I just spent three days in Co. Dublin and very much enjoyed my time there indeed. Here’s a few photos from the trip.

Bottles at the Guinness Brewery

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    2008-03-06 10:34   ...0 comments

I have long said that I have done all the winter camping that I ever want to do. I am willing to make one amendment to that. Anyone wanting to send me for a few nights at ICEHOTEL is more than welcome to do so. This would be an awesome place to stay for a night or two. In a thermal sleeping bag on a bed of ice.

ICEHOTEL

    2008-02-19 15:14   ...4 comments

The City of Ottawa has created Design Lansdowne. This is an online community (run by a pollster) for debate and discussion on the Lansdowne project.

Anyone can comment, and if you register you will get to vote on surveys they will be sending out that will help to shape the design competition.

    2008-01-24 11:44   ...0 comments

I just clued into the fact that Keltie is posting her 365 masks on a different blog than her regular one. It’s at 365 Masks.

    2008-01-24 11:42   ...0 comments

On our recent trip to Europe we drove north from Barcelona (which is in Catalonia, Northern Spain) to Perpignan (which is in Catalonia, Southern France).

We had a nightmare of a time finding our way out of Barcelona.

Now, a designer has created 25 ceramic tiles based on satellite images of highway interchange areas. The one for Barcelona should give you an idea of why we had so much difficulty.

    2007-02-25 14:37   ...0 comments

New Zealand is a beautiful place, and well worth taking the trouble to visit. This is a random highway shot taken on the north island on the east side.

One of the most striking features of that part of New Zealand is Waipoua Forest, the forest of giant Kauri trees. These trees are of unbelievable size. Here’s a snapshot of the base of one.

That photo gets much more impressive when you know that the red stick things that look like they’re coming from between the trees are Jen’s arms sticking up over her head. (You can see the boardwalk at the left and right edges of the image.) You can see Jen with another one on wikipedia, that one is Te Matua Ngahere (the Father of the Forest)… 5-6 m in diameter.

The Kauris are just one of the things about New Zealand that make people look small. here’s a funny pair of hobbit shots.

    2006-11-19 14:26   ...1 comment

I don’t usually post photos of people without asking, unless it’s like cottage pictures or some type of reportage. However, I came across this funny shot that I like very much… so I’m posting it anyway.

    2006-11-17 12:11   ...2 comments

One of the most exciting things about our trip to Europe was the driving.

Upon arriving in Barcelona we rented a car to drive to Perpignan in France (where the actual conference was). It was a nightmare. We were told to follow the signs to Girona, but the problem was that we didn’t know what to expect from European road signs. Turns out they expect you to follow the directions and not get upset/worried if there isn’t another sign for 20 km or more. So after following the first sign towards Girona, we began to get worried as we passed exit after exit (including bifurcating highways) for other places with no further mention of Girona.

We then began randomly searching for Girona by coming up with more and more crazy ideas about where to go to find it. We discovered, exhaustively, that the city of Girona is not located in downtown Barcelona… a location for which we had no maps.

Eventually we figured things out. We then got to Perpignan, a small town for which we had 3 sets of (different) directions to our hotel. At 1 am there is no one around and no stores open to help us (a) get a map or (b) give us directions or (c) sell us a phone card for the public phones that do not take cash.

As we drove aimlessly around Perpignan, we discovered that not only do the streets have names, but the intersections (and roundabouts) do too. So businesses have addresses like 105 rond-point de la mongolfière. The side effect of this is that — when it tells you to take a particular street that comes off a roundabout — you have to actually drive down ALL the streets from the intersection you’re at; this is in order to get far enough from the intersection that you can find a real street sign.

We did eventually find our hotel without killing each other, but we did badly want to kill Google, Mapquest and the hotel management. None of them actually gave us usable directions. We later found out that we basically drove in and out of town several times. The one easy route to the hotel, which we discovered eventually, had this sign on it. What does it mean? You decide.

    2006-11-15 23:00   ...2 comments

I was recently in Catalonia (the south of France and the north of Spain) for a conference. I spent three days touring and photographing Barcelona. As many have before me, I arrived not exactly sure what I’d be focusing on, and left having discovered Antonio Gaudi.

I have been planning an extended entry on the topic, but that hasn’t occurred yet. Instead, here are two pictures of the awesome Casa Batlló. This residence was converted from an existing structure by Gaudi for his patron Josep Batlló Casanovas. The work was done between 1904 and 1906.

Nothing in this house is square. Most (traditionally) flat survaces like doors are curved. The idea was to use the organic shapes of nature — and in this house waves — to create a more pleasing interior feel. It’s Seuss-like qualities really work.

The upstairs of this house has baffles to allow natural breezes to pass through and dry clothes. Some of the common rooms on the top floor are straight out of Star Trek… even though they were designed in the early 1900s.

    2006-11-14 11:56   ...1 comment

Last year or so, Jen bought me a lovely evening trip on the Wakefield steam train for my birthday. The waitress took a photo of us that I really liked, but it’s far too dark to really see anything. I was planning to lighten it a bit in PhotoShop, but I found I liked the effect of it a bit overboosted.

And as a bonus shot, here’s Jen’s meal… not too shabby!

    2006-11-13 11:24   ...1 comment

The lovely and talented eala_dubh (waves) posted a link to an OC Transpo driver’s comments on how to efficiently travel by bus in Ottawa.

    2006-10-30 14:47   ...0 comments

Here are three photos I like. The 3rd is a photo of some tasty Filo bundles Jen made for dinner a little while back. The 2nd is of the ruins at the experimental mill built by Thomas “Carbide” Willson (wherein he condensed phosphates to make fertilizer) in Gatineau Park. The 1st is of emerging leaves on the lilac by our front door. It is a backwards day.

    2006-04-23 17:20   ...2 comments

Jen and I were eating supper tonight when we heard quite a loud noise, almost like 10-12 snowplows all scraping the road at once. At first I thought it was a problem with our heating system, but it was soon apparent that it wasn’t.

We went to the Natural Resources Canada earthquake site and looked at some data. That graph makes it obvious that there was a disturbance at exactly the right time: 8:40 pm EST (1:40 am UTC).

An hour later, their friendly geographical maps have still not been updated, nor has their text listing been. Despite this, the US Geological Survey has accurate information on their site, along with a map, and historical and geographical information about the event and region.

I think it’s pretty pathetic that the US government has better and faster information on our tectonic activity than we do.

Ottawa is in a seismic zone, and there is a 10% chance that in the next 50 years we will feel an earthquake that causes mild to moderate damage to buildings (according to government information on earthquakes here). On average every three years we have an earthquake that is felt indoors by many people.

The event was interesting to me because of a manifestation of some of my anxiety and panic attacks in the last year. I woke up a few times thinking that there had been an earthquake, but there wasn’t. Shortly after moving into the new place I had weird sensations lying down where I felt like I was being gently pushed back and forth (head to toe). This type of hallucination of movement is sometimes called linear vertigo. I didn’t feel that panicky during most of these strange episodes, more excited than panicky I guess. I guess I kind of like earthquakes.

The sites I linked to, above, helped me to understand that there really was no earthquake going on during these hallucinations, but it’s interesting to compare my experiences then with the earthquake tonight. Tonight there was a lot of noise. The house itself was rattling. Despite this there was very little sense of actual motion. Based on the experience of tonight, there is no way that I could possibly have been experiencing a real earthquake because the motion was much much more, but with no noise whatsoever. Mental note: in future if experiencing motion with no noise, it is not motion.

    2006-02-24 22:39   ...2 comments

Well, Jen and I visited her grandparents in Fort Erie last weekend, and I got a few photos of our time there. Fort Erie, for those who don’t know, is right near Niagara Falls in Ontario’s wine country. Although we didn’t visit any wineries (unlike my previous trip to Mondavi’s in California) we did hit a few interesting touristy areas.

On the saturday we were driven to Niagara on the Lake. Site of Andrew’s family and the Shaw Festival. We wandered around and saw the kitschy little shops that always seem to be in these cute towns.

The next day we took some time for ourselves and went back to some of the places we’d driven by with the grandfolks. I took some photos of this really cool abandoned stone building covered with ivy.

More photos of the building and other places under the cut

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    2005-10-06 23:27   ...0 comments

Had a very nice and relaxing weekend in Halifax. We were down for Jay and Aimée’s wedding. That went super-well and we had a very nice evening. The next day was a special treat: sailing in the harbour on the Mar.

Halifax harbour is the second largest harbour in the world (behind Sydney) and a highly attractive one it’s true. As such, there are quite a few harbour cruises one can take, and on a variety of vessels too. As far as I’m concerned, though, sail’s the thing and we couldn’t have had a finer ship for a cruise.

I was particularly impressed by the captain’s manner with the children on board. They all got to steer the ship, but it was the crew’s warm and friendly manner that really made the day for them.

Here’s some photos from the trip. It’s hard to take pictures of a boat from on the boat, so I opted for vertical shots instead.

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 › NovaScotia     2005-09-07 00:10   ...2 comments

Well, it has been a fantabulous weekend here in Ottawa. The temperatures have been mild (15 °C) with brilliant cloudless blue skies. The snows have mostly receded to those shady areas where the days just aren’t hot enough to penetrate.

We decided to drive up to the cottage, to see how things had come through the winter, to see how far the snow had melted (45 minutes North of town) and just generally to get out into the country a bit to enjoy the weather.

Of course, I had to bring along my camera (recently described as my third arm — except it disables an arm instead of adding one). The light was excellent and I got a few good shots.

Side of the boathouse

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    2005-04-10 17:49   ...2 comments

Last week I witnessed an accident. Luckily there were no injuries, but it was a very strange experience I have to say.

It was lunch hour, and Chris and I were on our way to lunch at a local Lebanese place. For those familiar with Ottawa roads, we were stopped, facing North on Merivale waiting in the queue to turn left (west) onto Hunt Club.

When the traffic going the opposite way (Southbound on Merivale) began to move, an old man let his car drift across all 3 lanes of traffic. He bounced up onto the median, narrowly missing a light pole, and drove along the median for while. He then seemed to get a grip and steered off the median and pulled a U-turn.

I decided that this wasn’t right and the guy was obviously having some sort of difficulty. We made various turns and manoeuvres and got behind him as he brought his car to a stop. I got out and knocked on his window. He seemed to be in his late 70s or early 80s. I asked him if he was OK. He said yes. I said I noticed he had been having some trouble. He said no. I didn’t really know what to do at this point. So I returned to my car, and called 911 on my cell phone.

The operator was familiar with the car (someone else must have phoned earlier) and we followed the car north. It continued its strange behaviour. I began to wish I had not got back into my car. Anyway, we went through a freshly red light together, gathered some speed as we went downhill (under the railroad tracks) and went through a medium-sized intersection whose light was green.

Going at a fair clip we approached a queue of cars which was stopped at a red light (at Viewmount). As the distance between his car and the queue closed I decided that he wasn’t seeing the other cars. Sure enough, he plowed right into the back of one of the cars — travelling at speed. He never touched his brakes. The rear car slid forward into the back of a van, which slid forward into another vehicle, and so on. There were four or five vehicles affected by the accident.

Now I was really wishing that I’d taken the guy’s keys away a few intersections back. Anyway, I went over to the guy’s car and told him that he had had an accident. He was in the process of trying to get his car into reverse to back away. In the end I had to pry open his door and turn off his car myself.

He was very confused and kept repeating something like ‘I never touch’ or ‘I touch?’. To make a long story short, he basically appeared to have no memory of the incident, or even of recent events. He had to be prompted about his name. He didn’t remember what he’d eaten for breakfast that morning. He didn’t know where he was coming from or driving to. In short, he was in rough shape. Eventually an ambulance showed up (with the world’s snottiest crew who dispensed inaccurate information) and they eventually decided he needed to go to the hospital. A good idea in my view, as I think he may well have been having a stroke (‘Sir, there’s no way he’s having a stroke, he wouldn’t be walking around.’ — Geez, how do these paramedics pass their tests anyway?).

So, I had to write a two page report. The guy will most likely lose his license. If he didn’t have a stroke then it could have been that he is a diabetic or simply over/underdosed on his drugs or something. Poor guy, this one event could well change his life.

Anyway, as many have pointed out, he could have easily rammed a pedestrian rather than a line of cars; I feel OK about having done my best in this situation, but if someone had been badly hurt I would feel terrible for not having had the wits to take his keys away at the start.

In other news, I know the driver of the car that was plowed into. Small world.

    2005-03-19 09:30   ...2 comments

Spurred on by the unprecedented interest in La Cave in recent comments I will reveal what we discovered during our recent trip. First, let me simply lay out the facts as we discovered them:

1. There now a restaurant called La Cave located on Spring Garden Rd. down near the public gardens. Jen informs me that it is in one of those ‘deadly’ locations that seem to have as much turnover as an apple fritter factory. The sign outside says ‘La Cave: Fine cheesecake blah blah blah since 19-eighty somethingororother’
2. When we walked up the half-flight of stairs from street level to look in we discovered that La Cave is now apparently a large room with tables and chairs in it and a cheesecake fridge at the back. No winecellars here.
3. We decide to look elsewhere for food, and walk down Spring Garden. We walk by the old Blowers St location. It is padlocked.
4. Outside the old location there is a sign reading at the top Re-Opening Soon… The Cavern Wine Bar and Bistro. And at the bottom All the great cheesecake and ambience you loved or some such.
5. In the middle of this sign there is a clipping posted from the Coast. (The text of the clipping is online — scroll down about 2/3 of the page to ‘Best Place for a First Date’ or search for ‘cave’). The clipping, physically located between the raves for the resurrection of the old location, advertises the move to the new location.

So those are all the facts. La Cave has moved to a soulless graveyard for restaurants. The old location says ‘re-opening soon’ with a new name, but a posted review for the moved old place. Very confusing.

My hypotheses:

• The owner of the restaurant wanted a second location. He ‘moves’ the restaurant to a location on Spring Garden in the main restaurant district. He ‘closes’ the old place for renovations, then ‘re-opens’ the old place under a new name but with all the same feel. Presto. Two locations.
• The owner stupidly slew the golden goose by moving his restaurant. A new entrepreneur realizing that La Cave was the location is trying to grab the market by re-opening an indistinguishable inheritor to La Cave on the orignal premise.

In any case, Jen now believes something is fishy and is refusing to consider going to either location until things are made clear.

 › NovaScotia     2005-01-23 13:03   ...0 comments

create your own visited country map

hmm… a lot of blank space there…

    2004-11-12 11:43   ...1 comment

I’m sitting on my balcony enjoying a lovely August day.

Yesterday at 9 am or so we got the call we’d been expecting for some time now. It was from Gav and Emily, with the happy news that they were about to become parents all over again.

I headed over there with Jen close behind to find Emily in Gav’s kneepads (she was finding the early contractions easier while kneeling). While Gav made us all tasty omelettes, the midwife came and told Emily that the contractions could stop and the whole deal might be off for today. This was a bit frustrating to Emily (not to mention the rest of us) but Emily persevered and the contractions got more and more serious.

It was at this point that we decided to take their daughter Aladara out of the picture a bit and entertain her. The plan had been to see if she wanted to be involved in the process, but I think she didn’t exactly know what to do, especially once things started to get more intense for Emily.

So, Jen and I went upstairs with her and made paintings, then we read books together. I had forgotten how exciting The Cat In The Hat Comes Back really is as a children’s book. Seuss was the master of rhyme, metre and fun. I think it’s just as fun to be the reader as the listener in terms of enjoying it. I had forgotten the pink snow too.

Aladara’s masterpiece. She likes to work with paint and white glue

Anyway, we tried to have a picnic outside, but the wasps came, so we had an inside picnic in Aladara’s room.

We decided to head out to the park, to totally vacate the premises as Emily moved into the final stages of labour. So we packed Aladara up in her stroller. She’s old enough now for us to be able to ask her what we need to bring to the park (Water and Juice!) and how to get there (Go that way!) and being at the park was fun. There was much running around and sliding, and meeting of friends, and sharing of buckets of sand. It was a good place to get some photos too, so here’s some of Jen and Aladara at the park.

Having enjoyed the park we walked up the street to the drug store (Aladara enjoyed pressing the door-opener button) to pick up some extra strength Tylenol for Emily, then came back to our house for bread and cheese, and to watch Monsters, Inc. together. No sooner had we started, however, did we get a call from Gav with good news and a request to bring the big sister home.

We arrived back at their house to find the happy but tired parents in the basement with the new baby! Aladara was a sweetie, declaring that she liked the baby, which while endearing as a new human was still getting adjusted to the realities of life outside a warm damp cosy bag inside Emily.

As always I am stunned by how much less placid life is with a new baby. I mean, just a few hours before we’d been chatting with Emily, and the baby was presumably entertaining itself as it released its “I’m ready to come out now” hormones, and now it’s out and ready to be taken care of!

There really is nothing like a newborn baby for enjoyment though… Gav and Emily wisely decided to nap the afternoon away, and I held my new friend for a few hours in the living room. (Newborn babies are known for napping deeply right after birth, so it’s a good opportunity for parents to rest.) She snuggled into my arms as I closed my eyes myself and later read some short stories from an anthology within reach. So small and light, you kind of feel like you’ve just picked up the clothes and left the baby behind, but there she is, all 6 lbs. 10 oz. of her.

At the end of the day we went out to pick up a So Good feast. Mmmm… a tasty end to a very good day.

Edit: Just found this picture of Jen holding the new baby. Thought it deserved a home here too:

    2004-08-22 15:14   ...7 comments