Monday Mercurial

Today’s Monday Mercurial is a Carpenter Bee, who are rare and amazing creatures. This is the only thime I saw one and had a camera at hand. They are quite big, easily the size of my thumb and can give you quite a start when soaring past you when you don’t expect them.

Close up of carpenter bee

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

carpenter bee

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

Carpenter bee on the ground

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

 

Slavic Saturday

I do not think I could make this a regular feature, but possibly an irregular one – some random snippets from the Slavophone world whenever I notice something interesting – be it art, traditions, languages, politics. Let me know if you would be interested.

I instantly fell in love this song (and some others from this band). It is so cheery and silly. And I love violin.

And yes, the text is silly, although my Russian is not so good so I could understand it all instantly. But I was able to parse some and with help of online translators translate the first half for you. Unfortunately I cannot translate all, because translating it into English was not only much more time consuming than I expected it to be  – but above all I started hiting on phrases that are probably Russian idioms whose meaning I do not know. Being able to understand the gist of something and translating it into another language is not the same thing I am afraid.

I ain’t no poet in addition to my rusty Russian, so take the translation with a grain of salt. The Skobari (скобари) is an ethnic group in Russia and I could not find any proper anglicized word for them. And you probably won’t be able to sing along the translation with the original.

Who goes there, who goes there
have a look at who goes there
riding on a crippled mare
that sems to be our Skobari.

Skobari are a jolly nation
going home from a fare
one bare naked, one bare footed
and one with an injured head.

Play me such one
Skobar funny
so my tummy doesn’t hurt
tummy mine, the sinner’s one.

Play me such one
thats good for dancing
but not for every
snot nose prancing.

Smashhing up, smashing up
I feel like smashing up.
And truth be told you
I feel like brawling too.

Who’s that lad
prancing knees
hasn’t got hands on
aspen sticks.

Pennies for a party one
daddy collects his loot.
Mom whispers in his ear:
“Don’t you get drunk you silly fool!”

I was born hopeless
with no respect too –
should the heads roll
I’ll tie the rope.

I am breaking, back is arching,
I’m not really feeling well,
give ne just one half a litre
and I no doctor is needed.

We saw the grave of the one
who called us drunkards.
We did drink for our own money
nobody was serving us.

…….

 

 

 

Jack’s Walk

Angus is a lucky boy, ©voyager, all rights reserved

This is not Jack. This is Jack’s best friend, Angus, who is a very lucky dog today. Earlier in the week Angus ate part of a carpet that got stuck in his gut. He was sick for a few days before we figured out what happened and we only figured it out because by accident I found a bit of carpet fiber vomit in the long grass at the back. I’m sure that’s already way too much information, but here’s a few more details. The vet gave poor Angus barium and then for two days we fed him mashed potato in little bits to help push it all through. He was scheduled to have surgery today if it didn’t work. Well, early this morning it worked! Out came about a meter of wound up carpet fiber and now Angus seems almost back to normal. He’s weak, but hungry and for the first time in 5 days he barked. I have to admit I’m surprised it worked, but it’s hard to argue with success. Welcome back, Angus.

Pollination Party – Moths 1

More perfect shots from Nightjar, this time Hummingbird Hawk Moth Macroglossum stellatarum.

©Nightjar, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

It reminded me of a fun anecdote – during my studies at uni, one of my half-classmates mentioned one evening in the pub that he has observed a beautiful hummingbird in his garden. Pedantic killjoy as I am, I have pointed out that there are no hummingbirds in Europe, so what he has in fact observed was in this moth.

It was mildly embarrassing moment, because he was his half-classmateship was the biology half (me studying Biology-Chemistry, him studying Biology-IT). But there was no real reason for him to be embarassed. Nobody has perfect knowledge about everything and their similarity to hummingbirds in flight is really uncanny.

I have seen these beautiful moths occasionaly in my garden, but never when I had camera in hand.

 

 

Itsy, Bitsy, Dance

There will be more spiders from you! In the meantime, I think this green spider looked lovely when it waved at me from our plum. The way it was running around on that leaf it looked like some sort of dance routine.

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Shake it to the left…

Shake it to the right…

Oh, didn’t see ya there. Hi!

Jack’s Walk

Inukshuk on the Portage River, ©voyager, all rights reserved

This is another section of the Portage River and if you look closely you can see that someone has taken the time to build a few inukshuk on the shoal, probably while waiting for a fish to bite. The water here is very clean and these are bring home to eat fish if you can catch one.

Tummy Thursday

Or “never trust a recipe over experience”.

Last year, the blackberries fell victim to a hungry deer that ate all the flowers. This year, they#re getting ripe and are delicious, so I decided to make muffins.

I googled a basic recipe for cream cheese and blueberry muffins and came up with the following:

  • 1/2 cup of oil
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 4 oz cream cheese
  • vanilla
  • 1 egg
  • 1.5 cups flour
  • 1.5 teaspoons baking powder
  • 0.25 teaspoons salt
  • 1/2 cup buttermilk
  • blueberries

OK, I exchanged the oil for butter and the buttermilk for Greek yoghurt (which was only a quarter cup), yet still it seemed to be a lot of liquid, but well, that#s what the recipe said. The taste was delicious, but they did what muffins do when they are too wet: they crawled all over the baking tray.

Next time, less yoghurt.

unbaked blackberry muffins in a tray

Looks good
© Giliell

Baked blackberry muffins.

Tastes good
©Giliell

Jack’s Walk

Barachois, Gaspe Peninsula©voyager, all rights reserved

This is one of two public beaches in a small community that sits on the northern edge of the Malbaie Salt Marsh called Barachois, which fittingly means salt marsh in French. We don’t come to this beach very often because it is mostly sand an I find sandy beaches pretty boring. I’d much rather go to a stony beach where you can beach-comb for treasure. I’ve found all sorts of interesting things on the beaches of Gaspe; fossils, agates, seaglass (I have a large collection of this), pretty stones only some of which I can identify, bones and driftwood. I collect and then negotiate with my husband about how much I am allowed to take home. As a result I have collections here and there. At home I’ve made a little beach that grows year by year, but here my treasures mostly live in jars because the real beach is so close by. I say you can keep your groomed white sand beaches. Give me the sticks and stones and bones on a beach full of treasure.