Dappled Air

On my daily walk in our neighbourhood I came across this skeleton in a yard and just had to take a picture of it as I thought it was quite creative. Growing up in Switzerland there was no Halloween celebration, I only discovered that it existed once I moved to Canada. In Switzerland we had Carnival (Fasnacht), but that was in February, where you would get dressed up which I always disliked. I just don't like getting dressed up. Halloween was for the kids and my son sure made the best of it. I remember one year he came home with 2 black garbage bags full of stuff. It lasted way into the new year. Here is how Wikipedia explains the origin of Halloween . Have a happy and safe Halloween

I just finished reading the latest book by Dan Brown called the Lost Symbol. I liked the Da Vinci Code but did not plan on buying the new book. One day while shopping at Costco I saw that they had the book at a good price so I bought it. I had not read any reviews of the new book and so did not know what to expect. My verdict is that I really liked the book. I probably prefer it to the Da Vinci Code. I have never been to Washington DC, but the way the story is told you can easily visualize and imagine how it would look. The author has a very visual writing style and I like that. I also liked that I could not really guess the outcome of the story. There are so many turns and changes of direction that made it difficult to figure out who are the bad guys and who are the nice guys. The part I liked the most of the book were probably the last 100 hundred pages. I like the way the storyline explained concepts. They went right along with my New Age outlook and left me uplifted. I did not expe...

Until I came to Canada I had no idea what a touque/toque was or had even heard the word. It seems it is a typical Canadian expression that came to English from French. Now what on earth is a touque? A touque is a knitted winter hat. My husband always uses this term instead of hat and it still sounds funny to me after 35 years. Well, hubby put on his touque today for our walk around the lake as it had gotten chilly and a strong North wind was blowing. So him using this strange word gave me the idea for this blog post. In case you are wondering, no I haven't dug out my touque yet. The Urban Dictionary has a couple of definitions for touque: A Canadian must have. Ok eh! Like it was so cold that we had to wear touques eh! Every time someone says toboggan, I remind them that a toboggan is what you ride down a hill on, a touque is what you wear. The WordWeb Online gives this defintion for touque: A kind of warm cap winter wear, usually made from a knit bag with closed tapered ends by p...

I haven't posted for a while and I realized that as I took another picture of a tiny tree seedling. This year it seems that just about every seed that fell on the ground sprouted. The maple tree seedlings are especially abundant. I had to pull them out by the handful. If you let them grow too long they get too big and are hard to get rid of. I don't want maple trees growing all over the place. these maple seedlings grew in the cracks of a wooden bench I don't recall them sprouting like this in other years. I wonder what this means? Are we in for a cold winter or just plain crazy weather? this blue spruce seedling is also growing in a crack of wood

At yesterday's weekly EFT get together a discussion ensued on how to handle "evil" people. I am currently reading the book "Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life" by Dr. Wayne Dyer. It is his interpretation of the Tao Te Ching. Imagine my surprise when today's verse offered the answer. I found it in the 62nd verse. Here are the parts just literally jumped out at me. "Where you perceive negativity, alter your view to see pure love and kindness that's mistakenly being directed to seek a sacred place in the material world." "Practice forgiving, and avoiding judgment, when you see reprehensible or evil-minded ways." "Take Lao-tzu up on his advice for dealing with those who appear to be wicked people by mentally separating the individuals from their toxic behavior. Remember that they are Divine creations of the Tao who simply believe that ego should control life. In your thoughts, erase the vileness, the wrongdoing, and the addict...

Today I discovered very visibly why it matters what soil vegetables are planted in. This is a picture of my freshly picked carrots. They taste great and grew well, but because the soil had large compost pieces in it the carrots could not grow straight down. So every time the growing carrot encountered an obstacles it started to grow sideways and that's the reason why my carrots grew in spirals. Now my plan for next year is to move this soil to another part of the garden and replace it with more root vegetable friendly soil. I would love to hear from other gardener's about their experiences.

Shucks, this morning my Hotmail would not download to Thunderbird any longer. Now what? I recall getting Microsoft emails about changes coming to Hotmail, but all the info was for Outlook and Outlook Express. Thank goodness for Google. A quick search revealed that, yes there was a change and also an explanation of how to get Hotmail to download again. You may ask why don't I simply switch to using Google? Well, I discovered that my computer runs better with Thunderbird as my main email client rather than another online mail browser window open. And with a couple Hotmail accounts, a Yahoo account and Gmail that all arrive in my desktop email box I am set. OK, back to the fix. Rather than creating a new email account, I just edited the current one and things are working again. Select the account in Thunderbird -> view setting for this account and make the changes like this: Server Name: pop3.live.com User Name: Your FULL email address Port: 995 (this should be automatica...