It was the morning before I had to leave for Kelowna to pick up Erin. Noah, Fiona and Sophie had to be got up, the lunches had to be made, everyone had to be fed, coffee had to be made
Fall bits
Where has October gone? Where has my blogging mojo gone? My additional teaching load, and all the juggling of travel and activities by Noah and Sophie, is taking a toll. Fall was amazing until the rain finally caught up with
We Live Here 3D
Recently Fiona has been fascinated by Vi Hart’s quirky art-in-math videos. She’s made Fibonacci spirals, binary trees, trihexaflexagons and various other doodly-mathy things. Recently she noticed how a particular style of spiral doodle looked a bit like topographic lines on
Mountain bike camp
Finally the cold rainy spell broke. We had rainfall totals for June that were almost twice the previous record. There were two weeks of mountain bike camp and luckily we chose the second one: the first week of July was
Physics
What we do at the rocky beach on a warm spring day when no one has much energy due to colds but we have to get out of the house. The left-hand cairn has more stones, but I think the
Hello, trees
Fiona and I have been visiting the trees in the forest that surrounds our home recently, appreciating them anew as they emerge from the snow and prepare for a new season of growth. Yesterday we checked out the red cedar
Check your boots
When you hike a couple of hundred metres through the nasty snow and frozen slush of your laneway to reach the road for a barefoot run, it’s sometimes nice to wear your boots, especially if you know you’ll be doing
Ice
The lake at the summit north of us has frozen clear, without snow. It’s not quite glassy, but quite skate-able. We’ve opted not to flood our backyard rink this year, so there’s even more reason for the trip to the
Cessna over the Slocan
Chuck and Noah were invited by a friend to take a trip in his Cessna. Can you imagine a more amazing place to tour the local scenery? They’ve both decided we need a plane of our own. That would certainly
Up Idaho
The dog seems better from her bear injuries. The house is a mess but who cares. We’re working on winterizing the little cabin. Last week I spent a couple of days permachinking the interior. Chuck is hard at work adding
Beware of small bears
We had these two in our yard at least once today. Probably twice. A mama and a cub. A tiny, cute little cub. Standing up and peering around, curious about everything. We think our dog tangled with them this morning,
Nestlings
Ever kid should have a nest of baby birds to watch every year.
Long run
Two years ago I discovered that the distance between my driveway and the next village to the east was a few hundred metres over official marathon distance. This weekend it finally worked out for me to run it: I had
Bear stories
Last week it was beautiful and sunny and I decided to sneak in a quick afternoon run. I took the highway out towards the junction to the east of us. Typically this highway has only very light traffic, and it’s
Shrooms
We weren’t looking for pine mushrooms today although if we’d gone well off the beaten track we probably would have found places that hadn’t been picked over by intrepid harvesters. Rather, Fiona and I were looking for a hiding spot