and things went downhill from there

Today's picture is shrooms. atara pointed them out to me growing in St John's Cemetery (the one attached to the Anglican cathedral south of our abode).

I don't know if the picture fully credits the size of these fungi, but they sood about 30cm from base to crown.

I do not think that anyone in our town would argue otherwise if I said that this has been the worst winter in living memory. I know that this is a subjective assessment, but the statistics would back me up. This has been a long, cold, snowy, miserable and - dare I say - shitty winter all around. We welcomed the first day of spring yesterday with weather that was just mild enough to make a long walk bearable. We are back into the deep freeze again today with temperatures in the negative double-digits, and wind chills in the -30 range. Environment Canada is suggesting that we might get as warm as freezing by this time next week, but as inaccurate as weather forecasting is that far in advance, I tend to think they are bullshitting us to prevent mass suicides.

On another note, I could make a fortune¹ if I opened up a suicide clinic in the city this year.

I have been covering a support role at work the past week, which has meant that my hours start at 05:00 daily. This has put me out of sync with atara's schedule, so rather than commuting in with her and putting in a 12-hour day, I have been working from home and seeing her off every morning.

The weather was comparatively pleasant on Wednesday, so rather than waiting for her to get home, I wrapped up work, put on my hoodie and walked into town to meet her by the car. The route takes me through an interesting part of north Main where the local fauna had also noticed that the weather has turned nice, and I found myself running a gauntlet of persistent, drunken pan handlers. Still, the walk was refreshing after a long winter cooped up in the house, and I decided to do it again yesterday, but down the other side of the river to change things up.

I walked south along Main, then cut east on Redwood so that I could take Henderson in the rest of the way. I don't even want to talk about the state of the side walk on Redwood/Hespeler. I will say that I have come to appreciate how conscientious the people along my own street are about clearing the snow from in front of their houses and leave it at that.

The route had a few curious dead ends where the side walk simply stopped, but eventually I managed to navigate my way into town. My shins are killing me today from all of the climbing and slogging as I detoured and scrambled to avoid deep slush and snow, but it was a pleasant stroll overall. I will have to do it again when the weather is warmer.

I took this shot from the top of one of the two new spans linking Elmwood to the city core. I did not have my real camera with me, but I am pleased with the quality of the pictures my phone takes. Snow on the ground adds a wonderful element of grittiness and old-school industrial feel to a photograph. The fact that I applied three different filters to this photo on my phone before I posted it also adds to the gritty look. I am pleased with the results.


¹I almost said "make a killing", but I restrained myself at the last moment.

Well, perhaps the words of Luscious Jackson don't quite fit here, but I definitely had a nervous tic if nothing else.

I did some maintenance today, backing up some music, videos and photographs to the file server down in the basement. I was a little nervous because a lot of my more recent libraries resided only on my desktop - the one on which the redundant raid broke a few years ago, so it has been functioning as a couple of 500GB drives. On the one hand, the additional storage of having two drives was nice, but on the other hand, the lack of redundancy has made me, well, nervous.

After I was done pushing more files down to the server today, I had a quick look at the file statistics for my photo directories:


These are just my pictures - atara has her own library of photographs as well.

Now I'm suddenly nervous about our lack of off-site backup. We have talked about loading up an external HD and stashing it in a safe deposit box, or maybe buying up some cloud space. Given how cloud storage seems to have become a target of certain governments of late, the safe deposit box sounds like the more enticing option to me.

Wow, five years tomorrow!  Time really flies.  O_o

( Here is why it takes a little longer to get ready in the morning. )

Hoo boy, it's going to take some adjustment for running Scholo/Strat with parties of 5.  I set a personal wipe record last night.  You know it's a bad run when your armour repair bills exceed your take from a dungeon run.