Accidental Photography Expedition

Putting on the collar. (I'm in love with that little flick of his tongue.)

When I signed up for the Providence Bay Writers' Camp, I learned that the gorgeous photos on Gail Anderson-Dargatz's website (go take a look; I'll still be here when you come back) were all taken by her husband Mitch Krupp, many of them taken on Manitoulin Island. So I knew I had to bring my camera with me.

Get dirty for Easter!

Every now and then, I actually create one of the zillions of things I've pinned on Pinterest. These pretty Easter eggs were one of them. After I posted a picture of them on Facebook the masses (two people) demanded that I show how they were done, especially after I explained that they were really easy.

In the Offing

This picture actually has nothing to do with this post, but it makes me happy.

Over the past several weeks, I've put the wheels in motion for a few things that I'm really excited about and happy to share with you.

That challenge is not going as I expected.

I'm digging this vintage 1970's cover.

When I started the 2015 Book Challenge, I was full of good intentions to read new books, ones I might never have discovered otherwise, and to share them with you. Well, things have not gone entirely as planned.

Book Challenge: Smilla's Sense of Snow

Title: Smilla's Sense of Snow
Author: Peter Hoeg
Pages: 457 (including endnotes)
My rating: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆
Category for the challenge: A book written in a language other than English. (Originally written in Danish, Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne)

Book Challenge: One Down

The first book I've completed for the 2015 Reading Challenge.

As others in our Facebook group have commented, the 2015 reading challenge is already giving us rewards. I, for one, have read a fantastic book that I certainly would not have read if it were not for this friendly bit of peer pressure/rivalry.

Count me in!

At my niece's invitation/inspiration, I've joined a reading challenge!

I've got a serious case of book-club envy. I belonged to one (even the word "belong" strikes envy into my lonely heart) for the final year that we lived in Colorado, so it's officially been four years that I've been a lonesome reader.

Liminal Spaces

Bridges in the forest at Frank Ryan Park

I recently learned a word that describes one of my continuing artistic obsessions: liminal.

liminal (adjective)
1. of or relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process.
2. occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.

Questioning Christmas Cards

Be Merry Banner Christmas Card

Visit Shutterfly.com for Christmas cards this holiday.

That preview shows the last Christmas card Steve and I have sent -- and that was two years ago now. Last year, I was exhausted enough that I had quit my job, and was doing my best to make as many of our gifts as possible. At one point, I had fantasized about creating individual watercolor cards for each person on our list.

Fresh out of the oven! -- UPDATED

UPDATE: now includes preview and link to order iTunes version!

DING! The Sibbald Family Famous Recipes Cookbook is DONE and we have ordered enough copies for our little family.

The book is available to you, now, in two formats: print or PDF. (I'm still waiting for the iTunes book to go live.) Here are the links.

This is why I hoard.

The other day, my computer informed me that the hard drive was at 90% capacity. It cautioned that its performance would begin to slow down.

Pea Soup

I will never be able to say "pea soup" without hearing the crickets (surely they aren't cockroaches!) from Rescuers Down Under. Despite that, it is one of our favourite recipes.

French-Canadian Classic: Tourtière du Lac-St-Jean

Tourtière du Lac-St-Jean

Most Canadians are familiar with tourtière* - a meat pie made with ground meat and spices. It's so popular that you can buy it ready-made in grocery stores. This is not that tourtière.

This one is a feast of game meat in big chunks, slow-roasted in a pie crust. It is a recipe big enough to feed a whole extended family, and it takes most of a weekend to prepare and cook.

Murphy's Law strikes again.

I'm still working on the cookbook project, and am making good headway. I've decided not to share every recipe here, especially if the recipe is fairly straightforward. But today's recipe warrants a blog post -- not so much because it's fancy (quite the opposite), but because a full-blown comedy of errors took place in our kitchen this afternoon.

Challenge Accepted

Front cover of the Sibbald Family Famous Recipes Cookbook

More than two years ago, I decided to turn our hand-written, heavily soiled family recipe book into a proper cookbook with photos and stories and personal notes. Since then, I've encountered corrupted files, obsessive perfectionism, and loss of enthusiasm.

Throwback: Reflections on my (failed) attempt at Xeriscape gardening

Our back yard in May 2014

This post is from May 2010 when I was very much looking forward to moving back to Ottawa from Colorado. 

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I discovered the joy of gardening in 1993. We had rented a house that had a rather large perennial garden, and I fell in love.

When baby #4 came along and we had to move, I set about creating a beautiful gardenscape at the new house. In the process, I turned a house with almost no curb appeal into one of the nicest front yards on the block (if I do say so myself). I turned a parched "dead zone" at the south side of the house into something out of an English garden. In the backyard, I grew (among other things) a purple smoke bush that threatened to swallow any of the smaller children wandering near it.

Then we moved to a bigger house, just because, and there, with the help of Steve's sister, we created a true backyard oasis: a pool and patio surrounded by trees and perennials that invited you to take off your shoes, grab a beer and bliss out. [Update: we once again have a pool and a backyard oasis.]

A shady corner in our 2005 Ottawa garden

Blue fescue in Ottawa, 2005

Then we came to Colorado Springs: high plains, semi-arid. Dry, dry, dry. Sun, sun, sun. And we were at the tail end of a 3-year drought.

Even before we moved to the Springs, I bought a book on local gardening, called "Xeriscape Colorado." Xeriscape gardening, (which many pooh-pooh as "zero-scape" gardening because it often uses large swaths of rocks and gravel as part of the landscape design - and some people have been known to take this to the extreme, razing their lawns and blanketing their yards with nothing but gravel) is actually a very responsible approach to landscaping. It espouses micro-climates and putting plants where they will naturally thrive with minimal additional water.

The book made it all sound so easy, and a visit to the local xeriscape demonstration garden made it look quite lush. Here's a picture of the xeriscape demonstration garden (in May 2005). Notice how green all the plants are? (That's Garden of the Gods and Pikes Peak in the background.)

Xeriscape Demonstration Garden with view of
Garden of the Gods, Colorado

So I dug in with zeal. I enriched the soil, I bought sun-loving perennials and hardy ornamental grasses. I planted them, I fertilized them, and I covered them generously with mulch. I even cheated by allowing the built-in irrigation system to nurture them along.

You see it coming, don't you? Fail.

First, the irrigation system failed - but only in the garden areas, not on the lawns, which put my xeriscape approach to the test. Did I mention we were at the tail end of a drought?

Then winter came. A winter where record-breaking blizzards caused chaos at the Colorado airports and alternated with prolonged dry spells. (Our neighbours would actually water their gardens throughout the winter dry spells. I derided them and decided that was coddling.)

All of my shrubs died. Including three purple smoke bushes - specifically described as "quite drought-tolerant, so useful in xeriscaping" - that I had sagely planted along the west side the patio to give us afternoon shade in the summer. I'd had visions of 8-foot-high bushes. Instead I had lots of low-growing (and slow-growing) plants.

Eventually, we got the irrigation system repaired, but I think we were too late. Or we were too stingy with the water. The lawn began to encroach on the gardens - but the supposedly hardy ornamental grasses I'd planted died! This is NOT the way the xeriscapists proclaimed it would be. Kentucky bluegrass, which most lawns are made of, is supposed to be among the thirstiest of the thirsty plants.

Blue fescue, Colorado

This picture shows a section of one of our gardens: an ornamental blue fescue ("drought tolerant" my patootie!) on the left and the blasted Kentucky bluegrass on the right. Xeriscape fail.

Today, I put my last token effort into these gardens in this hostile environment. If we owned this house and were staying here, I have to say I'd be inclined to go for a zeroscape garden! Bring on the river stone! (Though, honestly, the lawn even encroaches there!)

In the not-too-distant future, I will be back in the land where planted things actually grow. I'm looking forward to it.

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As you can tell from the photo at the top of this post, I am thoroughly enjoying the easier gardening conditions of Ottawa.

My 23 favourite pictures from 2013

Oh, my do I enjoy taking pictures! It's becoming a bit of an obsession, having outlasted several other hobbies and interests I've had over the years. So, here we go -- my favourite pix from 2013.

What makes them "favourites"? In each of these pictures there is something about it that makes me want to look at it again and again.

(P.S. In my first draft of this post, I used the word "love" about 23 times. Those of you interested in writing may be interested to see how I edited to say the same thing in different words without being awkward.)

Produce from the organic food basket we had delivered weekly.

I am drawn to the colours in the food basket.

Our beach, beautiful, even in winter.

I remember the serenity of the beach and the idea of visiting a "summer" place in winter, "away from the madding crowd."

My niece, Melissa, with her fiance, Elvis

I was so happy with how this picture turned out! They are so happy together and weren't planning to do an engagement shoot, so we spontaneously took a few pictures during a family gathering.

Giant's Causeway, in Northern Ireland

This picture is not a spectacular work of art, but does mark a memorable moment of 2013: visiting a landmark that I had always wanted to see.

Creamy cheese in an open market in Ireland

Oh, how the light makes the cheese look so edible. The market was a photographer's delight! Heck, Ireland itself was a photographer's delight!

Ring of Kerry shrine

Sometimes, the composition draws me. (I would like to edit the above picture so there's a little more light on her face, but I love it even as is.

I am captivated by clouds and storms. (Preferably when I have a warm, dry place to hide.) The light in this picture is mesmerizing.

Yellow!

 Sometimes the scenery is just so perfect . . .

Absolutely scrumptious fish & chips

 I do have a fondness for photographing food.

Trinity Library, home of the Book of Kells

Ah, those clouds!

I love the light and simplicity in this picture.

This one just made me laugh. The sheep were quite oblivious to our bus.

This picture almost lets you touch the texture of this headstone.

I didn't take this picture, but it's one of my favourites nevertheless.

You're probably sick of seeing this father-of-the-bride picture about now, but I think I never will be.

Aside from loving this little dog, I'm also happy that I captured the mood in this picture.

Again, the subject is dear to me, but I also like the warm tones and focus of this picture of Scooter.

My flower garden means I get to have fresh flowers in my house all spring and summer, and look at pictures of them through the cold months. Flowers also make delightfully stationary subjects for a photographer to practice with. (Maybe that's why I also like food photography.)

Old architecture is so beautiful, and I especially love the light streaming through these windows.

Over Christmas, I did a lot of food photography, and was very happy to see that I'm making progress. The challenge has always been to get enough light and to get just the right depth of field (i.e., what's in focus and what's blurry). I've also started paying more attention to "staging" -- all the background and surroundings in a food photograph.

I could look at this one every day just for the fact that it makes me laugh. I also like the focus and lighting.

My favourite kitty cat. It's hard to get a good picture of her when she's moving, so I was pleased with this result.

It was quite a year. And here we are, almost with January this year!

Do you take pictures? Do you have faves? What do you do with them? (I add mine to my desktop slideshow and screensaver, so I get to see them again and again.)

Are any of my pictures amongst your favourites?

Garden Variety Bouquet

I've been quietly enjoying freshly cut flowers from our garden this summer. In previous summers, I've hesitated to cut flowers for fear that there would be nothing beautiful left in the garden. But this summer I discovered that if I clipped off a stem or two, the plant would burst forth with renewed vigour in a couple of weeks.

For the first weekend of fall, we had this on our dining room table.

This was the third summer since we moved in. Not one of those plants was in the yard when we moved here. You can see:

• periwinkle (foliage draping down, it flowers in the spring)
• sage (the velvety, grey-green foliage)
• white roses
• miniature pink roses (mostly in bud in this view, but you'll see more in the other pictures)
• pink-cream hydrangea
• ferns
• euonymous (the variegated green-and-white foliage)

That pink-and-cream hydrangea is actually our second attempt to grow a hydrangea.

We've had a couple of challenges with our  gardens:

1. Most of the garden areas are full shade, though we do have a large section that gets full sun. That's where I've planted the herbs. It's such a hot spot that even the parsley survived last winter! I finally got wise and planted ferns in the deepest shade - they LOVE it!
2. The soil is exceedingly poor: sandy with hardly any organic material. We've been building it up with mulch and rich soil, but I think I'm going to layer on some serious sheep manure this fall.

I am sad to see summer go, I've so enjoyed our back yard. I think I will dry some of these hydrangeas to get me through the grey days of winter.

Technical Difficulties

We have five computers in this house of only four people. Two of those are my laptops. Neither of the laptops currently functions. This is what my current laptop looks looked like:

Before I performed surgery.

The screen flickers unless the lid is opened to juuuuuust the right angle. That angle keeps increasing, to the point that it had to be opened to its maximum angle. Otherwise, it performs beautifully and has everything I need in terms of performance.

On my previous laptop, the screen is just white. At that time, two years ago, I was told it would cost $300 to repair. I opted for a new laptop.

Earlier in that same laptop's life, the monitor had flickered quite a bit, so I sent it for repairs. It came back with the hard drive wiped. Why????

This time, I figure I have nothing to lose. Rather than risking an overzealous repair or buying a new laptop, I decided to take a stab at resurrecting the machine. What could possibly go wrong?

So I watched the videos about how to replace a screen.

Looks pretty straightforward, though somewhat fiddly. But, heck, I can do stained glass! I can do cross-stitch on fine linen! I can do delicate beading! This should be a cinch!

I ordered a screen for about $70 from laptopscreen.com. It arrived quickly, looking like this.

Before I started, I backed up all my files.

I encountered my first difficulty almost as soon as I removed the battery.

The critical screw is positioned conveniently behind the base.

I called in the expert: my son, Peter.

He's even more dexterous than I.

He even comes with a fancy tool kit.

From when he helped out on tech support at high school.
The tech staff gave him this kit as his graduation present.

But it was to no avail. In the end, we found more elaborate instructions that involved taking the entire base apart. Whereupon, we found this.

A bundle of wires that twists and wraps through each of the two hinges.
(Doesn't the motherboard look pretty?)

At this point, we continued with replacing the screen as we were already so close. But when we did, the display was exactly as it had previously been.

Evidently, and as I'd kind of suspected all along, the wires are frayed. What I didn't realize earlier is that you can actually order a "cable bundle." I had assumed that if the wires were gone, I'd have to find someone with a soldering iron and magnifying glass. Wrong.

So the laptop is currently in several pieces in the bubble-wrap bag, waiting for me to order the cable bundle.

All of this explains why I haven't blogged in a whole week. I don't like blogging via my iPad. Tonight, I've borrowed a work laptop so I can edit the photos and write an actual post.

I do hope to get the danged cables and put the whole thing back together again, at which time I'll finish this story and (I hope) get back to blogging more regularly.