Skywaatch Friday

An Archival Summer in the Similkameen














Look at all the lovely skies from around the world by clicking here.

ABC Wednesday

D is for Drumheller and Dinosaurs

Drumheller and Dinosaurs go together like bees and honey. The town is located in the Canadian Badlands of southern Alberta, and the bones of the dinosaurs that once roamed here dream on in shallow graves, a hip bone sticking out here, a long bony toe searching its way out of the ground and massive footprints preserved for thousands of years.

Drumheller is named for Colonel Samuel Drumheller. The Colonel bought land a hundred years ago, in 1910, and started mining operations in 1911. Here he is in his Cadillac.



During the time when Coal was King Drumheller's population was more than 30,000 and it became a city in 1930. Now it contributes to a vibrant energy sector and has Alberta's second largest natural gas deposit, the West Drumheller Field.

In 1997 Drumheller dropped its City Charter and once again became a town, amalgamating at the same time with fourteen old adjoining residential mining communities.

The great deposits of coal in the vicinity led to the establishment of The Royal Tyrell Museum in Drumheller. While surveying for coal deposits Joseph Burr Tyrrell found the first dinosaur - a 70 million year old Albertosaurus. In 1985 the Museum was opened and is the only museum in Canada devoted to 4.5 billion years of the Earth's history. In the Dinosaur Hall a T-rex towers over a display of some thirty-five complete dinosaur skeletons.



You can go here, and here to learn more about this wonderful Museum, and about taking part in a dinosaur dig in the badlands surrounding Drumheller.





Within these Badlands is a wonderful natural amphitheater and each year for six days in July a dramatic portrayal of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is presented in the form of a Passion Play. In 2009 over 12,000 people attended this event.



When we visited Drumheller ten years ago we were impressed with the Royal Tyrrell Museum, but moved to tears by this presentation. The acoustics are beyond splendid; the music and sets and costumes and the performance of the hundreds of local volunteers is remarkable and one can feel the spirit and heart and passion that is put into it. It is a three hour performance, with a twenty-minute intermission, but to the audience sitting on bleachers (take a cushion) it was absorbing and time passed almost too quickly.



Learn more about this marvelous Canadian Passion Play here.



For more information and entertaining D's visit ABC Wednesday here.

Signs of Spring

Caspar and I went out for a short walk this morning, just before we left for church.

Half way down the lane was a robin, - yes, truly. A Robin! A quiet friendly robin, - it didn't go flying away in a panic at our approach but loitered along the lane, looking a little askance at us, but quite content to stay put.

Of course I didn't have the camera with me, and we turned and came back before the little fellow became alarmed. I have to say it made my heart leap a little to see him, so early in February.



This is a picture of a robin, courtesy of the Internet. Probably a cousin of our solitary visitor.

We had a little nap after lunch and then took the camera and went off in the car to visit with a friend. What a lovely mild day it was, and although we didn't see any more robins we did enjoy some veiled sunshine.



As we turned into the driveway on our way home I was surprised to see that the pussy willow tree at the big house was clad in small, furry, silvery buds.

Stop, stop, I said to that intrepid driver, and he did, and I got out with the camera and took a picture or two, feeling more than elated.



The picture is dark, and the buds don't show well on it, but the blue of the sky makes a beautiful background for the dark branches.

I cherish a child of this tree, planted out in the meadow, and when we reached home I quickly went to investigate. Sure enough - here were more pussy willow branches....



As we came up the driveway the sun was just slipping behind the mountains in the south-west and there was a lovely splash of pink across the blue sky.



Heavenly day.....

Skywatch Friday

For the last two weeks, with little exception, the Similkameen skies have been despondent, despairing, dismal and gloomy. Just occasionally delightful.















Here is a photo from the archives to add a little colour to this dreary posting.



For many more and varied skies from around the world visit Skywatch Friday here, with many thanks to the Skywatch crew.

ABC Wednesday

C is for Calliope

First of all Calliope was one of the lively daughters of Zeus.

She was the eldest of the Muses, the goddesses of music, song and dance. Calliope was the goddess of eloquence, who bestowed her gift on kings and princes, and the mother of Orpheus. In the picture below look for the Muse playing the Lyre, or carrying a scroll. - that would be Calliope



As we approach modern times (relatively speaking) the calliope has a nice ring to it and speaks to us of fun and fairs and riverboats. Nowadays a calliope is a mechanical musical instrument that produces a sound by sending gas, or steam or compressed air through large whistles. In the age of steam a calliope was a most convenient instrument in any place where a steam supply was available for other reasons, - it does not make gentle music and neither is it capable of nuances of emotion, but its merry, rather raucous music, is perfect for steamboats and carousels out in the open air where it can be heard for miles. On a steamboat the excess steam is used for pumps and various anciliary apparatus. "When a steam plant is slowed to a stop steam pressure demand is reduced and the excess must be relieved somehow. They can either open a valve and release it in a loud roar, or they can pipe it to make music." (riverexplorer)

I had so much fun researching the whistles and keyboards that are all part of the calliope, - it seemed to me to be a part of America that interpreted so well her spirit in those years from the 1850's to the 1950's.

Joshua Stoddard of Massachusetts, patented the calliope in 1855, originally intending it to replace bells at churches, - if you want to learn more about their construction
Wikipedia has a wealth of information.

Unfortunately there are few steamboats left on the big rivers of America, but enjoy this sample of a Calliope, gaily decorated and blowing off steam in a musical fashion



Is there a carousel in your memories? One that housed a calliope and could be heard above all the noises of the fairground and will be forever associated with pink cotton candy and hot dogs, and when you were very small was a great and exciting adventure?



We have a calliope of sorts in our memories. Shortly after we were married we bought a 1933 yellow two seater with a rumble seat and wire wheels, - the perfect car with which to start a marriage, romantic and lighthearted and the prettiest yellow (and don't forget, with wire wheels!). On VJ day Charles attached an old four note whistle from a 1920's Essex car to the exhaust and created our own small calliope which we took to town and joined in the celebration.



There are more interpretations of C here, at ABC Wednesday, thanks to the generosity and hard work of the ABC crew and Mrs. Nesbitt.

"White rabbits, white rabbits" I said to Caspar early this morning, as he was the only one awake besides Miss Callie, and she doesn't believe in such nonsense.

And Welcome to February!

We are having mild, damp weather. The clouds hang low in gloomy despondency, but in the garden things are happening!



A week ago I looked speculatively at the forsythia in the garden, and decided to break off a small bit. Popped it into a narrow container and put it on the kitchen windowsill, along with the gourds and a bit of dried flax from last summer, (which has lost almost all its heavenly blue bits).



And in the big bathroom a pot of pink tulips are promising a treat in a couple of weeks, along with the red geraniums which are just coming back into bloom





Weird old Christmas cactus bloomed in November, and now is doing an encore, but only a half-hearted effort.



Charles did a tour of the garden this morning, and the rising sap awakened in him his Master Pruner spirit! After sixty-five years and the deep down knowledge that he knows exactly what he's doing, it still makes me nervous when he gets the pruning shears in his hands and that enthusiastic gleam in his eye.

However, he is welcome to prune the forsythia sometime very soon, and I will fill the big bathtub with its branches and we will have a glorious golden froth to complement the red geraniums.

I poke and peer along the pathway, but all I have found so far are a few daffodil bulbs poking through the ground, and the Lenten Roses pushing their vibrant scarlet stubs into the balmy air.




The quail and a sharp shinned hawk take turns patrolling the garden.





What will tomorrow bring when the groundhog wakens momentarily to sniff the air for spring?????

Skywatch Friday

Two mid-summer sunrise photos from 2007.

To brighten up the despondent skies of January.






Here be more pictures of the skies of the world to bring you awe and pleasure.

Home Alone

On Wednesday Charles goes singing, and I am 'home-alone' for maybe three hours. I think about that little space of time quite earnestly, and wonder how I will spend it.

Do some cleaning? / Play some music? / Read a book? / Bake something yummy?

Last night our oldest son, (the one who plays the piano in a way I wish I could), sent me a link to a wonderful Horowitz YouTube performance of the first movement of Mozart's Sonata in C Major K330. The original performance was in Moscow in 1986 when he was 83 years old. It was so profoundly beautiful, and I went on to listen to the 2nd movement, during which the audience was shown to be as quietly enthralled as I was.

I decided I would spend my time alone with Charles' magical machine that he uses to transfer old tapes of interviews with pioneers and peers to spanking new CD's. And so I did, - the task took me along into the afternoon and I ended by ripping Horowitz's Last Recording on to my own computer, rescuing it from a shady spot on the bottom shelf that holds CD's. some of which get quite forgotten.

I had never seen Horowitz play and was impressed with his technique, - the restraint and control which yet produced emotion and drama and a 'speaking quality', as if his music was a mirror of the way he lived his life. (I read that somewhere)



It is said that "Horowitz's hand position was unusual in that the palm was often below the level of the key surface. He frequently played chords with straight fingers, and the little finger of his right hand was often curled up until it needed to play a note; to Harold C. Schonberg, “it was like a strike of a cobra.” For all the aural excitement of his playing, Horowitz rarely raised his hands higher than the piano's fallboard. His body was immobile, and his face seldom reflected anything other than intense concentration. Horowitz preferred performing on Sunday afternoons, as he felt the audience would be more well rested and attentive than during a weekday evening".

Have a listen, - I think the music is truly beautiful and captures one completely!



There, wasn't that splendid!

ABC Wednesday

B is for Blue Skies



This is quite a Beautiful rendition of Irving Berlin's Blue skies, - well worth listening to, I Believe.



And B is for Bluebirds, sitting on your shoulder, on the wing, or out by a little puddle.....



Both symbols of Bright cheer - marvelous antidotes for the January BLAHS

An Update on the Sock Project



Just starting the second sock of the second pair - establishing the habit.

I'm going to be one of those people who say, virtuously, "I just can't sit without doing something with my hands!"

Not only that, I plan to be a paragon of multi-tasking...

Have been listening to e-books while I knit in the evenings. I just finished C.S. Lewis's allegorical tale of the "Great Divorce" which he wrote in response to Blake's "Marriage between Heaven and Hell". Philosophically Lewis was trying to diffuse Blake's theory that all roads lead in the end to the same place, and that there was no advantage to choosing the high road over the low road. Interesting, but I'm not sure that Lewis is a shining light to today's society.

Now I am just beginning Wallace Stegner's "Angle of Repose". Both this book and "Wolf Willow" sat on our shelves for many years, but were victims of the Great Downsizing when we moved from the house we rattled around in and filled with the Great Accumulation that resulted from six children and sixty years of marriage.



I read both books a number of times, as well as Stegner's "Collected Stories", and look forward to knitting two, purling two while enjoying them both again.

When I scribbled down my own childhood memories I was mindful of the words Stegner used in the foreword to his Collected Stories concerning autobiography...

"I am not to be trusted with it. I hate the restrictiveness of facts. I can't control my impulse to rearrange, suppress, add, heighten, invent, and improve. Accuracy means less to me than suggestiveness; my memory is as much an inventer as a recorder."

Is this the mark of a great story-teller, and if so, what of truth????

Skywatch Friday

 

This year - a rare cloudless winter sky in the Similkameen.

January slipped in a preview of spring this past week, - I could have drowned myself with pleasure in the deepness of the blue, blue sky.

Most days this month have presented clouds and mist and drizzly rain - beautiful in their own way, but oh, how one eventually begins to yearn for sunshine!



For fascinating sky views world-wide visit Skywatch here.

ABC Wednesday

A is for Absent Minded!

The days slipped by and I got distracted, and now it is bedtime Wednesday evening, and I have just remembered about ABC Wednesday.

Oh dear.....

here to ABC Wednesday as they start a new round of the Alphabet.

And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

My dears,

I cannot let this gloomy day pass without telling you about yesterday.

It all started the night before, - towards midnight, when the little dog and I went out to attend to his business, we stepped outside into a nippy evening. The clouds had lifted, - only a few wisps clung to the mountaintops, and in the dark bowl above the stars were cold and brilliant.

I lingered a few moments, looking for the winter constellations, and dared to dream 'sunshine in the morning!'

Yes, yes, yes!!! The morning dawned with nary a cloud in the sky.

Slowly the blue of the sky deepened, - the snow along the ridges glistened, and the faintest hint of spring came tickling Old Man Winter's fancy, just for a few golden hours. The branches of the neighbour's peach trees took on an orangey glow as the sap responded to the sunshine.



The morning grass was frosted and white, but as the day wore on there were bright green patches, speaking of earthworms stirring underneath.





All day the blue sky continued to delight the winter-weary.



And there were SHADOWS - imagine, shadows....... Here is the red rose climber that was so badly injured last winter, reflecting itself against the wall.



I poked around in the Hellebores and found lovely crimson stubs, pushing their way through the rain soaked ground.

Towards sunset a few clouds began to gather, and when we woke this morning the mist was back and it was raining.



But yesterday lives on in my Journal of Gratitude.

I hope that where you are a little peek at spring comes to lift your spirits.

Hildred