Scary and not scary
It's August, and I've had to sail only twice. Maybe three times. Not bad. On Friday, I went to yoga rather than to the lake because I had signed up for the yoga first. Also because yoga doesn't scare me. See (->), not scary.(The lights around my knees are from the reflector strips on my Mountain Equipment Co-op stretchy pants. They protect me from oncoming yogis. This may make it appear that yoga is scary, but it is not.)
Oh, I hear you. You're saying I should use yoga to overcome my fear of sailing. Well, I did, didn't I? I did yoga instead.

I've been kayaking once, a dawn paddle with my neighbour, Janice. When the three bald eagles (!) went over our heads, my camera told me, "Change batteries." It's good at deciding it needs new batteries for epic shots. It let me take this picture, though.
But you came here looking for scary, so, okay, here you go:

I know! Yikes!

It's cold, but it smells like spring these days.

Shots of the bridge at Florence this afternoon

Harry assesses the ice jam around the treehouse at dusk

We were thinking tonight of heading down to the treehouse. River's up, so it would require the canoe. Bit of ice, but breakable. Then we thought harder. The temperature is supposed to drop to minus 10 tonight. That means more ice, and too thick to plough through, too thin to walk on. How many days would we care to be stranded down there? Maybe Sunday night we'll try it. It is to be a mere minus 5 then. We'll call you if we run into trouble.

Who needs a sail?

Okay, phew, sailing's done for another season...

I'm going to see whether this works to keep me out. Will let you know.

Spinnaker shots! It was important that someone stay ashore, on the solid, unmoving beach, to snap the photos...

A carpenter and a bricklayer race in a homemade puckboard lark. (Puckboard is the hard plastic with which hockey arenas are lined.) The carpenter says to the bricklayer, "Just tell her we came in fifth."
But for first-time racers they did well. No rule infringements, no puckboard fragments floating in the bay. No tradesmen floating in the bay.

The first cosmos of the pond garden has bloomed, and that's the birth flower of someone I could maybe lure home for a visit. Maybe if I put a kitten beside the cosmos. The kitten won't stay. Pick up the kitten and hang it from my hand, purring, beside the cosmos. Can't get the shot right. Conscript dad to hold two purring kittens. There we go.

If I post some cloud pictures first, yes right there, and some wheat, the kitten pictures should effectively make a subliminal impact.

This is not a food blog, but into every life comes a hot milk sponge cake. No one in this house likes shortcake - it's just a biscuit - and one person in the house, the tallest one, likes those store-bought sponge things made from corn syrup and cellophane. I promised to make a real sponge if he brought home strawberries. Here it is. It's from an internet recipe, only I opted against the obsessive sifting at every step. Really, in this day and age there are whisks. Use one to mix the dry ingredients and you're fine.
I knew you'd want to see it, this nice cake.
The sad thing is that this got flooded with milk in his bowl the same as if it was a nasty chemical cake. The good thing is that this looks like breakfast.

So I post only pretty things or things I find interesting. But I live in SW Ontario, where not everything is pretty or interesting. It is only by ignoring a great deal of the surroundings that I get nice-ish pictures. I suppose that is the same everywhere. Would you like to compare? This is the village in which we had a little job to do on Saturday. I was not trying to make this village look bad. Of course, I could have made it look fine by focusing on flower petals or, well, not cornices or anything because there weren't any. Not rain barrels. I stood in one spot nearly, moved a bit, and snapped what I was seeing. Horses! Those are pretty. But they have giant satellite dishes beside them and no thought went into that fence. And so on. Are you in a more depressing place than this? Really sorry if so. I'll cheery up the next post.

Still in spring cleaning mode and found this. It's circa 1974. I appear to be the only one not taking seriously the flood conditions in which we are canoeing.

I'm just not capturing clouds the way I want with this little digital camera. I mess with the midtones in the editing so that you see what I saw before I snapped the photo, but it still doesn't work out. See, this was a series of what looked like innocuous funnel clouds -- slow-moving, non-destructive, lighthearted tornadoes pirouetting from the wheat field to Rick's pasture. Just doesn't come across, does it. A little?

Canoeing on Good Friday, we (the patient sternsman pictured and I) passed, then stopped to take a look at, this cow skeleton on the riverbank, surprisingly cohesive after storms, floods, scavengers. We (I) took photos that day of many living things, mostly turtles and ducks, but we (I) liked these photos best, less for the dead cow in them and more for the utter stillness of the place.

Once a turtle counter, always a...

Took a photo this week while walking to Florence, and then couldn't help but sneak up on my unsuspecting subject, paparazzi-style, to get another shot.

Then, camera already out, I took a photo of a tree (that I deemed not interesting enough even for blogdom) and a gate (mostly for the sunpath around it, not the gate itself) on the way back.

Lord willin' and the creek don't rise.

Just got called, by my husband, a temptress, for sending him a text message. And he's right. If you're not too squeamish, here's what I said:

Let's ditch work and go canoeing.

Oh, it is so beautiful here today. Something like 16 C and sunny. You can smell spring. There are lines of trumpeter swans in the sky. But I'm trapped behind this computer and he's trapped in a bathroom renovation. Probably had to dig himself out from under the crawlspace to answer the ring.

(Pussywillows, magnolia buds, nearly melted snow.)