Today’s bike ride took me past the Community Gardens, where someone’s proudly flying a Ukrainian flag.
Slava Ukraini
Today’s bike ride took me past the Community Gardens, where someone’s proudly flying a Ukrainian flag.
Patrick
Portal fantasy
You’ve probably read a portal fantasy. It’s just a story where the characters are transported from our world to some other world, usually by magical means, often through a door of some kind. L. Frank Baum’sThe Wizard of Oz is a portal fantasy; so are Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I’m currently reading The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern, which is a literal portal fantasy: travel to the secondary world is through actual doors, mostly painted by a character named Mirabel.
For well over 20 years I read Stephen King’s Dark Tower saga, which is a portal fantasy, with characters moving between Keystone Earth (ie, our world) and Mid-World via doors that stand on beaches, in forests, in darkened basements and haunted houses.
So when I saw the blue door leaning against a Bell MTS building, I had to stop and take a photo. If it wasn’t behind chainlink fence, I might just have tried turning the doorknob, in case there was a world behind it.
You never know.
Neighbourhood watch
As seen from my bedroom window.
Lilacs
I went for a walk at noon. This time I remembered my water, which was good—it was hot out. I also took my camera.
I love lilacs. They’re my favourite flower. Their scent is one of the treasures of late spring. The only downside is their season is so very short.
I also spotted a painted rock along the 34th Street walking path.
Aurora: May 19–20, 2023
It was a lovely night for the aurora. It’s too bad I was standing next to my car, broken down on the side of the Trans-Canada Highway, while I watched it.
Thanks to my lovely wife Kathleen who came and rescued me, and kept me company while we waited on a tow truck.
Nerdy details: all the photos were taken at 11mm, 5 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 3200 and edited (lightly) in GIMP. The panorama at the top is 3 photos stitched together with Hugin
Early Bird
In case you slept through my Saturday morning interview with Shannah-Lee Vidal—or you’re not in CBC Manitoba’s broadcast area—here’s how the story went.
Aurora, April 23, 2023
Last night, Kathleen said to me, “I hear the aurora should be good tonight.” I checked the app on my phone that shows me the aurora data. Everything looked pretty good except the Bz value, which was about +17. (For a good show, you want the Bz to be negative. The longer it’s been negative, the better.)
Continue reading “Aurora, April 23, 2023”In the paper
One of my photos from the March 23rd aurora was the cover photo for this week’s Westman This Week section of the Brandon Sun.
I think that’s pretty neat.
Lasagna
I don’t know about you, but for me, lasagna[1]Especially the lasagna Florentine my dad taught me to cook. is the perfect comfort food. When it’s in the house I will happily eat it at every meal till it’s gone.
This time I snapped a photo or two before I devoured it all.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | Especially the lasagna Florentine my dad taught me to cook. |
|---|
Aurora, March 23, 2023
Wow, that was a show.
The data looked ridiculous from the outset. There’s one parameter, when you’re consulting the oracle (sorry, the space-weather data), the Bz, that you want to be a negative number. I’ve seen great shows when the Bz was around ‑3 or ‑5. The longer it’s negative, the better.
Yesterday afternoon, every time I checked, the Bz was around ‑15. Crazy.
And the auroral oval looked like this. When it’s yellow, that’s usually a good sign. Red—that much red—is flat-out amazing.
