives and domestic spaces and the use of tools or technologies within the traditions of the hand-made.

Here is a sampler of her GPS tracks:

Our photo, with reflections of the setting; more layering.

What struck me first, entering her studio, were a series of hangings, tea-towel-sized linens, in grey and charcoal, each one depicting a geological structure or event; a dust storm in the Gobi Desert, a satellite map, an island, and so on. The "stuff" of our lives, as pervasive as washing dishes, but unnoticed unless it bothers us. Like the dishes do when we don't have a dishwasher.

(That's me; my take on the towels when I saw them. It ties in with her interest in "a blurring of lines between global perspectives and domestic spaces.")

Ruth was inspired by a quote from Ada Lovelace, one of Babbage's "programmers",

"The analytical engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves."

and looks for the relationship between patterns in "nature" and in our "designed nature" (as if it were not part of the whole). Here is the leaf and the Difference Engine:



Compare it to an old print of Babbage's Engine:

From "Charles Babbage ..."

Laurie liked this wall hanging:

Leaves in vases, sweeping nudes, and flowers.

Ruth's sewing machine, in a sunny tower window.

Ruth's website has many more of her designs, and explanations for each new focus; it's well worth examining.
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Crawling at the Wilder Snail

Hawks and Keefer. For us, this is the jump-off point of our Culture Crawl explorations. For one thing, it's a "can't miss" location, at the corner of MacLean Park, and more or less the centre of Strathcona proper, and just off the fold on the map.

Paneficio Studios, with a full house of artists, sits katycorner from the Wilder Snail, a newish grocery and coffee shop. (The name comes from this gigantic snail, ...



... that hangs from the ceiling, along with enormous red paper globes. From outside, after dark -- early in these November days --, they warm the entire street.)

The Wilder Snail, after dark.

Same building, during the Crawl.

Laurie has been experimenting with scenes reflected in car windows, which stretches and twists them in unexpected ways. Here's another, of the same corner, looking northeast:

Crowds of Crawlers.

Mid-afternoon, both days, from our table in the Snail, we watched the action on the street:

Crawlers entering the front door of the Paneficio. Valerie Arntzen and Sharon Petty are here.

Bicycle in MacLean Park

At the corner of the park, a handy bench.

Dog, highlighted by the afternoon sun, watches his owner intently.

The Crawl has grown; this year, over 300 artists participated. They were housed in at least 52 buildings, some as individuals, some occupying studios in large buildings, such as the Parker Street Studios, with 90 artists' studios open for the weekend. We couldn't possibly have seen them all, even in the two days we had. We did manage to visit some 30 or so, and talked with many of the artists.

These studios are usually not open to the public; some of them are live-in studios, others are work sites only. Exhibitions and sales take place in other venues, staffed by salespeople. So this weekend is a unique opportunity to drop in and visit with the artists.

Many of the displays are temporary set-ups, tables in garages, small apartments with the living quarters carefully disguised (but not entirely) by curtains or even stapled-on brown paper. My granddaughter borrowed her aunt's house for the occasion; the upstairs was blocked off with a chair and masking tape sealed the office door. (By the way, in this, her first Crawl, she sold 3 large pieces, totalling over $3000. Congratulations, Auj!)

Auj, in the middle, with two friends, and two of her paintings.

You can see a larger sampling of her work here. (They're not all nudes.)

She's only 22. We're very proud of her.

Next: talking with some of the artists. Starting, I think, with Ruth Scheuing.
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Brief interruption

I have been tagged for the six random things meme. By PZ, who cheated; he never got around to step 5. (Let each person know they have been tagged, and leave a comment on their blog.) I had to find out all by myself.

When you are raising an army of cephalopods, you can afford to do that, I guess.

'nuff grumbling. The rules are:

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5. Let each person know they've been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

So that's 1 and 2 taken care of. Now, the six random things.

1. I love driving, even in the city. Especially at night. Nights after a rain are the best, when the air is clear and all the lights are sparkly. Or on the highway, when the moon plays hide-and-seek behind the evergreens.
2. I have a Mexican straw hat that has hung on my wall (in many houses, and three countries) since 1959.
3. Long ago, back in the early 1980s, I swore I would never, ever, have anything to do with computers. (I'm a lousy typist; how was I supposed to handle programming on a keyboard? And I like books. On paper. That I can throw in my bag and carry with me, slip little scraps of notepaper into, even write in the margins of.) Then I house-sat where they had a tape-driven Commodore, with games for little kids, and was hooked for life.
4. I make lists. Like this one. But not shopping lists; I always lose them, anyhow.
5. I have a live spider in a plastic container in the living room. Not for the first time. I usually have some sort of multi-legged "pet" around.
6. Yay, the sixth already! I am a fairly decent Mexican cook. But I can't eat beans and tortillas any more. (I cheat, sometimes.)

Rule # 4: Tag 6 people.

PZ sort of cheated with this one, too; he just grabbed the last 6 commenters on his blog. Way to discourage your minions!

Let's see ... who's on my Google Reader? How about these:

1. Clare, at The House and other Arctic Musings,
2. Pablo, at Roundrock Journal,
3. Shawn, at Prairie Preacher,
4. Bug Girl, at Bug Girl's Blog,
5. Christopher, at Catalogue of Organisms (you've been working too hard, Christopher; time for a bit of silliness),
6. and Nina, at Nature Remains.
   

Rule 5: Notify these bloggers. Will do, in the morning.
Rule 6: Notify PZ. Ditto.

There! Now I can get back to the Crawl photos. 'bout time.
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And now, half frozen, too.

It was another beautiful day in Strathcona and the streets were full of Crawlers. But out of direct sunshine, it was cold. November cold.

However, like most of the rest of the Crawlers, we kept going, and going, and going, not wanting to miss anything. We Crawled until dark, until our teeth were chattering and our fingers stiff. And then we Crawled back to the car, on the opposite corner of the map.

Heading back at dusk across MacLean Park.

This, in a corner of one of the studios, was a welcome sight:


Too bad we couldn't carry it with us.

I'm putting our photos and notes in order; we've got art, scenery, reflections, silliness, and a dog or two. Starting tomorrow.
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Amazed, astounded, inspired. And exhausted ...

... and, if the weather permits, we're going back tomorrow!


For now, one sample photo:

Ruth Sheuing's loom.

More about that, later. Now, I've got some sleeping to do.
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Time for the Culture Crawl again!

In a few hours, we will be heading into Vancouver to join the annual Eastside Culture Crawl.

Last year's sign, outside every participating studio.

From the Crawl website:

The Eastside Culture Crawl is an annual 3-day November event that involves artists who live in Vancouver's Eastside in an area bounded by Main St., 1st Ave., Commercial Drive, and the Waterfront. Painters, jewelers, sculptors, furniture makers, musicians, weavers, potters, writers, printmakers, photographers, glassblowers; from emerging artists to those of international fame... these are just a sampling of the exciting talents featured during this unique chance to meet local artists in their studios.

Purchase something that strikes your fancy, commission something to be uniquely yours, or just browse through the studios and meet the artists, learning about their specific works of art, materials and tools, approaches and techniques. This is a once a year opportunity to meet many diversely talented artists and view their creations in the studios where they work. Be part of this exciting event, which brings people from all over the Lower Mainland, and share in the imaginations that enrich our neighbourhood and lives.

And this year, we know where we will be starting; at my granddaughter's very first showing. Yay, Auj!

From there, we will follow our noses, and our cameras. No telling what we'll find! First report, tomorrow.
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Kelp

Head:



Tail:



Well, if you ignore the stipe and the holdfast, anyhow.

Here's a more-or-less whole one, as it washed up on the beach at Boundary Bay:


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Dog in a Creek

... at Crescent Beach, yesterday. His owner was tossing stones in the water for him to scramble for.

Every muscle tensed, watching.

Next!

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On a sun-dried log

Not all mushrooms need damp and dark; these were on a pair of logs well above the high-water mark at Boundary Bay beach.

Log #1: growing out of the side of the log.

Common Split Gills?

They look like the Common Split Gill mushrooms in my guide (Audubon). But the write-up says their range is "Maine to Tennessee, west to North Dakota." Which is contradicted two sentences further on, with "The Common Split Gill is found throughout the world..." Confusing.

The biggest is about an inch across.

The underside, showing the split gills.

On log # 2: growing at the cut end.

Oddly-shaped mushrooms, pinched at the centre. A couple of similar ones in the guide are called Saddle-Shaped.

These are a bit more conventional.

Slime or mushroom?

Looking like blobs of Silly Putty oozing out of the pores.

And dribbling down the log face.

Many of the other pores were outlined in this white stuff:

Hebrew script?

My guide doesn't acknowledge the existence of anything quite this weird.
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Very bad photos of good birds

We weren't birding, this Saturday; we had other things to do. We voted in our local elections, then headed for a bi-annual pottery sale in Tsawwassen. Afterward, we would have lunch in Beach Grove, and then, weather permitting, go for a short walk. All very organized.

The voting went quickly. But the procedure was different than usual; they gave us pages to fill out by connecting arrows, using their pens, not ours. And those pages were fed into a machine that swallowed them and left the worker with the folder only. She said it had counted our votes already. I'm not so sure I trust these contraptions.

On to the pottery sale!

Except that we got side-tracked. On the far side of a plowed field, we saw a small flock of white birds. We turned off and parked on the farm road.

Trumpeter Swans

Too far away for good photos; why don't they come this way?


Oh. They've got a windfall: plowed-up carrots. Do swans eat carrots? It seems that they do.

They honked constantly. It sounded like a 5-year-old's birthday party, with all the kids at once blowing those silly plastic horns.

On to the pottery sale!

With a slow-down to check out an eagle's nest by the highway. No eagle there now. (There was when we were heading home.) Slow-down to look at a blue heron in the ditch, another for a flock of starlings that rose in a sudden cloud when we passed. Slowdown for Laurie to get these ducks in an artificial pond. (Two years ago, it was a bare puddle; then there were weeds, now grasses. Ducks are a new development.)

The car is moving. Not the ducks.

There were no birds at the pottery sale. Not even pottery birds.

It was late, and the weather was beautiful, so we stopped at Tim Horton's for soup, bought a couple of bags of bird seed at Bosley's for my feathery family at home, and went on to the beach at Beach Grove. The tide was in, the birds were out. Way out.

Mixed rafts of waterfowl. Too far away to identify.

A pair of loons swam close to the shore at one point, teasing us by diving in unison, halving the chances we got at photographing them. (Laurie got a beautiful shot of two circles on the blue wavelets, circles where two loons* had been when he pressed the shutter.)


Caught them, just after they surfaced. Didn't wait to focus.

Later, in the distance, we heard them laughing.

On the chimney of one of the houses, a seagull posed. At least, until he saw a camera pointed in his direction. Then:

Mooning us.

Looks like he's standing on wingtips.

Back into Beach Grove for coffee and tea. On the way, this Downy teased us, hopping from the backside of one branch to the far side of the next.


Caught him, anyhow. Once, and blurred.

Time to head home. For us and these crows; they were part of a long stream (river, even) of crows going west, as usual at this time of the night. I've watched them many a time, tried to count occasionally; there must be several hundreds, maybe even thousands, wherever it is that they go home to in the evenings.


So much for not birding.

*I was wrong. They were mergansers, Seabrooke says. I should have looked more closely, rather than relying on the clue of the laughing loons.
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I have an excuse ...

... for not posting much earlier.

I picked up a Terry Pratchett book after supper last night. It was a thick one, "Monstrous Regiment".

Good thing I'm a fast reader, but now I'm 12 hours behinder. (That's a word, isn't it?)
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Exclamation point

This sign, beside the railroad tracks in New Westminster, intrigues me.

"Wow!"

But "Wow", what? What does it refer to?

What do you think?
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Patterns in the current

At New Westminster Quay, sometimes we stand just looking at the water. And sometimes we see intriguing patterns:

As if they were outlined by a Magic Marker.


Still there.


Until the ducks come along.

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Discouraging realization

I will never, ever catch up. Not with housework, not with projects, not with blogging. Never. No matter how I work at it.

The days are too full of good things to do, to see, to share.

Like this. Bee mimic on thistle.

The "To be Uploaded" file on my hard drive stretches back to last June.

My Inbox (paper) is overflowing. The urgent stuff is somewhere on the bottom.

Poor Polly!

We've been antiquing, and I've come home with stuff that just begs to be researched. And photographed. But not tomorrow.

The Strathcona Culture Crawl is coming up in a week or so. We will come home with another 200 photos, I'm sure.

Strathcona, reflected in a car window. Not the Crawl, yet.

I have to make or buy Christmas presents. Many, many Christmas presents; my family keeps extending itself, drawing in more amazing people by the day, it seems.

And so it goes. I will never, ever, ever catch up.

And if that is a grumble, it's a happy grumble; life is good, too good.

Laurie, finding something interesting at Kwomais Point.

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On our knees in Watershed Park

It's a good year for mushrooms in the Watershed Park; every step we took the other day revealed more. Most were the usual tiny blue-stemmed "umbrellas" or the slimy yellowish ones that look almost like dinner rolls. The slugs beat us to them, though.

Slug-nibbled "dinner roll".

And they got almost all of these, too:

Hiding under a leaf. The slugs will find it, anyhow.

But they left us the really tiny ones.

Inch-high yellow fingers growing out of a log. With a smear of green stuff, and pale blue lichen.

Zooming in.

Staghorn Jelly fungus (Calocera cornea), I think.

I hadn't even seen these next ones, until I looked at the photo. Behind the moss, see that hairy thing?(It helps to blow it up to full size.) I think it is a Douglas fir cone. I don't know what the growth is, though.



On a well-rotted branch, maybe an inch across, a clump of pure white 'shrooms.

That little dark dot on the second-bottom mushroom is a spider.

Mushrooms and spider, from underneath.

I almost kneeled on these, trying to get a photo of the yellow jellies. I saw them just in time.

See the white dots on the big-leaf maple stem?

Here they are, from a 1/2 inch away:

Is that two, or three, species of mushrooms?

From another angle.

These slimy growths are in many of the rotting logs. When we have photographed them before, they responded to the flash by turning brilliant white, so that all shape and features disappeared. And it was too dark in the Watershed to do without flash.



I thought; "diffuser! I need a diffuser." But I had forgotten to bring my latest home-made one (a slotted film canister). On the spur of the moment, I picked up a yellowing maple leaf, and held it in front of the flash. It gives a yellowish cast to the photo, but at least the blob is visible. I'll have to try that again, and aim for a closer look.

Just as we turned to go, I saw this long log. Those little dots are turquoise mushrooms, cone-shaped, and too small to photograph without better light. I picked up some a year ago, and got a few inadequate shots at home with the old camera.

I tried to break off a section of the log this time, but this one is not rotted; I couldn't get even a splinter. Next trip, we bring a knife.

Tip of the log, with moss and blue cups.

Equipment to carry next time: sharp knife, bottles, some source of extra light (good flashlight?), diffuser, magnifying lens (for me, not the camera). Bandage material; the lack of that sent us home early. And Laurie left a trail of drops of blood from a scraped leg. The price of enthusiasm. He's recovering nicely, though.
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Slug heaven

When the rains come, we always head down to Watershed Park; it's mushroom time!

And the slugs are partying. This one seems to be sleeping it off, though:


I don't remember seeing that striping on the foot before; very pretty.


And the head is such a warm golden colour! It matches the leaves.

Yes, we found mushrooms. Photos tomorrow.
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Mossy truck. Not a typo.

Yesterday, driving home from Abbotsford the long way round, we passed this truck:

The green is not paint.

Molds, lichen, moss. Have you ever seen a mossy truck before?

There were moments, today, when I was comparing Blogger to this truck. Not favourably. However, I think all is well, except that now I have to re-do my blogrolls.

And thanks! to all who gave ideas and sympathy.
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Still working on those problems ...

The grey line is still there. And Island Walks tells me that the blog has been slow loading recently.

So I've temporarily removed some of the links to other pages, including my blogrolls, to see if that helps. Sorry about that; I'll get them back A.S.A.P.

Back to the innards, looking around for grey lines ...

Problems with Blogger

Blogger seems to have gone haywire. At least on this blog.

Are you getting a long grey line stretching vertically through all the posts? I am. And only on my blog, as far as I can tell.

If you don't see it, tell me, please. (Or if you do, and it's doing anything else weird.)

I'll be back as soon as I've sorted this out.

Getting down to basics

Trees in the twilight in Strathcona, yesterday:

Not all the leaves are on the sidewalk. Yet.

Fig tree. Fruit ripening without leafy cover.

Moonlight shining through clouds and bare branches.

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... upon his back to bite 'im

A week or so ago, I was poking at an old log on the hillside above Kwomais Point, looking for spots of yellow slime mold, and a big, red beetle ran out from beneath it. He came home with me, in a cosy plastic bag.

I housed him with a handful of log bits in a lidded plastic bowl. He had company; the wood swarmed with tiny flies, assorted miniscule beetles, and at least one sowbug.

And I tried to get a decent photo of him.


He wasn't co-operating; he never stopped running, not even when I put him down for a nap in the fridge. I did my best, but most of the photos were of a blurred backside or the last segment of a leg. I gave up and put the whole container outside, in the cool. When I had time, I would try again.

Out of a hundred or so photos, some must turn out. This did.

Later that evening, I was sorting the photos, when I noticed something about them. Look at that last one, zooming in:


Do you see it?

Big fleas have little fleas,
Upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas,
and so, ad infinitum.

I checked all the photos; there were three, maybe four of these along for the ride. Mites of some sort.

It's been a hectic week; I didn't check on Big Red, as I was calling him, until this evening. Unfortunately, in the interim, he has died. Sorry about that, Red; I should have let you go free last week.

But at least I could get a good look at his face, which he wasn't allowing before. I moved him to the upturned lid and lowered the light over him. A bunch of little red specks, fast-moving specks, came with him. Oh. The mites; I had forgotten.

Poor, dead Big Red, overrun with hungry parasites.

The mites. Spider-like, but with only 3 pair of legs.*

Red-brown waistcoat, cinched with a white belt, white tail end.

The rest of the community in the plastic bowl seemed happy and busy, and I am sleepy. So Big Red and his mites went back among them; I will keep an eye on things and see what happens. Will the mites multiply? Leave him a shell only? Fill him with eggs? Go away and leave him to rot? Will those yellow slime molds develop here? Oh, the possibilities!

And I got that face shot: look at these jaws!


And four little spoons to hold his food. Handy.

*Update: Christopher Taylor to the rescue again! (See comments) The mites have 4 pairs of legs, not 3, as I said. The front ones are held up, like antennae. (The better to grab you with, my dear.)
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A busy shoulder

Finn Slough has but one road, along the landward side; the island is accessed only by foot or boat. The road, two lanes, with a deep ditch and no shoulder on the Richmond side, doubles as parking, storage, shop, and garden area for the houses with an anchor point (never all four corners) on dry ground.

There are no lawns, no driveways or garages. Cars and pick-up trucks line up, two wheels on pavement, the others on gravel or weeds. A scant 2 or 3 metres separates them from the back doors of the homes.

Some vehicles are more or less new; many are derelict, put to non-transportation uses. This one holds machinery in the pick-up bed, sprouting plants in the "greenhouse" cab, and cats on the engine hood:

Blackie and Number Four

The cats' caretaker came out while I was scratching their ears; he feeds them here, where it's warmer and out of the mud, all winter, starting a couple of weeks ago. The grizzled one is Number Four. (I didn't ask, but it could be that he came from Number Four Road, just around the corner.) He is fourteen years old; Blackie is younger.

Detail of the truck; foot rest between the cab and the rear fender.

At the next house, someone has been getting in the wood for the winter, splitting the logs right where they were dumped from the truck;

Alder, a weed tree. Good, quick-burning, aromatic wood, useful for cooking and starter fires.

Curious set-up; a tap in an old piling. Not connected to anything at the bottom.


Number Four keeping a planter company on an old chair.


I have no idea what this is. It's on a wall a few feet off the road.


Number Four again. Just because.

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Time wasters

I've been wasting time, reading and watching the wrap-ups on yesterday's news. Not that I had the time to waste, but when has that ever stopped me?

And I lost another hour or so, reading my Plants of Coastal British Columbia, trying to identify this:


A tall, spare plant, with tiny yellow flowers. An aster of some sort. I find these yellow weeds; hawkweed, hawksbeard, cat's ear, sow-thistle, nipple-wort, etc., extremely confusing. I wonder if there's any simple way to remember which is which. They're worse than bees!

And this one should be a red osier dogwood.


A medium to tall shrub, leaves with prominent veins, red in the fall, flowers and white berries (only two here) in terminal clusters.

Nice that some things, at least, are simple.
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Woo-hoo!

I've spent the afternoon and evening following the US election. I'll get back to Finn Slough in the morning.

But for now, just this:

One of four sculptures outside the Surrey General Hospital.

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Finn Slough: what's underfoot

Finn Slough is green, green, green in the summer. Not in November; now the prevailing colours are the browns, from golden beige to deep chocolate. Except for the mosses and lichens. When the rains come, they collect all the leftover green and paint the old wood with it.


The slough cuts off a thin sliver of land, making it an island; here, half a dozen homes are snuggled into the bush. Access is across a rickety, slippery, patchwork bridge. A sign on the planking warns visitors to "beware (be aware) of uneven walking surfaces and other potential dangers." A second sign reminds bikers to get off their bikes.

Wise advice; even walking slowly and carefully, we found some parts of the pathway treacherous.

The bridge. With a gap closed by chained-on planks, maybe to let a boat through.

The old lumber has been colonised by mosses, assorted lichens, and tiny slime molds, growing deep in the cracks, working at breaking down the wood.

Rusty nails, popping up, look like growing mushrooms, Laurie says.


Lichen garden in a knothole. Cladonia and a leaf lichen.


Inch-high stalks, leaf lichen, and moss.


On a dock on the island, the mosses invade knotted ropes. Cladonia, and on the left, an strange, branched lichen.


Tiny green cups. The ones on the bridge have orange rims; these are all green.


On a rope tied around a post by the walkway, another lichen. This looks like old, decaying cottage cheese.


On the sunny side, it completely swallows the rope.

The houses, and some of the residents, next.
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Better than rainbows

It was pouring rain, but we gave up waiting for it to stop; we went out looking for adventure, anyhow. Finn Slough, our destination. It had been too long since we were there.

And we were lucky; just as we arrived, the sun burned its way through the clouds over the river, and highlighted the dying leaves and grasses beneath them.

West end of Finn Slough, under a wet sky.

Tin, gold and steel grey.

White undersides of leaves, blowing in the wind.

More golden trees.

What else we saw, tomorrow. (I'm still sorting photos.)
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Fall back

October/November: time to shut things down for the winter.

Three weeks ago. A snail feasts on a dead rose. Three more flowers to go.

Two weeks ago. Wild silver dollar plant. The seed pods will rattle all winter.

One week ago. Big-leaf maple and "normal" maples caught, for now, on the evergreen ferns.

Yesterday. My young maple has about one day's worth of leaves still hanging on. Bedraggled lily-of-the-valley leaves shelter hungry young slugs.

But the towhees are back, and the juncos; they forage cheerfully among those fallen leaves. And a trio of house finches is still here.

Bathing in the rain.

And Daylight Saving Time is over, done with, finished; I just set my clock back. I get to sleep in! Woo-hoo!
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They come out of the night on All Hallows Eve

Last year, the red-head had three horns; this year, our visiting devil was a little more mature, and had five:


At the other extreme, what could be more angelic than this?

The littlest trick-or-treater

Hope you had a fun Hallowe'en!
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