I showed up a bit early to pick up Natasha after work, so while I waited in the car I pulled out my long-neglected sketchbook and doodled out the awesome view from the back of the confederation building. This is Parliament Hill’s Peace Tower, looking from just behind and below the West Block. (Can you [...]

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Sunday afternoon I heard a loud droning noise from above and looked up over downtown Ottawa just in time to catch a fleet of biplanes and WW2 Canadian warplanes flying in formation. I wasn’t aware of any military celebrations, but Greg suggested it could be the Vintage Wings of Canada out on a practice flight [...]

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While I’m on the subject of grumpy news… we’re finding the Junebug grubs especially frustrating this year – our neighbourhood seems to have a scourge of them devouring our lawns in wide patches.
Natasha and I are wary about using insecticide – but we tried to dig up some of the grubs along the munching wavefront [...]

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Following a sign that promised fresh butter tarts, we ended up visiting The Gingerbread Man while we were in Manotick last week. It’s a cute store along a strip of quaint teahouses and things next to Watson’s Mill, where the owner sells gingerbread cookies and pastries. Inside the gingerbread showroom, though, is a full-on gallery [...]

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We did a bunch of cross-city driving this weekend, but the upside was that we finally had an opportunity to stop into Vera’s Burger Shack in Bells Corners! Ottawa managed to snag the only location outside of British Columbia, it’s a rare import that’s been getting good reviews on foodie sites. Vera’s is hidden inside [...]

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Me and a gang of keeners from the office took a walk around Hampton Park with garbage bags and rubber gloves to do some spring tidying. I expected litter and found plenty, but I thought it was weird how much large-scale waste we found laying around. It doesn’t help that there’s a road construction site [...]

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There’s a new squirrel moving in to the tree in the front yard – we had a grey squirrel for a while, but this black squirrel seems to have asserted itself and captured the territory. We’ll see how that plays out. I suspect squirrel territory has pretty flexible boundaries. There have been squirrels chasing each [...]

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Yesterday at the office I went all-out and put together a salad bar as part of a charity lunch fundraiser for the Ottawa Community Gardening Network. 3 kinds of lettuce, 22 fixings, 5 dressings, 4 pasta salads and over 25 hungry customers later I had raised over a hundred bucks.

Weirdly, a bunch of people made [...]

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The parking lot where I work had a pretty big snow hill that’s taken a beating over the past few days of summery weather. When I was a kid, I’d spend all day out in my rubber boots stomping around and channeling the puddles all over our driveway. As an adult, I’m still captivated by [...]

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We’ve had an unusually warm and rainy March, leading to a few early surprises like these spring flowers pushing up out of the flower beds.

To be honest, I’m still not able to distinguish tulips from other bulb flowers like crocuses (crocii?) and irises at this early stage, although I vaguely remember tulips growing in this [...]

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