Day 2 - Botanical gardens and Vikingaheimar

Again, blogging a day behind the pictures. I'd hoped to catch up tonight but the only place the signal is connecting is nowhere near a power outlet so I'm limited by battery power. There's supposed to be signal in every room, but alas, it appears to be not quite the reality.

Yesterday then, we went to the botanical gardens in Reykjavik and found a few things to photgraph. A pretty rock garden....



A humble bumble bee doing it's thing...



Lots and lots of pretty flowers....



This bird ....



......splashing around in this lovely water garden.



There were also children aplently pulling the leaves and sometimes the plants out of the water feature in the botanical garden cafe (not pictured to protect their destructive little identities) and dropping their plastic cars in the pond.

Snorri made it to the Vikingaheimer with us to see the Islandingur, a replica Viking ship. More on the museum and the ship on the DARC blog when Neil gets around to blogging.



And of course.... in Reykjavik, there are cats everywhere. Ragnarr the cat visited us again briefly this morning before we checked out of the Erikr Rauði. This kitty was found in a wool shop in downtown Reykjavik.

Day 1 in Iceland - getting here and jet lag

So.... we're in Iceland. :) I'm writing on Day 2 actually but the pictures are from Day 1. I was way way too tired to write up the blog on Day 1. Jet lag is a real drag.

Snorri Steveson is a shared resource, carved by Steve from DARC. He's come to Iceland with us, and later he's going again, and to Denmark and England with Marcus and Jo.

First.... Snorri had to say goodbye to my .... err, our garden.



Here's Snorri at the airport while we waited for the plane. He's visiting the DARC website.



Snorri visited the Blue Lagoon with us when we landed.



The Blue Lagoon is a great way to .... attempt at least.... to recover from jetlag. It worked decently well last year...well, that and a nap... but not quite as well this year. There was a strong enough northerly wind while we were soaking to create cold currents in the water. And maybe I'm just not as hardy as I was last year. Jet lag had me bouncing up and down all day long - lost appetite, grumpiness, chills.... it's no fun. Good thing a good night's sleep will do wonders.

We did manage to wander down to the shore in Reykjavik for another look at the sun sculpture, Solfar. I was disappointed with last year's pictures because the day was overcast. This year.... lovely bright sunlight really loves this sculpture!!



That is almost the classic postcard shot.

Another shot... more whimsically artistic...



And one from The Man of the intrepid photographer doing her thing.

Trillium War, making beads, garden

So... we're on the eve of taking off for two weeks in Iceland, and I'm trying not freak out about not being packed properly or leaving a clean enough house for the house/dog sitter. I've decided to blog about the past few weeks instead. Just to take my mind off of it for a bit.

By the by, I'll be blogging from Iceland whenever the spirit moves me, and we have internet access.

Back at the beginning of July, we went to an SCA event called the War of the Trilliums. As is becoming usual for this event, Neil made a bead furnace and invited anyone who wandered by to try their hand at making beads.

This is the furnace.....



And these are some of the beads that people made.....



We got 1/3rd breakage rate - 12.5 beads broke, and 25 survived. That's a definite improvement over the years, but it's still pretty high. And those that do survive are often pockmarked with ash in the process. I don't think we have the hang of Norse bead making yet, but it's fun trying. :)

Our friend Steve gave us this fellow to take to Iceland with us - Snorri is the suggested name. I've called him Snorri Steveson in the Icelandic fashion. At Trillium War, he was guarding our camp.



Coming home to the garden, we have some lovely astilbes in bloom - they are shade plants.



The cosmos and the clematis are still in full bloom.



We had so much fun with working beads at Trillium War and managed to take the furnace home intact that we decided to do it again a week later with a smaller crowd so that we could test a few things - reheating an already existing furnace, and videotaping the tesserae method.

This is a still from the tesserae method of making beads. Rob is just lifting one of the tesserae pieces from a piece of flat new charcoal and starting to wind it around the mandrel. There's more information on the bead making process on DARC's bead pages and on DARC's blog.



This is a delightfully composed and poorly shot (it's not in focus!) picture of the beads that I made. One survived whole and one didn't - it's in the background in two pieces.

In the garden and the living room

This is one of Neil's pictures. He says the birds act funny when they know their picture is being taken. :)



This is largely what I blame for the last month's worth of fatigue. Imagine if you will, because I don't have a 'before' picture, the trim is 50 odd years of layers of white paint, and the walls are a pale taupe.

We've been renovating. And please don't get me started on hiring a person who said he'd get it done in two days, and didn't, leaving us to spend weeks finishing it.



Of course, the garden has been a pretty busy place as well. Neil keeps bugging me to post larger garden pictures - this is the round garden, the triangle garden, and the tomato garden in the background. Three for the price of one picture! Remind me to take another one like it in the fall when all the annuals are at their peak.

The long promised tomato experiment

Before:



After:



The Problem: The already established 'veggie' garden is right out by the fenceline, to the right of the 100+ year old maple tree. Said maple tree is currently reduced to about 1/4 of it's root system (due to road and driveway work) and it's all in the yard. In the past few years, I've tried growing tomatoes out there, but they fight with the tree roots for nutritients and don't do as well.

Plus..... that garden space is increasingly being taken over by flowers and woad. I'm running out of room!

The Solution: A new garden space, in a raised bed, with fresh soil. Obsessive hobbies are fun. :)

Squirrels and Chipmunks and Birds, oh my!

Okay... I've had these pictures and the Garden Notes paragraphs at the bottom of the post ready for two weeks, but without any other content here. Then I got busy.

It happens. Apparently... somewhere between June of last year, and June of this year, I managed to forget to take my vacation time. The workplace gets a little annoyed with things like that.

Anyway, the bird feeder has delightfully increased the life in our yard!

We have squirrels....



.......chipmunks,



....cardinals,



and blue jays, oh my! And I am having a great deal of fun with the new lens for the camera.



Now, the flowers here have come and gone, but they were beautiful as usual.

This is Fritillaria Imperialis - it's an interesting flower. It hangs down, as if from a pedestal, and in it's early growth - it stinks. The banner for my blog is a snippet of the flower from two years ago. It seems to be a reliable perennial.



Tulips, of course, are the mainstay of many Canadian gardens. This yellow-red combination is fairly common.

I had some beautiful pink tulips along the fenceline at the sidewalk, and some inbred redneck teenagers appear to have alternated between snipping them or ripping them up and leaving them on the sidewalk. It certainly makes me understand the urge to violent revenge in the human race - if I could catch them, I'd be tempted to do some damage to their heads.



Last year, I dug up much of the grape muscari that had multiplied and spread it out in a different area - lots of colour! I think I'm going to find some more and continue this line down the garden.



Garden Notes:
Temperatures unusually high for this time of year, but we're still getting the occasional frost warning for evenings. This is Canada, after all. I haven't bought any annuals yet. That's next weekend's project, I hope.

Planning a raised bed for the tomato / green pepper crop. Haven't figured out where to put it yet. (Have done it - next post :) )

Last week and this week

Okay, I'm behind on last week's photos and getting ahead of this week's photos.

Chokecherry blooms and house - I really like the depth of field. I can't remember whether this is one of the wedding trees or not. I think so.



Okay....the weekend before last, we headed off on a new adventure in Peterborough. A friend arranged to have her teacher give a private class in wheel thrown pottery and a grand time was had by all!

This is the very first thing I've ever thrown on a wheel! It's not yet dry or even trimmed in this photo. It's a little lopsided.

But I love it. I loved throwing pottery! I came home from the weekend and started looking for classes/studio time here in town.



These are the hubby's hands doing his own thing.



We came home from the weekend to the neighbour, with a large branch of the maple that's just over the property line on her side down in her driveway. Close inspection proves it was a lightening strick! Neil volunteered to chain saw it and take it away. He's a sweetie sometimes. Or very politely deranged. Your choice.

And two fence sections torn out by the wind. Shame that isn't as easy to fix as a bit of chainsaw activity.

But on the bright side... two days away and I swear all the plants grew six inches!

First tulip of the season! (Don't worry, there will be many many more.)



Yellow Primrose....



Apricot blossoms with the church steeple in the background..... again, a beautiful depth of field.



And just for fun - my new view at work! After 18 years...... I finally have a window!

Before and After

Playing with Photoshop today....

Before:


After:


Any thoughts?

Karen

Spring birds and flowers

Playing around with the new telephoto lens again. I wonder if it will be enough to capture dolphins on our next trip to Iceland.

Both this photo and the next one are cropped from the original for a tighter frame.

Strangely enough, I found all the photos of the yellow finches on the feeders just slightly _over_ exposed. My usual problem with this camera is that it generally _under_ exposes pictures on automatic.

Perhaps it was the way the light glinted off the bird feeder? The sparrows (all hiding in the brush like this fellow) didn't have that problem.

Now, a slightly different problem with the sparrow picture is that it is just slightly out of focus. The brush is somewhat further away then the bird feeder, and this is an even tighter crop then the yellow finch picture. It's harder to tell just exactly what the camera is focussing on when one takes the photo.




Crocii, yellow. Second blooms of spring. :) The snow bells always come first. It is very very nice to see - it was a very long hard winter for some reason.

Canada Blooms

Last weekend, we made our annual pilgrimmage to Canada Blooms, Canada's largest garden show. It's draw is a strange thing to me.

Is it the new ideas in gardening? the forced blooms giving hope for spring? The chance to stay in our favourite hotel - the Cosmopolitian? To photograph the city?

Forced tulips....



Water feature.... I love 'em, but I don't have the energy to maintain them in our yard.



I love calla lillies, but this picture is actually about me discovering another feature of the camera - being able to change the ISO to accommodate the low lighting on the show floor. I hate using the flash. I think it's rude to the people around me and I never like the results anyway.



Photographing the city.... usually it's the CN tower for me - either up from the ground or down from it's observation platform. But this time, it was the Royal Bank Plaza. On bright sunny clear days, it really comes into it's own.



The Cosmopolitian - delightful as always, but the food in it's companion restaurant is becoming more.... normal. We have another unexpected opportunity to be in Toronto in mid-May - could anyone recommend some high-end eating? I'm interested in a quiet peaceful atmosphere, in which the food is utterly divine. The ethncity of the food is completely unimportant to me - I want to try new things!

Spring!

Spring is finally finally really.... almost here.

Forward Into the Past is almost upon us on April 4th. Go.... check out the website at http://www.treheima.ca/fitp
and if you're local enough, come on out and join us for the day.

We had a high of 12 degrees celsius here and I got some yard work done. I burned a bunch of wood. You have to see the yard to know why that made such a little dent but still made me feel good.

And there are buds on the cherry tree.

Birds and Spring

Neil and I are having a light debate about two photos - perhaps you can help us.

I like this one better - I've lightened the colour balance, although it does seem to flatten the depth in the picture a bit. I like the compositional balance - birds, clematis and fence all seem to be in good space to each other.



Neil likes this one the best - he likes the profile of the birds and feels that the clematis detracts from the simplicity of the birds. I tried lightening this one, but it seemed to make it too light in some spots. Although the depth of field is better in this one, I feel that the third bird being right on the edge of the photo ruins the compositional balance.



Which one do you like better?

--------------

We went to the Stratford Garden Festival on the weekend with my folks. I don't know what everyone else's reasons were - it was very crowded - but I desperately needed a hint of spring.

Usually I can manage to hold out til the Canada Blooms weekend (that's in two weeks) but this year, the yard is a horrible mess and winter seems to be just dragging on.

If we had geothermal energies all over the place like in Iceland, maybe we'd have more recreational greenhouses to get people through winter.

This wild exhuberance of blooms was almost enough.



But these darling little things in my own garden the next morning are tipping over my sense of hope. :)

Another week, another post

Just in case any of you are wondering why I'm posting more frequently, almost predictably, and the photos have been relatively inane of topic....

I'm trying a new thing, suggested by the hubby, to aim for taking and posting one new photo a week - just to work on my photography. Posting to the blog and increasing the readership is just gravy. I hope.

So....this week's topic is my workplace. I don't talk about it much. It seems somehow.... like a bad idea. But I've got a few pictures to show you. :)

We're planning on some renovations (mostly just moving people around into new space) and wonders of all wonders.... I'm told that I will finally get a window! I could have plants! This is the view a few days ago when there was still snow on the ground.



It's important to make sure that this fellow comes along for the ride. It's the gift of a former student - he's been on our whiteboard for 3 years. What's in the thought bubble keeps changing. "Goðin Dag" apparently means "Good day" in Icelandic. I'm a closet Icelandophile.



And should the view not pan out, and the turtle needs to go away.... as long as they don't change this nearby feature.... I'll be okay. His name is Porcellino.