plonq: (Meow)
Today's picture is shrooms. [personal profile] 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.

20200926

Yawn

Apr. 28th, 2014 07:39 am
plonq: (Evil mood)
I don't mind doing the early shift at work, but I still haven't mastered the art of going to bed correspondingly early. If I was a betting man, I would put my money on a short nap happening later this morning. One of the benefits of working from home is that I can do that, and tack the time onto the end of my day to make up for it. For as late as I went to bed, I woke before my alarm this morning to the sound of rain pounding against the window. It has been a while since we heard that sound in these parts.

Now that they have added the features that were missing in the preview, and I have learned my way around it, I am starting to like the new Flickr. I admit that I hated it when they first pushed out the preview of the changes, but the tweaks and fixes they have made to it since then make it seem like they have been listening to their users.

We drove up to Oak Hammock again this weekend, and while it had thawed out considerably since last weekend, it was still largely dominated by red-winged blackbirds and geese. We dressed a little more appropriately than we did last week, and it was a few degrees warmer, which made for a very pleasant walk in spite of the brisk wind.
Birds

While the geese and blackbirds dominated the denizens at the marsh, there were a few gulls and purple martins as well.
Birds

We don't do half-measures when we get potholes in our neighbourhood. It is hard to gauge the size of this one from this picture, but it is about 30cm deep at the lowest point, and still sinking. Fortunately the city came by yesterday and put up barricades around it to discourage people from trying to drive their cars through it. While it is arguably hard to miss at this point, with the rain this morning this would have become a deathtrap in the making. We have another one just outside of our alley that is doing its best to reach the same proportions of this one.

These are bigger than the normal potholes we see this time of year because they left our street in pretty sorry shape after the sewer work they did last fall. They wrapped up quickly and slapped half-assed asphalt patches on the road just ahead of the first snows last year.
We grow them big
plonq: (Omgwtf)
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 [livejournal.com profile] 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.
The view from the bridge

1I almost said "make a killing", but I restrained myself at the last moment.
plonq: (More Better Truth)
I've lost about 15 pounds in the past three weeks. I don't expect to keep up that kind of torrid pace, but I am on the right track. [livejournal.com profile] atara and I went through this a couple of years ago and were doing well until we fell off the bandwagon. This time there is a larger group taking part, so we can challenge and support each other through the long journey and many pounds.

There is no thematic link for these pictures, it's just a dump of shots that I processed recently.













plonq: (Pinkie Pie wtf)
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:
File Server Pictures

These are just my pictures - [livejournal.com profile] 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.

Crocuses

Apr. 28th, 2007 09:38 pm
plonq: (Burning Fur Mood)
The first real sign of spring for me is when the first crocuses bloom. It was a beautiful afternoon when I got home from work today, so I decided to grab the camera and snap a couple of shots to document the occasion. It turns out that the first bees of the season have also made their appearance, and one of them was kind enough to pose for me.
Behind a cut )

Gronk

Mar. 30th, 2006 11:17 am
plonq: (Huggy Mood)
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.

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