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The Noordam (bottom right) leaves for Alaska on Sunday, September 14, on 2 week cruise. Kathryn's immediate family (brothers and sisters) are celebrating their parents' lives by taking a cruise together.  Her parents, the now deceased Clara and James, will have their ashes spread into the ocean as a nod towards one of their favourite activities - cruising.  The destination is not random; Alaska was a fond and oft repeated destination for them. There will be ten of us, the five brothers and sisters and spouses.  Everyone being sexagenarians or older, the on-board activities will be limited to dining, walking, visiting, watching shows, and hopefully playing cards.  There are 8 ports of call where we will be engaging in three excursions.  Other onshore activities will involve taking in the vistas and, for me, anyways, taking photos.  I hope to get photos of creatures and places I have never seen before. I am concerned about the weather - rain is forecast -...

A one-family car.  Toyota 2008 Yaris - "S"  260k km.  Asking $6,000.  Snow tires included. We bought the Yaris from Toyota in the Lower Mainland - new, although it was used as a demo for a bit.  We drove it for a number of years until gifting it to Leanne (our daughter) as an incentive to finish her post-secondary education.  She drove it until last month when, after taking a job in Abbotsford as a teacher (in French, no less), she purchased a new car.  Another Toyota, given the reliability of her previous one. To help her out, we hauled it back to where we live in Kelowna where we plan to sell it.  We have all the paper work necessary to store it, drive it for testing, and sell it.  I have listed it on Marketplace (you can see the listing here ).  It is coming off tomorrow but will go back on when we return from our upcoming trip. The thumbnail of the paperwork in the image above is shown in full size below.  It is the report on th...

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...