It is May. It is May. It is May.
I keep saying that it is May because it’s hard to tell right now.
Snow falling on lilacs
Patrick
Bike Ride, May 20, 2024
I went about 22km and took a bunch of photos.
The trees were all starting to flower. Even the lilacs had blossoms on them.
You can talk all you want about robins redbreast, but for me the truest sign of spring is when the yellow heads of dandelions[1]Or, as the French would have it, «pissenlits». appear.
I’m glad to see the Ukrainian flag is still hangin’ in there at the public gardens, too. I imagine that I’ll be photographing sunflowers there later this summer.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | Or, as the French would have it, «pissenlits». |
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Aurora — May 11, 2024
The second night[1]First night is here. of the show was a bit tamer, and tempered by smoke in the air that amplified all the ground lights. Still, it was a good night. I spent a couple hours snapping photos with my friend Kevin.
The smoke turned the crescent moon reddish-orange, too.
Timelapse. See if you can tell when the light was strong enough that I could see it reflecting off my hi-vis vest.
I was out from about 10:30pm till about half past midnight. It was another good night.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | First night is here. |
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Aurora Borealis, May 10, 2024
A few days ago, the sun launched like 5 CMEs our way. This naturally excited all the aurora nerds, myself included[1]I charged all my camera batteries and tried to keep my expectations tempered..
CMEs are the usual cause of auroras, and when you get more than one at a time, the aurora show is usually going to be more intense. So when night fell and the data was[2]were still looking intense[3]The KP index, for example, was between 7 and 9, its maximum; most of the really intense shows I’ve seen were at KP6 or so, I packed my gear and headed west of the city to one of the spot I like to use for aurora photos.
I arrived with daylight still fading and started setting up. There was another car nearby; they, too, were there to watch the show.
Here’s the first shot I got, unedited except for straightening and cropping. Even in the twilight you can see the purple/pinkish lines of aurora.
As it got dark, the lights got brighter. I had two DSLRs running, and I snapped a few photos with my phone, too. Apparently my new phone has a better camera than the old one, or else it’s better at post-processing, because those shots were pretty good if I do say so myself.
I was there from about 10:15pm till just around midnight. My friend Neal came for a visit, and there were about 3 or 4 other cars that showed up on the stretch of road, too.
OK, enough talking; here are the photos. All the DSLR photos were taken at 5 second exposures, apeture f/2.8 or f/1.8 on the 50mm lens[4]ie, as wide open as the lenses would shoot, ISO 1600. The phone photos were taken on night mode, using whatever automatic settings the phone decided would work best.
First up: the DSLRs.
And here are the photos from my phone.
And a couple of time-lapse videos. In each video, 1 second is 1 minute of real time.
Spring is sprung
…the grass is riz, I wonder how come I never noticed my neighbour’s skull decoration before.
Library haul, April 2024
My local library had neither one of these books in the stacks. Enter ILL!
I bet I could probably get Gene Wolfe’s final novel, Interlibrary Loan, via ILL…
Ste. Rose du Lac
Kathleen had meetings in Dauphin today, so I took a side trip to Ste. Rose to have a look around.
It was a little weird driving around in town. It’s been a while since I was there, and so there were spots where my mental map differed from reality. There are a row of new condos along where the rail line used to go. The spot where a house once stood (the one I had in mind, in fact, when I wrote the line “a house crumbling into genteel senescence”[1]whatever that means) is now a vacant lot. Another house, which in my memory is a pale yellow somewhere between lemon and sunshine, has been re-sided in a dark mossy green.
You can go home, but it’s not gonna be the same.
I also got a couple multi-photo panoramas of Riding Mountain when I headed back to Dauphin to pick up my darling wife.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | whatever that means |
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Hercules
Right around lunch I heard the drone of an airplane, and it sounded different than a Cessna: louder, maybe, or deeper. I put the zoom lens on my camera and stepped outside to see if I could find it.
It looks like a C‑130 Hercules was tooling around. I got a couple photos for you to enjoy.
National B
My certificate arrived today.
Thanks for getting the photo, Kathleen.
Edmonton, 2024
We flew out to Edmonton this past weekend. Arrived Thursday afternoon, got to the rental car place, which was—predictably—out of the compact cars that I rented. For the same price, they gave us a Mustang.
(What a ridiculous car.)
Highlights of the weekend:
- Hanging out with family
- Teaching Gracie to play crib
- Spending 28 hours at the West Edmonton Mall, most of it at the Ice Palace where they set up the judo mats
- Passing my National B referee evaluation
- Pretzels with cinnamon sugar
- A walk with Juliana to see hoodoos in the city
- Seeing Mary at the airport—she was flying out to Edmonton on the same plane we’d just returned on
- Park ‘n’ Fly washed our car while we were away
As always: it’s fun to travel, but it’s sure nice to be home. Tomorrow is gonna be laundry day.