Photos of the day: Parliament Hill Yoga

I think most residents of Ottawa have heard that on Wednesdays from noon to 1 pm in summer, there’s free yoga on the lawn of Parliament Hill. It’s hosted by lululemon (a store I personally refuse to endorse with my cash) and has been going on since at least 2007. Because I don’t work most Wednesdays, I’d never actually made it over to see a class in action, but my week is a little out of joint this week and today seemed like the perfect day to check it out – as a spectator, that is. I’m actually attending a weekly hot power yoga class one evening a week, but was not at all prepared to do anything but spectate today.

I should have clued in to the fact that it was going to be well-attended when it seemed like most people walking up Metcalfe toward Parliament Hill were carrying yoga mats and water bottles. I was anticipating maybe 50 or a hundred yogis. I’d underestimated the attendance by a few – hundred. Maybe as many as a thousand.

They took up every bit of space on the entire West Block half of the lawn in front of the Parliament Buildings. People were setting up on the sidewalk, around Eternal Flame – everywhere. Look at this!

Yoga on Parliament Hill in Ottawa

Yoga on Parliament Hill

Is that not amazing? Free yoga for thousands on the front lawn of our seat of political power. I love Ottawa!

Five things I did not know about robins

I wish I’d noticed much earlier that a pair of robins were busy building a nest in our porch light fixture. The top of the fixture had blown off in an autumn wind storm, but since it is in an area protected from the elements, I really didn’t stress about replacing it. Then one day I noticed that someone had been busy and built an entire house in just a few days.

My first inclination was to leave it. A little birdy had worked hard to build a home for his family, and far be it from me to tear it down. What if there were already eggs in it? I didn’t have the heart.

But, that’s my porch light. When I mentioned to Beloved that I didn’t want to disturb the nest, he expressed concern that (a) dried grass and electric current do not mix and (b) even a compact fluorescent light would probably throw off enough heat to cook those poor eggs. Given my reluctance to relocate the nest, he did the next best thing and put a reminding piece of tape over the light switch inside. Good thing I never got around to installing that darkness-detecting auto-on light fixture!

Daddy robin is not terribly pleased with all of our coming and going right under his nest, and he has given me a few lectures for reposing on the porch swing when it’s too close to his nest. I’m happy enough to let them stay until the eggs hatch and the fledglings can make it on their own – within reason.

I did a little research, wondering when we might be able to reclaim our light fixture. Here’s five things I learned about robins:

1. Robins are among the first migratory birds to lay eggs in spring, and will ordinarily have two to three broods between May and July.

2. A new nest is built for each brood. (Phew!) Mama robin sits on her 3 to 5 eggs for approximately 14 days, and the fledglings leave the nest about two weeks after that.

3. Parent robins clean the nest after every elimination, carrying the waste away in their beaks.

4. Only 25% of hatchlings survive the first year. (Seems like a lot of effort for a not-very-high success rate!) A robin’s life span is approximately two years.

5. When you are reading Anne of Ingleside out loud to a 13-year-old and 11-year-old boy, they will not be able to resist throwing each other scandalized glances the first time you start to read about the Blythe family’s adopted pet bird, “Cock Robin.”

So, I figure we leave the nest there until Canada Day, and then we can reclaim our porch light. I may see if I can sneak up there with my camera soon to see if any inhabitants have appeared.

Photo of the day: Springy tree and sky

Well, that 11 and a half minutes of spring was nice, eh? Now let’s get right on to summer. Works for me!

I have been loving the sky lately – the clouds are either wispy and light like this, or in fat puffy clumps. And the bit of tree in the corner was just the thing for a bit of contrast. I love that limey green of spring shoots!

spring sky and tree

Happy sigh!

Photo of the day: Trout Lilies

Hey, remember when I used to take photos? Yeah, me too. I missed it!

I went for a nice long walk in the woods today and saw the most glorious signs of spring, including patches of these delicate little flowers in sunny spots at the bases of trees.

Trout lillies

I’ve since learned that they’re called Erythronium americanum, commonly known as Trout Lily or Adders Tongue. They’re native to the woods and meadows of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

Hooray for wildflowers!

I think we’re ready for portrait season, too. Thinking of spring family portraits? Me too! Get in touch and we’ll book yours. 🙂

Ten-pages-in book review: Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

How, I keep asking myself, have I missed this book for my entire adult life? It is everything I love in a book – it’s clever, witty, cheeky and just the tiniest bit sacrilegious. It’s irreverent, intelligent and laugh-out-loud funny. It seems like every one of my friends has not only read it but loved it. I feel like a science fiction fan who has somehow missed the entire enterprise that is Star Trek.

This book is Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. I at least been aware of Neil Gaiman for years, and have been quite enjoying a few of his books for kids and for grownups over the last year or so. From Fortunately the Milk for the kids to The Ocean at the End of the Lane for me, I was happy to discover a quirky author whose work I had previously overlooked. I was a little less aware of Terry Pratchett – I knew his name, and loosely his genre, but thought he was more straight fantasy in the lines of George R R Martin or David Eddings. In fact, I think I had been confusing him with Terry Brooks, now that I think about it.

As the boys and I started casting about for something to read after we finish the Anne of Green Gables series, Discworld tripped my radar and I realized that Terry Pratchett was revered on par with Douglas Adams for his witty irreverence. And to complete the mental loop, I had just last summer read Neil Gaiman’s biography of Douglas Adams called Don’t Panic. And so, I picked up Good Omens on a lark.

I don’t often literally laugh out loud when I’m reading by myself, but this book had me doing just that. The book is, to do it complete injustice in the summary, loosely the story of an angel, a demon and the coming of Armageddon to a sleepy little English hamlet called Lower Tadfield.

I have to admit, there was a bit early in the novel when I scratched my head and wondered where the hell all the various plot lines were going, but the humour kept me hooked. There was an early and ongoing bit of schtick about how “all tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into ‘Best of Queen’ albums” that had me sniggering, and at least once a chapter I was laughing out loud and thinking to myself, “Self, you have really GOT to figure out how to turn on the highlighting and underlining thingee on the Kindle so you can mark some of these quotes for future reference.

Some of my favourite bits:

Crowley had always known that he would be around when the world ended, because he was immortal and wouldn’t have any alternative. But he hoped it was a long way off. Because he rather liked people. It was major failing in a demon. Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. There had been times, over the past millennium, when he’d felt like sending a message back Below saying, Look we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there’s nothing we can do to them that they don’t do to themselves and they do things we’ve never even thought of, often involving electrodes. They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got imagination. And electricity, of course. One of them had written it, hadn’t he…”Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.” Crowley got a commendation for the Spanish Inquisition. He had been in Spain then, mainly hanging around cantinas in the nicer parts, and hadn’t even known about it until the commendation arrived. He’d gone to have a look, and come back and got drunk for a week.

And this:

“Anyway, it’s like with bikes,’ said the first speaker authoritatively. ‘I thought I was going to get this bike with seven gears and one of them razorblade saddles and purple paint and everything, and they gave me this light blue one. With a basket. A girl’s bike.’
‘Well. You’re a girl,’ said one of the others.
‘That’s sexism, that is. Going around giving people girly presents just because they’re a girl.”

And this:

“I don’t see what’s so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin’ upset cos’ they act like people”, said Adam severely. “Anyway, if you stopped tellin’ people it’s all sorted out after they’re dead, they might try sorting it all out while they’re alive.”

And this:

“In every big-budget science fiction movie there’s the moment when a spaceship as large as New York suddenly goes to light speed. A twanging noise like a wooden ruler being plucked over the edge of a desk, a dazzling refraction of light, and suddenly the stars have all been stretched out thin and it’s gone. This was exactly like that, except that instead of a gleaming twelve-mile-long spaceship, it was an off-white twenty-year-old motor scooter. And you didn’t have the special rainbow effects. And it probably wasn’t going at more than two hundred miles an hour. And instead of a pulsing whine sliding up the octaves, it just went putputputputput …
VROOOOSH.
But it was exactly like that anyway.”

I could really just go on and on pulling quotes from this book. Seriously, HOW did I miss this treasure of a book for my entire adult life? The more I read, the more the stories started to come together, the funnier the lines got and the more I wanted to read. By the half-way point, I had tripped that magic spot where you start thinking about the book even when you’re not reading it, and by three-quarters of the way done, I knew it was going to end up on my top ten faves of all time list. I cannot remember the last time I finished a book and immediately started thinking about reading it all over again. (Oops, did I say “10 pages in” book review? Sorry, I’m a little late on this one!)

You might have heard that Sir Terry Pratchett died this past March, just a few weeks after I realized he was an author whose works I should have been reading since I was a teenager. We were discussing my late-to-the-party adoration of this book on Facebook and a friend shared this list of 50 great quotes from Terry Pratchett. I discovered one that has to be the new motto of anyone who works in social media for the government: “It’s not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere would much rather you weren’t doing it.” And this one, which came >this< close to being the new tag line for the blog: "If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become part of someone else's story" As another wise friend said, "Lucky for you, there's only about 50 more Pratchett books for you to discover. Sad for all of us, there will never be any more than that." I am still perplexed as to how I so utterly failed to notice this book before now. I'm delighted, though, that we have just a few chapters left to read in Anne of Ingleside, and then I can start reading The Colour of Money (aka Discworld #1) by Terry Pratchett with the boys. I think I may cue up a little Neil Gaiman for my own reading next. Where should I go? American Gods? Neverwhere? The Graveyard Book? Clearly I can no longer be left to my own devices when choosing books, or I would have read Good Omens 20+ years ago!

Enlighten me, bloggy peeps – what ELSE have I been missing?