Jack’s Walk

Pumpkin Season, ©voyager, all rights reserved

The sun has come out of hiding and it’s a lovely autumn day. Just warm enough that you don’t need a jacket, but still cool enough that Jack wants to frolic. I’ve been playing with my camera and the scratches don’t seem to impact my photos too badly. That means that I can take some time before I buy a new lens.  This is good news because at the moment my money has more important things to do. Jack will be needing surgery soon to remove a lipoma (fatty cyst) on his right elbow. It’s grown to the size of a baseball and we’d like to have it removed before the snow starts to fly. The surgery is planned for Halloween, which can be winter-like around here so let’s hope autumn decides to stick around for a while.

Tummy Thursday: Mirror Glaze

The little one told us to surprise her with a party for her birthday later this month. I decided to go for a party “Under the Sea” and I want to make a special cake with a “mirror glaze” frosting. Mirror glaze is a special type of frosting which is, you may guess it, very smooth and shiny. Since I’ve never done this before I decided to make a cake for Mr’s birthday last Sunday and try it out, since he can cope with “delicious cake that looks like roadkill”, just in case that things don’t work as they should, but they did.

Actually it turned into two cakes, because I had too much batter for my pan, so he got a galaxy cake with a strawberry cardamom filling and a Ferrero Rocher cake.

Small cake

Ferrero Rocher cake
©Giliell, all rights reserved

Blue and purple cake

Galaxy cake
©Giliell, all rights reserved

For a “how to”, click below the fold

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Funny Animals

The finalists of the 2018 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards are out, and they’re a blast. Here’s a couple of my favourites:

© Achim Sterna/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2018

 

© Mary McGowan/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2018

 

© Roie Galitz/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2018

 

© Kallol Mukherjee/The Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards 2018

 

And lots more…

Today’s piece of music is more of a dance showcase, in the theme of colourful animals. Below the fold because spiders.

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Jack’s Walk

Soggy leaves, ©voyager, all rights reserved

It’s another damp and dreary day around here and the weather forecast is for more of the same for days ahead. There wasn’t even moody fog today, just dull skies and soggy ground. Even worse, I tripped and dropped my camera and scratched the lens. The camera seems to be working fine, but for the next while my pictures may have a bit of scarring. I’ve been thinking about getting a better lens and perhaps this is the universe’s way of telling me not to wait any longer. In fact, it might just be time for an early Christmas/Festivus present for voyager. I’ll see how bad the damage is over the next few days and if it’s only minor I may try and wait. I think I might need to save a few more pennies to get the quality I want. I’m using a Canon T5i with an EFS 18 – 135mm lens. Any suggestions?

 

Not Quite Tree Tuesday

The trees are doing something odd out in northern Ontario:

In the forests of northern Ontario, a “strange phenomenon” of large natural rings occurs, where thousands of circles, as large as two kilometers in diameter, appear in the remote landscape.

Via this link: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Aerial-photograph-of-forest-rings-with-diameters-of-approximately-150-m-in-northern_fig1_292337890, which leads to a very scientific article on the phenomenon.

The article assures us that this is nothing unnatural or particularly mysterious:

Indeed, as geochemist Stew Hamilton suggested in 1998, the rings are most likely to be surface features caused by “reduced chimneys,” or “big centres of negative charge that frequently occur over metal deposits,” where a forest ring is simply “a special case of a reduced chimney.”

Reduced chimneys, meanwhile, are “giant electrochemical cells” in the ground that, as seen through the example of forest rings, can affect the way vegetation grows there.

I’ve been out there and it looked fine to me, but things get even weirder and weirder the more I read – but that just might be the full article going in all kinds of directions, especially at the end. But the tree rings are cool. And maybe it’s aliens…

Jack’s Walk

The setting for our walk this morning came complete with mood setting mist and the intermittent caws of a murder of crows. Very film noir, so Jack and I pretended we were on the run from the mob and that we had to find a cache left somewhere in the forest for us. We searched high and low with our eyes and our noses and I’m almost certain I heard the crack of a pistol and the swell of violins, but alas! we could not find the cache. My trusted familiar, Jackson Brown, proved his worth yet again, though, leading us safely to the motorcar left for our conveyance to safety.

Deep in the forest, ©voyager, all rights reserved

Tree Tuesday

Our tree this week comes with my apologies. Lofty sent these photos in at the end of July and I misplaced them. Thankfully, they are now on the found list.  I’m very glad because the series is beautiful, starting with closeup shots of new growth and shifting the perspective until we finally see the magnificent adult tree.

…a series of shots of a popular beach side tree in our southern city, the Norfolk Island Pine.

Thanks so much for sharing, Lofty.

©Lofty, all rights reserved

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At the Zoo d’Amnéville 1

It’s the autumn holidays here and we decided to go for one nice family excursion before we’re bogged down in postponed work again. We’d been promising the kids to visit that zoo in France for ages and finally decided to go. I know, for Americans 100km one sounds like your weekly shopping trip, for us it isn’t.

The zoo is in a smallish town near Metz that seems to consist of a thermal fountain, an amusement park, and a giant complex with restaurant, hotels, cinemas, parking and the zoo. The entrance fee is prohibitive, because in France most zoos are private enterprises and not public institutions, but we decided that we can afford it for a special trip, especially since we always bring food and drinks and therefore don’t have to pay the prohibitive prices inside.

To be honest, I don’t regret the money. It was a wonderful day and the zoo is amazing. There are no holidays in France, it was a Monday in October and there were at the most 150 visitors in the whole zoo. I guess in summer the people push you through, but now we had the leisure to enjoy the animals and the shows.

Of course I took a ton of pics. Original count was 2200, after weeding out the really bad ones there are 1300 left. I won’t post them all ;).

First part is the white lions. They are gigantic, at last 30% larger than the “normal” lions in the next enclosure. The couple has some juvenile cubs and as you can see, in the pics, the male was very interested in making some more…

©Giliell, all rights reserved, click for full size.

Lioness, lying

Lioness, standing

Juvenile lions

juvenile rolling in the sand

Snuggling lions

Male white lion

Male lion trying to mount lioness

Male lion tryinmg to mount lioness

Lioness fighting off lion

Lioness fighting off lion

Lioness fighting off lion

After his third attempt ended like this he threw himself against the glass of the enclosure…