Around Town

I have a few 'just moseying around town' photos to share today.

When I drove to the arena to access the trail, the parking lot was closed for some paving. So I continued over to the old railway bridge.

Looking upriver toward townhall in the distance. That's the former Boulton Brown Mill on the left.

Farther along the same bridge and looking to the other side is the McArthur Mill.

On another day, we went for a stroll in the park. A father and son were fishing. I converted the photo to black and white and then applied some tones. Sort of sepia but not really.

That's all. Just a quick post today. Have a good day.

Coins, Skateboard, Dragons and Hockey

Two weeks ago, Danica had a sleepover, so it was JJ's turn on Saturday. I don't know if the kids do this to humour the old folk or because they actually like spending time with us. Whatever the reason, I'll accept it.

He recently got interested in sorting pennies, and then Sue remembered that we had some old coins from my mother, so she had them ready for him as his first activity on this sleepover.

The oldest coin that he found was a half penny from Hibernia, 1822. I found out that Hibernia was an old name for Ireland, and I had thought it would be Scotland. A little bit of Googling indicated that this coin might change hands for $20 - $50 today, depending on its condition. Not that one would want to sell it, but it was interesting to discover this information.

There is some Irish ancestry on both sides of my maternal line although it seems to go back a few generations, so I guess that's how the coin got into the family.

Sidetracking: My maternal grandmother was born in Canada, but she came at least partly from Irish immigrants. I am not sure if her parents were first or second generation Canadians though as I haven't traced that far back. My maternal grandfather came to Canada from England, but his family had moved from Ireland to England at some point. If I recall, without looking it up again now, he had been born in England but his father emigrated from Ireland.

Although it had rained earlier it cleared sufficiently to take the boy out to try out his new skateboard.

Then we walked the adjacent tail for a while. JJ wanted to find a tree to climb, but low branches seemed to be unavailable. There were stones to skip, however.

His sleepover present was a book, Dragonology, that he had seen when his cousin visited, and he fell in love with it. It was hard to get, but it arrived from the UK just before his sleepover after I had given up hope, thinking it had been lost in transit after more than a month of waiting.

We read the first few pages at bedtime.

Sunday morning and his first hockey game of the year. As so many things in Canada wind down after Thanksgiving, there is always hockey. 😄

He's the one with the puck in this photo, and he got off a good shot. What shocked me was seeing this relatively tall kid out there; I barely recognized him at first. It took me awhile to get used to his new size, for last year as a first year player in Novice, it just didn't look like this. Now, in his second year, he is one of the bigger boys.

That afternoon, Sunday, we had our Thanksgiving feast although officially, TG is always on a Monday. As I write this on Monday, I'm not sure what we are going to do today, if anything. The leaves are finally showing some colour and we would like to take them in, and there is a studio tour nearby which would be nice to visit, but it's gray now and there is rain in the forecast, so we may be housebound.

Gone or Maybe Not

Scuppered ... sort of.

My plan was to write a post about the fading of the double-edged razor into the mists of time.

Even though I a long ago switched to a modern razor (like this over here →) for main shaving, I have mostly used an old-fashioned razor to get the edges. I just find that it works better for the contours around my beard.

For those not born fifty years ago, these are the kinds of razors that we used to us. We had no choice. It was all there was. Somewhere along the line, someone invented the modern type (as above) and everybody switched. Including me, but I still kept using the old type for the edges as shown over there ←.


The last package that I tracked down, quite awhile ago now,  was at a dollar store, but being in great need for new blades after using them beyond hope, I went back. And found nothing nada zilch zippo.


So, I thought the old times were all gone and that I could write a nostalgic blog. But then, in searching for images to cleverly insert into this post, it appeared that there were still viable products out there to the extent that it even seems possible to purchase new handles and not just blades.

But lo and behold, blades are indeed available or so Google says. Apparently, you can get them at WM among other places (proof over there →). I'm not sure whether our store would carry them, but I might be able to get them online at least.

Not how many should I order in case
we are truly nearing the end of their life span?

Hmm ... how long will I live and show much do I want to stock up? Because I don't suppose my descendants will have any use for them. Will you, Jonathan?

My Mind Needs Reminding

A mind is a terrible thing to lose, and it appears that I am well on my way to losing mine.

On Flickr, where I post a photo almost every day (although I don't know why, which also confirms a diminishing of my mental faculties), I lost my way twice this week.

There is a Happy Truck Thursday group to which I posted this photo ↓ (which you have seen here before) on Wednesday. I had no clue that I was a day ahead until Thursday.

There is also an HFF day, Happy Fence Friday. I had this photo on Flickr ready to post but just not activated yet. What with the colour in addition to the fence, it seemed seasonally appropriate.

But this morning, this Saturday morning, I realized that I hadn't activated it on Fence Friday, so nobody saw it.

So, I lost my way twice; once I was a day early, and the other time I was a day late. In one week!

In other news, since I am already here and could possibly forget to ever come back the way things are going, this is Thanksgiving Weekend here in the Great White North, which is anything but white right now as we enjoy very mild autumn temperatures.

We (as in Sue with a little help from John) cooked the turkey yesterday. Here are 2 pictures of it coming out of the oven. Looks good, eh?

Note the bacon. We (as in Sue, once again) discovered, a few years ago, that putting bacon over the cooking turkey helped to prevent that drying out thing that tends to occur. I know that this isn't exactly slimming, but since Thanksgiving comes but once a year ...

And the bacon is salvageable for later use too.

Now, getting back to my diminishing mental faculties, when I took the turkey photos off the card, I saw photos from Danica's sleepover 2 weeks ago. Totally forgot. In my defense, and  I certainly need one, they were on Sue's camera, so it's easy for them to slip my mind or so I tell myself. (Oh sure, AC, the commentariat said with winks and nudges.)

Craft Time

Computer Time

Learning Time

Snuggling Time

Story Time

Treat Time

Who knows when I will think to download and upload the pictures that will be taken this weekend with JJ?

Doing the Moon Walk

No, there were no fancy steps, but with apologies to MJ, members of the community did the moon walk last night.

That;s right. It was the full moon close to [Canadian] Thanksgiving, and the labyrinth people organized a walk to celebrate the occasion. Unlike the recent Light up the Labyrinth evening, there were no candles and no special music.

Just a walk. Under the full moon.

Except that that rascally moon decided to play peekaboo and pretty much stayed hidden. Nasty old moon. So, it was pretty much a walk in the dark.

Naturally, I took some photos, but I found it difficult. I knew from the Light up the Labyrinth evening that too long of an exposure just made the walkers a faint blur and for the most part wasn't very effective in a photo. I had thought back then that would be a nice effect, but the people pretty well got lost.

So, I wanted to give the people more substance, but the results were so-so. I think that I would need more practice to do it properly, especially since it's really hard to see and adjust the camera in the dark.

For what it's worth, here are a few.

The folks clustered at the starting spot and lingered for awhile in hopes that the moon would appear.

However, the reluctant moon chose not to appear, so after a short introduction and reading, the walk commenced.

When it was all over, or just about, and as we making ready to depart, that capricious, rascally moon did make an appearance, so I switched to my longer lens and squeezed off a few shots. Of course, I couldn't get both the walkers and the moon in the same frame, and the walkers were all but done anyway, so I composited (pasted) the moon into a few photos, just for fun. It's the authentic moon of the evening but enlarged and superimposed on the original photo and in a different spot too.

Call it artistic licence if you will,. Or call it John-Being-Silly if you prefer.

Go Figure

My goodness! It seems to always be something these days. Something that wakes me up long before the sun gets up. With one exception in the past 5 days or so, 5:30 is my latest rising. Today it was closer to 4AM.

It's always something. Almost always anyway, except for the one morning that I slept in until 6:30. (I can remember when 6:30 was early and not exactly considered to be sleeping in. Buy hey! It's good that I can remember that at this ripe old age. Eh?)

In passing, I recently mentioned a stomach ache. as the cause for waking early one unfortunate morning There have been other little things since then that have caused what I consider to be premature risings: always something different or so it seems and not necessarily always something that I feel compelled to share. And sometimes, I just wake up for no apparent reason. I mean, why wouldn't someone suddenly awake  after a lengthy 5 or 6 hours of sleep?

This morning, however, the cause was quite perplexing — pulsing pains in my ankle. I don't really mean pulsing but rather rhythmic or recurring maybe every 5 seconds or whatever the exact interval. (Hooray for spellcheck: rhythm and its variations being one of those words that I can never seem to be able to spell.)

So, I would get this ankle pain briefly. Was it 1 second at a time? Five seconds? I was trying to sleep, trying in vain to ignore it, so I can't really say. It would soon stop, but then it would soon also return.

The odd thing (and I do confess to being an odd thing), is that the pains were occurring in my good foot. My left foot, not my pathetic bad foot. Not the foot missing cartilage. Not the foot with bone chips. Not the foot that limps. No! The good foot.

Go figure.

And the very instant that I got up, the pains stopped. Why would that be, I wonder?

Go figure.

Not that I am not grateful that they ceased, because I am quite chuffed about that. But one wishes that perhaps they could have stopped sooner. Or not started at all. Yeah, that would have been good.

Autumns Past

Unlike this site where I may post many photos at once, I usually post only 1 photo per day on Flickr. With autumn approaching or even here in theory but with no colour to speak of yet, I have been posting some photos on autumns past there.

So why not do it here too?

They have likely all been posted on this blog in the past, but why not show them again in a current post. The fact that I still had them in my Flickr queue, sometimes for years, likely means that I never counted them in my best photos, but I still like them, so ...

The first 2 were taken at Larry's in 2013. He is my since deceased brother-in-law. He lived in a beautiful house in a woodsy rural property.

A nook in the kitchen had a skylight with some fallen leaves resting on top.

Outside at Larry's, the trees were still in colour. I added motion blur to this image for a fun effect.

A panorama stitch from Algonquin Park, 2 years ago. We were about a week away from peak colour, but it was still a nice view. I have lost track of how many individual shots went into the stitch.

This was taken near the same spot as above but emphasizing the foreground. I actually haven't posted this to Flickr yet, but I think I will.

From 2 years ago, two red maple leaves on the boardwalk on the trail near us.

The rest of the photos were from last year, 2016. The first 2 of Sue walking in the woods were from our stay at the cottage. They are the same photo, but I added some arty touches to the top version.

Also from the cottage, we see autumn colour on the other side of the old planer mill which was converted into a gazebo or summer room if you will.

The next one was taken on our trip home. At this time of year, we like to take the backroads and stop for photo ops.

On the same trip in a more open area by the Madawaska River.

And a few from our local area just last fall, the first from the Mill of Kintail Conservation area.

From Riverside Park in our town.

Wheelers Maple Sugar Camp.

Finally, of our river from our nearby trail. The water is higher this year, so we wouldn't be able to see most of the rocks in the foreground.

I wonder how autumn will progress this year. So far, there isn't much colour.