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My main computer - backing up all my files from summer (based on laptop). I have been busy this year taking photos.  From our visit in the New Year in Leduc with my son's family until we got back from our camping trip to Alberta, I have shot thousands of photographs.  And that is just what has happened in the last 9 months.  I started shooting digital images around the year 2000, and so I have 25 years of images.  Then there are the slides and photos scanned from before that. Backups are important.  Hard drives fail.  Sectors get errors.  Stuff breaks.  And then there are the harsher realities of life, accidents and theft.  Floods, hurricanes, tornados, earth quakes, fires - they all take their toll on equipment.  And if your memories and important images and documents are all in one very vulnerable place, you could lose it all.  Like I said, backups are important. And so, at least once a year, I back up my files.  I have two m...

Inside this gall is the larva of the willow apple sawfly. "What gall!"  Or is that, What a gall!"  Or better yet, "What is a gall?"   A gall is a small tubercle or raised bump that forms on a plant's leaf or stem.  It is created by any one of a variety of gall-producing insects as a means to produce offspring.  The range is astonishing, there being about 1500 species of gall producing invertebrates in North America alone.  Many of them belong to the Hymenoptera, the group of insects that includes wasps, bees, and sawflies. The number of plants that play host to these gall-producers is also diverse, but typically specific to the particular species.  The above photo that I took is of one particular insect that uses willows in the subgenus Salix .  I photographed it in the southwest corner of Alberta near Waterton National Park.  It is likely the gall produced by the willow leaf gall sawfly  ( Euura pacifica , also known as  Ponta...