“I’m a very early riser, and I don’t like to miss that beautiful early morning light”.
David Hockney
I was up early yesterday and this was the view from our windows. Just had to take a shot (or two)…
Not bad…
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Tags: Mount Baker, Photo, Vista
“The neighbors are drunk and lighting fireworks. It must be Victoria Day!”
Unattributed
This last weekend was a long weekend here in BC (think ‘bank holiday’ should you hail from the UK). This particular one commemorates the birthday of the monarch for whom this city was named – Queen Victoria.
Now – as I mentioned in previous recent posts – having already resigned ourselves to the reality that we would not be traveling anywhere very far in this second year of the COVID, we have also now also had to accept the idea that we won’t be doing major renovations to our home either – given the current outrageous cost of building materials.
This is – to put it mildly – a bit of a bummer and left us feeling somewhat out of sorts and directionless.
Just at the right time, however, we saw advertised at one of Victoria’s loveliest downtown boutique hotels an enticing ‘Spend-the-night – Dine-in-room’ deal. We have not stayed at The Magnolia before but we have treated ourselves to its excellent restaurant – The Courtney Room. The restaurant is – of course – currently closed, but the deal (which ran only until the end of May) enables one to indulge oneself in their culinary offerings at a window table in a splendid bedroom, to spend the ensuing night in comfort therein and to do all of this in complete COVID safety.
What is not to love about that?
We visited on the Friday evening and dined splendidly on in-house breads & crackers with roasted eggplant dip and smoked paprika oil – dry-aged Two Rivers burger with aged cheddar and a splendidly fresh salad (for The Girl) – local catch of the day Bouillabaisse (for me) – followed by a Blood Orange Tart (with pumpkin seed frangipane, blood orange marmalade and Wild Mountain honey) and a Meyer Lemon Mousse (with caramelized white chocolate crumb and toasted bourbon meringue). All of which was washed down with a very passable bottle of Savigny-les-Beunes.
We watched the sun go down over the inner harbour and for a brief period all seemed right with the world.
The following morning the sun was doing its very best early-summer impression and we got to wander around downtown and to lunch outside one of our favourite predominantly vegetarian restaurant and juice bars – Re.Bar.
Because it would clearly have been a great shame for our splendidly indulgent weekend to peter out on the Saturday we also treated ourselves to some pampering at the lovely Brentwood Bay Spa on the Monday; a relaxing massage for me and a reflexology treatment for The Girl’s most lovely and dainty feet.
All in all a wonderful long weekend, during which it was possible – perhaps for the first time – to imagine what it will be like to emerge on the other side of this grim era.
Time to dream a little…
Tags: Brentwood Bay, COVID-19, Dining, food and drink, Victoria
“Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful,’ and sitting in the shade.”
Rudyard Kipling
I make no apologies for posting more photos of the garden. This is – after all – its very best time of the year…
Tags: British Columbia, Gardens, Photo, Spring
Should you feel inclined to glance back over the archives to this blog, paying particular attention to the entries posted at the start of May each year, you will find a pattern; one post each year (at the very least) that looks remarkably similar to that posted the year before… and the year before that…
The reason for this somewhat repetitive annual ritual is simple: each year at around this time I venture forth into the garden and am brought up short by the beauties that nature has taken it upon herself to bestow upon us – quite regardless of the fact that – but a few weeks prior to the event – the whole thing looked a complete shambles.
All I can do each year is to exclaim – “Wow!” – and to scurry inside again to fetch a camera. I absolutely must take some photos – and absolutely must thereafter post them to this journal for the gentle readers’ delectation.
Enjoy!
Tags: British Columbia, Gardens, Photo, Spring
This time from the Guardian – who also seem to have a bit of a Canada theme going. Who can blame them?
Hummingbirds halt controversial pipeline
Gotta love those cute little hummers!
Tags: British Columbia, Canada, Hummingbirds, wildlife
Tags: Beaver, British Columbia, Canada, wildlife
We have been blessed of late – here at the southern end of Vancouver Island – with a spell of good weather. The sun has shone upon our gardens and the temperature during the afternoons has several times crept into the 20s C. This is not expected to continue of course – it is still only April after all – but we have been enjoying it all the same. Next week it will rain!
The Girl – having been suffering a little cabin fever – suggested last weekend that we should go out somewhere for a walk. We have done plenty of such exercise in the immediate vicinity of our home, but getting away to somewhere else completely seemed like a good idea – in the service of our mental well-being.
The Girl suggested Witty’s Lagoon – one of the many bits of Victoria that she knows of old but that I have not yet visited. We duly set out for the southern-most tip off the island on Saturday last – taking the Olympus OM-D with us so that I could share photos with you good folk.
A short walk from the main entrance to the park – as one begins one’s descent to the lagoon – one comes across an excellent waterfall – Sitting Lady Falls. I leave it to the gentle reader to muse upon how that name might have come about:
The extensive but shallow lagoon lies behind the beach and is the point at which fresh and salt water come together. The result is a wildlife paradise:
The beach itself is unusual for the southern end of the island in that it is sandy; many of them are pebble. As is the case with other similarly located beaches the vista is of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and beyond that the Olympic mountains in Washington State of the US:
Pretty (spectacular) – ain’t it?!
Tags: Photo, Victoria, Walk, Witty's Lagoon
Herewith the long awaited third part of my pair of posts introducing the gentle reader – particularly those out-with Canada – to some of our more – er… extrovert local fauna!
In the last post I introduced you to the bullet-headed Northern Flicker and noted its love of drilling holes in things other than the trees (of which we have an abundance). Just this year – presumably in search of food; or just because they can – the Flickers have taken to drilling large holes (nearly 2″ diameter) in the end wall of my garden shed. I almost wondered if they were indulging in some lumberjack style-competition, so eager were they to turn the shed wall into Swiss cheese.
When they have drilled the holes they seem to lose interest in them – and indeed in what happens to them… and that’s where this little chap comes in. This is a Nuthatch. Nuthatches are also known for drilling holes in things, but they are equally keen to take over a hole that a bigger bird has apparently finished with.
What a cute little bird – I hear you exclaim…
Well – no… he isn’t! He is – if you will pardon my use of the vernacular – a chippy little gobshite! If he played rugby he would undoubtedly be a scrum half – and most likely a Welsh one!
On the Nuthatch Wikipedia offers this:
“The nuthatches constitute a genus, Sitta, of small passerine birds belonging to the family Sittidae. Characterised by large heads, short tails, and powerful bills and feet, nuthatches advertise their territory using loud, simple songs”.
‘Loud’ is they key word here. Now – the Nuthatch may only be about two and a half inches long but he ain’t afraid of no-body… and certainly not of me. Seeing him pulling the insulation out of a hole in the shed wall I remonstrated with the diminutive avian, waving my arms about and inviting him to get out whilst the going was good. Instead he gave me a mouthful back. When I climbed a ladder to see if he was actually building a nest in the hole he simply buzzed around my head uttering a string of what I took to be expletives. When I plugged the hole with something he scarcely waited for my feet to touch the ground before he was tearing it out again.
I was clearly going to have to take some action if I wanted my shed to remain intact. We are hoping to paint it this year but at this rate there won’t be much left to paint. As is my wont I turned to the InterWebNet for helpful guidance. There are many sites offering much advice as to how to deter woodpeckers and other such birds, but the most important of these is the site that advises that none of these methods will actually work in practice – and that the only thing that can be done is to cover the affected areas with bird netting, the which must be strung some three inches away from the surface in question so that the birds cannot reach it.
This takes a bit of work to rig up but I duly did it – all the while the nuthatch sitting a few feet above my head squawking loudly. As soon as I had finished the bird landed on the netting and tried to tear it apart. On discovering that this was not going to be possible the little creature turned a murderous gaze upon me and uttered the birdy equivalent of “WTF!“…
I would have a lot more sympathy with our feathered friends were it not that – the previous owners of the house having clearly been bird lovers – our garden contains within its bounds at least a dozen bird-houses. One of these was about a foot away from the hole that the nuthatch had determined upon.
A pre-owned home is obviously not good enough for these stroppy little birds…
The extremely good news – from my point of view – is that I now have an appointment for my first COVID vaccination.
Hoorah!
It is not until near the end of April but I have no complaints about that. The mechanism set up in BC for booking said inoculation – on t’other hand – as the title of this post suggests, needs work!
It seems somewhat unfair to cavil at such things when the splendid efforts of all those concerned are focused on helping us normal folk to be able to get on with our lives. If I do so it is because I believe that anything that potentially puts people off getting vaccinated needs to be fixed.
Herewith my experience:
Having discerned that I could now register online for the jab I followed the instructions and rapidly did the deed. Easy as pie and no complaints from me. The next step was to await a message inviting me to book an appointment.
This message duly arrived a couple of days later – at about 1 o’clock in the morning. No reason why it should not do so – and because I was still up and about I decided to book right away.
I followed the link and connected to the online service – supplying the requested details at the appropriate points. I selected my preferred location for the appointment and the service offered me a calendar from which to choose an appointment date. I took a punt and took the first date offered. A message popped up informing me that there were no available appointments on that date. I tried another with the same result. It rapidly became apparent that the calendar had not been equipped with a way of showing which dates had availability and which did not. All I could do was to work my way through them until I found a date that could accommodate me. Eventually I found and chose such a date and selected one of the offered time slots. The site then asked me to re-enter my email address – though I had already done so and the service must have know it anyway to have sent me the invitation in the first place.
I typed in the address and was told that the time slot was no longer available. Presumably someone else had booked it whilst I was typing. Doh! I had to go round this annoying loop all over again… becoming even more frustrated because the site had forgotten the information that I had entered on the first go through.
Eventually a slot was booked and a page appeared containing a QR code and a message telling me to print this code and to take it with me to my appointment.
Now, as I suggested, I was doing this really quite late at night and I was so doing from my iPad – which does not have a printer attached or configured for it. A confirmatory email arrived but did not contain the vital QR code.
OK – now I am a big boy and – as regular readers will be aware – have a long professional history in IT. I can sort such things out, but I am a lot less confident that everybody trying to book a vaccination appointment in BC will have the same good fortune.
Chaps – you are doing a difficult and critical job tirelessly and brilliantly – but do sort out these glitches so that everyone can get the protection that they deserve.
Ithankyew!…
In the first of these two posts concerning the less than sociable habits of some of our local wildlife (“Wild? I was livid!“) I introduced you to that furry little critter – the racoon. I was delighted that my post struck a chord in at least some quarters…
For this second part we take to the air. This brute is a woodpecker – specifically a Northern Flicker (or just ‘Flicker’). Should your first thought be “That doesn’t look like any woodpecker I’ve ever seen” – you would find me sympathetic. Me neither! These brutes seem not to be native to Europe – sticking to the Americas… and they are big buggers!
The photo shows a flicker nesting in a hole that it has made in a tree. Canada is not short of a tree or two and I see no harm in some of its bird-life using those facilities to create homes. Flickers – however – are not much impressed with the idea of having to spend their days bashing their heads against a serious hunk of lumber.
One thing that they do love to drum on is the aluminium cowling that keeps the weather out of one’s chimneys.
What?!
Woodpeckers supposedly attack trees for one of two reasons – to make nests or to find food in the form of grubs and larvae buried in the wood. Neither of these applies in the case of the chimney cowl. No – in this instance the annoying avian is trying to attract a mate! Apparently the birdy belief is that the more noise the creature can make the more it gives the appearance of being a good catch. (We are – as you might expect – discussing the male of the species here)!
So – this spring we have been unwitting hosts to one of these bruisers. Apparently the best time of day to drum up some female interest is very first thing in the morning. Having one’s chimney cowls drummed upon by a flicker results in a racket that reverberates around the house – and continues in bursts until the bird either finds a mate or gets bored… or until one hurries outside and shouts abuse at it!
Wikipedia provides some comfort by informing us that – once the breeding season is done – these birds should lose interest in one’s rooftop furniture. Looking out of my window the other day I noticed our flicker atop our garden shed, in the company of another – presumably female – flicker. As I watched our flicker jumped on the back of the female, did the deed and hopped off. The entire act took about a second and a half. I could see the look on the female’s face. It was a look which said:
“You make all that racket but where it matters that is the best you can do? Not impressed, mate!”
Now – where have I seen that look before?
So – in what is clearly now going to become part three of this two part post I will introduce you to a final creature. Bet you can’t wait!
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