Niagara Escarpment, Mt Nemo


Looking northeast out from the edge of the Niagara Escarpment, in the Mt Nemo conservation area.

Red Trillium


Red trillium grows on the banks of a Muskoka waterway.

Spruce Bog, Algonquin


This bog shows succession of the different grasses, mosses, and trees that compete for terrain along the meandering path of a stream in Algonquin Park.

Wild-ish Asparagus


Asparagus naturalizes easily in Eastern Canada. It is spectacular when steamed lightly a few moments after having been cut.

Ottawa Tulip Festival


Princess Juliana of Holland was born in exile in Canada during WWII, though the Ottawa Civic Hospital was deemed temporarily extraterritorial by Canada to avoid jeopardizing her succession rights to the Dutch throne.  Once the Germans were booted out of Holland and the monarchy reinstated, a thank you gift including thousands of tulips was sent back.  Ottawa kept the legacy going, and holds an annual tulip festival along the parkland bordering the Rideau Canal.

Anzac Day 100th Anniversary, Seattle


A couple of keen expats wrangled sponsorship by local businesses, and arranged an Anzac dawn service in Seattle.  It was small and respectful, and captured a part of the emotion that's more properly experienced via a dawn service at the substantial WWI monuments in the capital cities of Australia.

Pedestrian delights


A Little Free Library, a Sedum garden, and a dinosaur menagerie?  This curb-mounted structure has everything!

Spring Plum Blossoms



Plum blossoms herald the arrival of spring!

Eagle herding ducks


A bald eagle looks for lunch in a raft of ducks. The ducks evade the diving raptor the way schooling fish do, by moving in unison away from the attacker. The eagle did not have success while I watched, though I imagine it eventually caught its meal.

Bolts and Washers


$1.86 in hardware fixed up a wobbly hand-me-down chair that was missing a few bits. It seems pieces of these dimensions were only offered in stainless, doubling the cost. Fortunately, we won't be kept up at night with worry about our furniture rusting away.

Creeping Floating Bridge


The replacement for the SR520 floating bridge is creeping across Lake Washington from east to west.  The existing bridge used to draw open at its midpoint to allow arbitrarily tall marine traffic through.  Openings were reasonably disruptive to vehicular traffic, requiring a 30 minute closure and a fleet of WSDOT flagging trucks.

The new bridge will limit traffic to 70 feet underneath its east navigation channel.

Sleeping Canoes


Rental canoes sleep on a dock near Husky Stadium on a cold March morning. They'll need to wait for spring for paddlers to enjoy them.

Fort George Brewery


Astoria has a brewery that on our visit was specializing in stouts and porters.  Fort George was the beginning of the British part of Oregon from 1813 to 1846, via an acquisition of what became the Hudson's Bay Company.  The Oregon Treaty resolved a territorial dispute, ceded the trading post (and the Western states) to the US, and it was renamed Astoria.

Fort George Brewery now sits a few blocks up from the river, and makes quite nice beer.

Clatskanie, OR


It's challenging to compose with a very wide field of view.  This is at 16mm on a full-frame, and very close.

Clatskanie, Oregon, just off US30.

Portland Japanese Garden


The primary image associated with the Portland Japanese Garden is a spectacular maple.  Our visit was in winter, and without any deciduous foliage around, there were better views to be found elsewhere.