Moi, the Chatterbox

I was pleasantly surprised the other day when ChrisB at Ms Cellania passed this award on to me. I hadn't particularly thought of myself as being a sociable chatterbox, but I am pleased to think that some folk might find Anvilcloud's Raindrops a comfy place to visit.

Over time, I seem to have become a more surfacey blogger than I once was. I post more general stuff about my days and doings and fewer perceptive thoughts. When you've written about a thousand posts, here and elsewhere, I think it gets like that — more chatty and less perspicacious. That's okay. And it is also more than okay to receive a Good Chat Blog Award. Thanks Chris.

Where are the Worms?

Cuppa noticed this robin sitting in our tree yesterday morning. We were downstairs and our cameras were upstairs, but the bird continued to sit patiently while I took the time to change to my telephoto lens. I took pictures from both upstairs and downstairs, and still she remained. She was probably too stunned to move and consumed with wondering where the heck the worms and and berries could possibly be.

The top version is with normal, minimal post processing. In the bottom version, I really boosted the contrast and saturation.



A Little Something for Janet

I know it's not much good int his size, but here it is anyway.

On the March ... in April

It was a glorious weekend. For quite a while on Sunday afternoon, we sat out on Thesha's porch. It was sheltered and it direct sunlight, and I actually got hot, just in my shirt and no jacket. But I refused to move and soaked it up as much as possible. Days such as this occur early in every spring, often earlier than this, and it can hurt when the weather reverts, but I still enjoy it whilst I can.

I removed some snow cover from Thesha's little garden and found crocus plants sticking out. I love crocuses. They're tiny but incredibly beautiful and so full of promise.


When I checked back with them a little later, the snow had completely melted back from around the plants. Spring is on the march.

Sunday Samplings

I had to call it something, and although it's a long time until Foto Friday, it's that kind of post, so Sunday Samplings it is.

Odds and Ends

I've just uploaded the first two photos on Saturday to publish on Sunday. In itself, that's not new because I do often get a post ready before I publish it. Today, however, there's a new wrinkle. I'm doing it in Draft Blogger, which supposedly will let you pick a future time to publish an article. In other words, in theory, if I set the publish date at 9:00 AM on April 05 for April 6 at 6:00 AM, it will post itself at that time. This is one feature that I appreciated on Wordpress when I published my travel blog on that host last summer. With Blogger this feature is still in the draft or experimental stage, but it's good to know that they're working on this and other new features. Let's see if it works.



Above: a few weeks after Thesha bought a set of blocks for Nikki Dee, she realized that she had two M's and no W. Rather than return the used blocks, she contacted the company, which was quite willing to ship the missing block. Apparently, they don't often make shipments of such small size.

Below: The Bonnie Wee One does her best to assist me to improve my brain age. It did not work! Actually, I was trying to play Sudoku, and I soon gave up.



Talented Women in My Family



Above: Cuppa started painting watercolor pictures about a decade ago but had to give it up after she injured her back. She could no longer manage to bend over the paper for long periods of time. Recently, she has put her talented hands to working with colored pencils. This medium allows her to assume a more back-friendly position and also to start and stop more easily without worrying about her paints drying out. I am so impressed with the tulip as it is supposedly just one of her early practice pieces. Aside from just beginning to learn the medium, she was also beginning to learn how to color on a background other than the traditional white.

Below: Thesha has been learning how to go about making a scrapbook using Photoshop. She's created about a dozen pages, and I have no idea why I chose this one for my blog. Would you believe that this choice is simply random? No, I didn't think so.



Around and About



Above: you'd be forgiven for wondering about the relevance of this photo and the dubious sanity of someone who would post it, but it's very significant because the window is open! You see, because the window tends to accumulate a lot of condensation in the cold months, we sealed it up last December. But I opened it on this fine spring morning.

Below: on Friday, I cleared a path to the BBQ. Yes, I plan to grill a steak pretty soon. I may have done it by the time you read this. Even a week ago, I wouldn't have bothered, but we've had so much melting in the past week that it was no problem.



Four Breakfasts

I know I should hang my head in shame, but I must confess to eating four breakfasts on Saturday. I did tell you that I couldn't sleep past three o'clock, right? Sometimes food helps to change the equation, so I ate some cereal around five o'clock = breakfast one. Then I had some toast with Cuppa around 7:30 = breakfast two. It was past 10:30 when I began to hanker for a breakfast sandwich at Tim's, but I had to get there soon because they stop serving breakfast at eleven o'clock. So I did. Hurry, I mean = breakfast three. I took the sandwich and my extra large coffee to the riverside where I took the following photo. There were lot's of geese hovering around, but they were all out of camera range, so I settled on this one. I think that distant but focal-point building is town hall.



But wait, there are more ... breakfasts. After munching and sipping by the water's edge, I dropped by to see the kids and NikkiDee, who, unfortunately, was asleep after also having a very bad night (we should have gotten together). Theboy had just cooked a wonderful omelet, so I had myself a piece = breakfast four. In my defense (and I certainly require one), I hasten to add that it was a very small piece, and both it and the sandwich were really lunch. Really.

Crazy Canadians

Cuppa and I are always somewhat amused by the site in this next and last photo. We see it all summer: people sitting outside at a local restaurant at the town's busiest corners. There's no view and lots of fumes, but they're always there in good weather. However, I was shocked to see people sitting there Saturday — in their jackets — because it was only 50°F/10°C outside. By some miracle, I had my camera and snapped the picture from the car while sitting at the stoplight.


Now, let's see if this publishes itself at six o'clock on Sunday morning.

The Name Game

After several weeks of decent sleep, something has gone awry again. On Thursday night I couldn't settle until three o'clock, and tonight (Friday) I woke up at three o'clock. Sigh. So here's a very easy and light post for your weekend amusement. I picked it up from one of my blog reads although I forget whose and I'm too weary to search.

1. Your rock star name (first pet, current car): Skippy Honda

2. Your gangsta name (fave ice cream flavour, favourite type of shoe): Skor Sneaker

3. Your Native American name (favourite colour, favourite animal): Red Eagle (I may have cheated just a little bit with the eagle, but it works better than cat, and I do like birds)

4. Your soap opera name (middle name, city where you were born): Stanley Kingston (Great moniker, eh?)

5. Your Star Wars name (the first 3 letters of your last name, first 2 of your first name): Rayjo

6. Superhero name (2nd favourite colour, favourite drink): Coca Blue (I used part of Coca Cola and reversed the order because I liked it better than Blue Coke)

7. NASCAR name (the first names of your grandfathers): George Arthur

8. Stripper name (the name of your favourite perfume/cologne/scent, favourite candy): Jade East (I don't wear after shave or cologne, but a long time ago I did wear a scent called Jade East a little bit. I left out the candy because Jade East seems to work on it's own)

9. TV weather anchor name (your 5th grade teacher’s last name, a major city that starts with the same letter): MacDonald Memphis (but I think I prefer Lafon London, Lafon being another favourite teacher)

10. Spy name (your favourite season/holiday, flower): Christmas Crocus

11. Cartoon name: (favourite fruit, article of clothing you’re wearing right now): Apple Turtleneck

13. Hippie name (what you ate for breakfast, your favourite tree): Muffin Maple or Banana Jack (can't decide which I prefer — I had both muffins and a banana for breakfast, and I like both trees — maple and jack pines)

14. Porn star name (first pet, first street where you lived): Pretty Boy Connaught (I have used two different first pet names, Skippy in #1 and Pretty Boy here. They both qualify. Skippy was a first pet, but he was really my grampa's. Pretty Boy was my Budgie.)

Foto Friday

If I were just posting the first photo, below, I'd be tempted to subtitle this post as Signs of Spring. To which you might be forgiven for wondering if I had, indeed, lost my precious few remaining marbles seeing that I'm shovelling snow.

To be fair, however, you will note that I'm working outside sans overcoat, and that's one sign of spring. You see, it almost went up to 10°C/50°F yesterday. Another is that I am shovelling snow onto the driveway not off the driveway. It's almost like rewinding a tape: first you throw the snow up there, and next you take it back down. I have never done this before in my life, but I decided to give Mama Natura a little help in reducing the pile. I figure that it will melt faster if I spread some of it back on the driveway. And I do want it to melt down somewhat more quickly than it has been. I know that it seems and looks odd, but it's been an odd winter ... and I'm an odd sort of bloke anyway.

I'm not the only one to do this, however. Nice Neighbour (across the street in the photo — the very same one who helped build that pile with her snowblower) has done much the same thing: much more of the same thing in point of fact. She has uncovered some of her garden down to bare ground, and guess what? She has tulips sprouting up. Can you imagine that they were sprouting beneath all of that snow? Amazing.

There have been other signs, of course. I saw my first robin on Wednesday, and as I continued along that same street I spied Canada Geese frolicking in and over the water. The other day Cuppa and I even saw goslings swimming in the river. The banks of the river are still icebound as are some of the slower river sections, but spring babies have been born nevertheless.

Well, that's a lot of prose for Foto Friday, so here are two photos. Nikki Dee is such an active tyke that when I tried to read to her I expected about a nanosecond attention span, but she actually maintained interest for quite a while, in baby terms anyway. She quite enjoyed turning the pages and pointing to Humpty Dumpty after I had done so a number of times. Maybe, we do have a reader on our hands!




Have a good weekend.

An Ending

Last summer Cuppa and I made our first trip out to BC and blogged a lot about it. Fear not: I am not about to reprise the trip, but I would like to make mention of a certain wonderful tree in wonderful Stanley Park. This hollow tree has been a great attraction in a great park for many decades, and this is Cuppa inside it.



It is 700 years old, but, as the next photo shows, it has been hollowed out for quite some time now and has been visited and photographed by locals and tourists for decades.



Sadly though, last night Vancouver City Council voted to have it cut down because it had become a danger, or so they believed. It had been supported by cables, but they still deemed the danger too great.

Although its remains will continue to be displayed as an attraction, I'm rather glad that we got to visit the old thing while it remained standing.



Great wasn't it?