December 31st: Gran Fandango

A little bit of Mexican humour.
Jose Guadalupe Posada's "Gran Fandango de Todos los Muertos", or "Great Party of all the Dead".

Pulque in the barrel, music, dancing, and ... Are those sopes on the griddle? I want one. Chile verde, please!

And La Catrina, all dressed up to dance the New Year in.

December 30th. Embers.

We're coming up to the end of 2006. Various memes are working their way around the blogosphere; listing the first lines of the first post of each month, tallying up the numbers, comparing "top tens", making predictions.

Me, I'm a newbie. Not to the web; I've been here forever and a couple of days. To the blogs. I started May 1st of last year, on Delphi. A bit of Mayday madness that has become a meme all by itself: a post a day. Or thereabouts.

So: waving goodbye to 2006 in my own way, I will post bits and pieces of those early blog posts, bits that tell who I am, where I'm going and why.

May 5, 2006: About Names

Why "Weeta"?
I answer to a whole slew of names. The one my parents gave me; Susannah; the one they called me, and my brother still uses (nobody else, please); Susie. To casual acquaintances, often Sue.
...
And to my grandkids, I have been, according to the age and favourite language of the kids, Grandma, Jaba, Jabasoo (his spelling, not mine. And Canada Post actually delivered a letter sent to that name, and with a wrong street address. Pretty good, eh?) and recently, Weeta. Which is a 3-year-old's pronunciation of "abuelita".
I like it.

Same Day: Immortal Words

The internet is clogged with trillions of words. Stashed in hard drives all over the planet, pixels appearing on screens on laps, on desks, on beds even, then disappearing a moment later, vibrating energies coating this old planet like slime on a pond; here today, gone tomorrow.
Even more ephemeral than paper, barely more permanent than the brief hellos we interchange with the neighbour in his driveway. ...
So: words into the void. But so what? I will still say hello to the neighbour; I may as well still keep on pouring words onto the screen.

May 10th, Mexican Mother's Day: Unappreciated Beauties A photo of dandelions. And, I think, the unifying principle in most of this blog; to wit:

We mow them down. Roundup them. Tear them out by the roots. Swear at them.
And what do they do to us? Smile at the sunshine. Brighten dingy days. Give little children something to blow away.
My granddaughter, 3, carefully searched out the dandelions that had already lost their little parachuting seeds, and harvested a fistful to take home to Mommy. Arranging them in a glass for her, I realized that they are beautiful, too, with their silky round stems, a neat little creamy cap on the top and a lacy fringe; how long is it since I had really looked at them?

It's a sad time of year, especially this year, maybe because this year has been difficult and fraught with loss, maybe because the future looks dark. There are health issues as we grow older, financial worries, the closing of doors. The weather no longer is a trusted cycle, "seedtime and harvest"; whether to expect ice and wind or baking drought is not something the almanac can tell us any more. And the world seems populated by insane ideologues hell-bent on suicide and willing to take any number of people with them, some by the dozens, others by the millions.

And the sun comes out only long enough for us to get our coats on.

But the world still manages to produce its beauty. Sunrise, sunset. Unassuming beetles, moss-covered logs, fruit flies with brilliant red eyes. Blue lakes mirroring a bluer sky. Eleventy-one tints of green in the bush. The ceaseless whispering of waves against the pier.

I can't do anything about the weather, my age, the news or the sanity of my neighbours, far and near. I can't do much about the beauty around me, except treasure it, cultivate it. Celebrate it.

Call it my act of defiance against the closing dark.

Walking Telephone Poles or Heavy Seagull?

In Strathcona, Vancouver, early morning.



View from the bank window. Mural, truck, chimneys, wires, a seagull and a buckling telephone pole.



No matter how carefully they make and install windows, they cannot guarantee perfection. After all, glass is a liquid; it moves, however slowly. Here, one pane of the bank window is decidedly warped; seen as a mirror, it demonstrates its own theory of relativity: space bends, in spots.

More Gunderson Slough Photos

The problem of using a film-based camera today: the photos aren't available until the entire roll is shot and developed. But they are different, somehow; L. likes them better.

One of these days, I'll get a digital. But not yet.

That said, here are a few more photos taken at Gunderson Slough (see my previous post).

Boats and sheds in the rain

Looking down river, towards the Alex Fraser bridge.

A fish boat, up against the shoreline. Raindrops on the water.

Christmas Shopping

Today. Shopping. All day. For Christmas presents for the grandkids.

Tired, tired, tired, tired.

I have blisters on both my feet.

And I'm still missing one present.

I noticed that the stores do not seem as full this year as they have on other occasions. In the third place, IKEA, I found parking in the first aisle I turned into. The line-ups went faster than usual; most people, even in IKEA, were carrying bags rather than pushing loaded carts.

And at 5:30, when I finally headed home, the traffic was sparse and flowing smoothly.

I wonder what that means.

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Photo; crabapples, Strathcona, this summer. Just because they look Christmassy.

When I had my own tree, I put them up in pint jars, with a standard light syrup and cinnamon sticks. They made an excellent garnish for holiday meals.

A Poem for Solstice

Just think;
wind blew sun warmed
dew and rain and snow seasons turning
last year and one before
it took all that

and all the struggles; for quiet, fresh veg.,
a place in the sun
for a paycheck a place in line a roof
a parking spot
for love and hate
and your own back

it took all that

wars and musterings
and mutterings
volkerwanderungs
kings and priests inquisitors
and patient tillers

dairymaids and shepherdesses
borgias
and their swains

matings and birthings and dyings
on land in air at the bottom of the deeps
nests and lairs burrows webs
tubes and tunnels
and the dark corners of palaces
hair fur feathers leaves
skeletons exo- endo- and none
all of that, too

spewing volcanoes sliding plates creeping glaciers
floods sandstorms
and the changing seasons, solstice to solstice
sun and moon and planets in
their solemn dance

it took all that

it took all that
to bring us to today solstice winter
of 2006
and you and me here
together as the world spins

and it was worth it
every whit

Gunderson Slough in the Rain

A week ago Saturday, a drizzly, chilly afternoon, we visited one of the last "unimproved" sites along the lower Fraser River, a spit out into the river enclosing a slough and housing a higgledy-piggledy conglomeration of warehouses, rotting boathouses, rickety piers and assorted working boats. The railroad runs along the river bank, beyond that, a truck road; from there, the hill rises straight up, covered in scrubby bush and "weed" trees.

It is not a beautiful sight, but somehow, even in the rain, it has a certain decrepit charm and its own sense of a long, busy history. It has been in use since at least 1870, when the first cannery in B.C. was built on the site; it is now named after a Norwegian, Jacob Gunderson, who worked there in the last years of the 19th century.

Gunderson slough is home, according to a signpost beside the road, to (an) unidentified endangered species. A Google search turns up a mention of bar habitat for bottom-dwelling fish, as well as the red-listed stream-bank lupine and western grebes.

And it is scheduled for modernization; a new split-level highway will follow the shoreline here, just beyond the railroad tracks. Cement or stone walls will retain the banks instead of bush; traffic will double; earth-moving equipment will frighten off the grebes. The sagging old sheds will be gone.

It looks all very pretty on the propaganda the government puts out. I doubt that the reality will match.

Here are a couple of photos, as it is today, in the rain and mud.

Mom Died of Alzheimer's

This will be a somewhat different post than my usual.

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Mom died of Alzheimer's Disease at 86, 5 years ago.

Last month, her younger sister died. Alzheimer's.

Her younger brother is now completely incapacitated. Alzheimer's.

The next brother in line is "confused". Early Alzheimer's.

I read some time back that if one parent has Alzheimer's, the children have a 50% chance of developing the disease. That's assuming, of course, that it is carried in the genes, which is debatable.

I am turning 65. Mom showed the first signs in her mid 70s, was incapable of running her computer by age 80.

What does this mean for me? 15 more years of productive work and play, and then the curtain falls? Or not? A 50/50 chance? Or will there be some effective therapy that heals the developing holes in my brain?

The Tangled Neuron, a blog focusing on one woman's "search for answers on my father's dementia", is on my blogroll. The writer continues, in her profile, "Although it's too late to help Dad, I hope any information I can find helps others."

In the last couple of days, she has been writing about

"the growing recognition that Alzheimer’s isn’t a single disease, and the controversy about whether we should spend our limited resources on trying to find a “cure.”
Maybe if we give up our fantasies of a single “cure” for Alzheimer’s, we can start talking about better ways to view and treat dementia. These discussions have already begun in labs, at conferences, on email lists, and in homes around the world. While preliminary, they provide us with a glimpse of how Alzheimer’s care might look in the future."

Well worth reading.

River Gods and the "Atlantes de Tula"

Underneath the Queensboro Railway Bridge, looking over towards New Westminster Quay, MN discovered these ancient relics.

When I saw the photo, it immediately reminded me of the mysterious pillars left by the Toltecs, in Tula de Allende, a short distance from Mexico City.

No-one really knows why they stand as they do, four 15-feet-tall stone pillars on a five-sided pyramid. (The pyramids in Teotihuacan, home, finally, to the Aztecs have four sides.) It is presumed that they are the supports for the wooden roof of a temple, although there is no other sign of such a roof. Even the pillars themselves were broken, tumbled into piles of rock; they have been reconstructed.

There are no others like them, at least discovered so far. (Who can tell what may still be buried under any Mexican hill?)



The Toltecs were the probable builders of Teotihuacan, but abandoned the city finally, for unknown reasons, and re-built in Tollan, or today's Tula, where they stayed for about 4 centuries. Some histories say they were driven out, then, by the Chichimecs, barbarian nomads, which seems unlikely. Others say that they disappeared as mysteriously from Tollan as they had from Teotihuacan and that the Chichimeca came some time later to destroy the city. There are tales and tragedies here that we never will hear. ... The Aztecs, other nomads, wandered in sometime around the 13th century, settled in Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) and set about expanding their empire until the Toltecs became a mere memory. Tollan fell into ruins.

History is not kind to the losers; when modern visitors think of ancient Mexico, they think of the Aztecs and their bloody cult to the sun. Not the Toltecs, where it all started.

We do know a few things. The pyramid is called the temple of Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli.

(No, that is not too hard to read. Break it up. Tla -- "tl" gives you a sound not used in English, but just start with your tongue in the "t" position, then say "la"; you've got it! -- huiz -- pronounced "wees" -- cal - pan -- easy enough -- te cuh -- "tay coo" -- and another "tl" sound; tli --say "tlee". See? Simple.)

The name has been translated as "temple of the morning star", although the ending, "cuhtli" means "Lord", so that "morning star" probably refers to the Plumed Serpent, in one of his disguises.

A far cry from our more modern "river gods", made of wood and moldering into the river. More peaceful; no human hearts ripped out here, no dancers in still-bloody skins of animals and people. More humble; no cult at all, no names, no "Lord" of anything.

Still, the same general structure, the same "O" mouth, the same erased memory. Fading, falling, giving way to more modern cities and gods, both groups. And probably used for a similar purpose; to hold up a wooden pier, as the "Atlantes" held up a wooden roof.

Juncos Coping

"Who hid my bath?"

These photos turned out a bit fuzzy; the snow was too bright, and the junco just wouldn't stand still. But they were just too good to hide, anyhow.



The first is a junco on the birdbath last week, the day of that big snowstorm. At the highest point, I measured 18 inches of snow on that bath.



Next, a junco (the same, or another, I don't know) just coming out of the birdhouse. You have to look closely to find the house; it has been knocked on its back by the snow. That's the peak of the roof, at the bottom of that pile of snow. Luckily, I don't think any birds had decided to use the house for sleeping, just as a perch.


Here's a female on the fuschia, wondering where the daylight went.

Good Planets are Hard to Find, Dec. 9

The latest installment of "Good Planets" is up at Journeys with Jood. Beautiful pictures, as always, from around the world. South Africa, Bhutan, Iguacu Falls (where is that?), Washington State, Jasper and of course, mine from BC. And more.

A nod to all you BCBloggers; I just joined you. Check out "Good Planets". We post photos once a week; you may want to contribute yours. This month, GP is being hosted by Jood at Journeys with Jood. You can e-mail a photo or two to her at jkblue at cox dot net.

The archive of all the photos (274, so far) is on Flickr, here; a brief history of "Good Planets" is at Tortoise Trails.

Eight Hours, Eighteen Minutes

Sunrise to sunset today, that is. From 7:56 AM to 4:15 PM. Tomorrow will be 3 minutes shorter.


That's an hour or two before supper for sunset. My poor birds; cold weather and limited foraging time. Then sixteen hours of night. At this time of year, I make sure that the feeder is always replenished.


And for us humans, it is S.A.D. weather. "Seasonal Affective Disorder", for those living south of the border. The days of melancholy, of pulling the curtains, shutting in the light, slowing down, puttering, remembering the glow in the belly of the old wood stove.



Farther north, they have it worse: in Bella Coola, where I used to live, sunset is about the same, 4:18 PM, but the sun peeks over the mountains in the lower parts of the valley at 8:28 today, much later up-valley. A Smithers day goes from 8:45 to 4:00. Barely 7 hours.


I keep myself sane (if you can call it that) by counting the days double. From now to the Solstice will be 12 days of decreasing daylight; another 12 of the upswing, and we come to January 1st, when the day will be the same length as today. Eight hours, eighteen minutes. Tomorrow, the target date will be December 30th. Two days for the price of one.


24 days. I think I can handle that.

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Photos: dawn from our parking lot; "red skies in the morning", these days. "Sailors take warning." And a chickadee at the feeder this summer.

Circus of the Spineless # 15!

The 15th Circus of the Spineless is now up at Words and Pictures.

Great posts, great photos. Dragonfly eyes, insect brainwashing, spiders, slugs, snails, mussels and more: it's all there. Including my own posts on water bears from here and here. Check it out!

Hood Ornament

This post reposted from my Delphi blog, which will be put on ice soon.

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Remember hood ornaments? Back in the 40s and 50s? The streamlined decoration at the very front of the engine; remember those? The ram (Dodge), stylized airplanes or trains (Olds and others), wings (Ford), assorted female figures and Art Deco-ish shapes? Long gone, these days, sacrificed to the gods of safety. (Samples here.)

We had our own custom hood ornament for a few minutes, the other day.

We had driven down to White Rock on a rainy morning to pick up black oil sunflower seeds for the chickadees (another story; later). We ate lunch in a crowded, drafty cafe, headed back to the car. That was it? It was a pity to drive to White Rock and not at least look at the beach, rain or no rain. We drove on down the hill, following our noses.
The tide was at the top of its range, the promenade deserted except for the seagulls sitting along the train tracks. The logs that usually line the beach were now floating, pushing their way inland. MN got out to take photos. I took one look at the whitecaps and the rain on my windshield and opted to stay in the car, keeping the heater going.

A few seagulls came over to investigate; I dug out a bag of seeds, saved for ducks, rolled down the window and tossed out a handful. All down the tracks gulls lifted into the wind, wheeled, dropped down to see what was on offer, turned up their collective noses and wandered off. Sorry, guys; I know you don't like seeds; I should have brought you a sandwich.

MN came back to the car, looking chilled. We sat while he changed the film. And a young seagull plopped himself down on the motor and stood there, looking in, probably hoping for that non-existent sandwich. We took photos; he didn't seem fazed by the flash. I turned on the wipers for a second, and he jumped back a few inches, extending his wings as if to fly off, then changed his mind and settled down to wait.

But we had to go. I backed out of the parking space and down the lane. Our ornament rode with us, unconcerned, all the way back to the main road.

Better than an Art Deco thingamabob, any day.

Updating Blog: Pardon the Interruption

For the rest of the evening, I will be trying to tweak the formatting of the blog. Please be patient if it looks funny, and come back a little later.

Here goes! (Crossing fingers, etc.)

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An hour later: so far, so good. Now all my old layout of photos has gone askew. Patience, patience...

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Late at night: looks like it's working. Now, for the big changes; importing my other blog into this one.

Keep an eye on this space!

BC Lower Mainland Snowstorm; the day after

About 18 inches of snow fell on this area of the Fraser River delta last week. It is raining again, as is usual for December, so the photos soon will be the only reminder left, apart from huge mountains of grungy scrapings in the mall parking lots.

First; an overview from our balcony. Early morning, before the sun appeared.

Looking towards the west.

Snow on a shrub, making faces and beasties.

Blue skies with the sunrise. Odd how the colour mix changes, so that the same trees now look darker.

And finally, in my garden, a visiting elf, in a 1940s coat and hat. (No, there is nobody there usually, nor is it a walkway; just a space between two trees.) Proof that --- well, proof of something, anyway!

Chilly Weather Photos

Winter weather is upon us.

Canada geese on the Fraser River
When it is cold enough, the water lies still and glassy, the air is clear. Colours fade, and the architecture of a space predominates.
Mid-afternoon at White Rock, and high tide. The wind so cold it shivered our bones. The lone stroller on the promenade is a seagull.
Central Park, Burnaby. The young gull on the left is not happy. His first winter; "What did they do to my nice warm pond?"