Lunar Bovine - Jason Cobill's Weblog » Ottawa

Horrible Giant Spider

jcobill — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 01:19:32 +0000

As I was leaving the house this morning to get on my bike, I noticed a thick shimmering spider web strung between our rose bushes. As I bent down to look I came face to face with something hovering on a nearly invisible web – this enormous 2 and a half inch long Orb Weaver Spider. Freaking gigantic!

And even worse – he told terrible jokes. A comedian! What a nightmare!

Ottawa Haunted Walk

jcobill — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 22:37:28 +0000

Natasha and I joined some visiting friends on a haunted walk of Ottawa! I’m probably the last guy you’d want to invite on a haunted anything, but I bit my tongue and had a lot of fun. I learned a few things too – did you know that the east end of Sparks Street is built over an ancient cemetery, and that there are still bodies being dug up during construction projects? (I imagine this is less likely to be an issue now given the depth that most of the building foundations go to, unless corpses were buried REALLY deep)

The tour took us past a few familiar buildings on Elgin – allegedly the Fridays restaurant, crazy drooling fish fountain in Confederation Park, and Teacher’s college are all visited by strange apparitions. The real nexus of paranormal doom is – the dreaded Lisgar High School. It is said that the attic is home to the creepy spirit of a maintenance worker who met his end falling off the roof.

I wasn’t prepared to believe any of it, but when I developed my photos, I saw something crazy I hadn’t seen before!

Our guide (the living one, in the black cape) was great, her speeches were a bit rehearsed, but she was clear and easy to keep up with. It was good to get out for a walk downtown, so I’d recommend it. At $13 it’s about the price of a scary movie, but you get some exercise thrown in. And you might see something ghastly!

Bruce Pit

jcobill — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 20:07:02 +0000

I became interested in Ottawa’s hidden lakes when I had an extra-long wait one rainy afternoon at a bus stop. The OC Transpo route map has bodies of water marked out in a weird shade of blue that makes all the little urban tributaries pop off the page. I couldn’t believe how many lakes and streams I’d been ignoring inside city limits.

My first intentional urban lake visit this weekend was to Bruce Pit which is a little-talked-about but beautiful dog park on the west end of town. It’s just a skip south of the Queensway Carleton hospital on Cedarview road. (Go to the end of Baseline and hang a left)

It’s one of Ottawa’s few open-leash dog parks, so you’ll see plenty of dog owners strolling around through the park with their four-legged friends. It’s a great place for an easy outdoor walk. The path is well groomed and pretty flat (although, being a dog park, you’ll have to keep your eyes peeled for messes). The path winds around through an open field and a forested area, and by a winter toboggan-run.

While we were walking around the lake, we caught a good look at an enormous blue heron who was skimming the pond. I’ll have to go back sometime with my long camera lens and some hip waders.

Natasha made an awesome spaz-out noise as we crested a hill – there was a big green garter snake crossing the path right in front of us. Brave snake to be hanging out on a dog path! He slithered away without gobbling up either of us.

Pink Lake

jcobill — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 02:33:37 +0000

We headed up the day after Canada Day to Pink Lake, to do our yearly hike around the rare blue-green “meromictic” watering hole. We picked a perfect day for it, too – blue skies and a nice cool breeze.

We saw turtles! And fish! And … leeches. UGH. You’re not allowed to swim in there for other reasons, but I’ll never step foot in that lake after seeing a monster leech swimming towards my shadow at the point. It was as big as my hand and slithered through the water without eyes or fins, and it seemed to know I was nearby.

But mostly we saw turtles!

ISS Photo Success!

jcobill — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 02:22:42 +0000

I managed to compose a much better picture this evening thanks to having a bit more light to work with at dusk. The ISS didn’t stand out as much against the light sky, but at least now you can see that it drew a clear sharp line as it descended into my neighbour’s yard. Sooooooo cool! There’s people on that streak of light!

Post-Earthquake Weirdness

jcobill — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 19:24:34 +0000

I wouldn’t say I was traumatized by the big Ottawa Earthquake on the 23rd – in fact I found it really rad – but ever since we had a good shake I’ve become hyper-aware of ground tremors.

You’d think stuff stays pretty stationary most of the time, but that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. I sit near a stairwell on the 3rd floor, over a flexible steel beam that bounces whenever anyone walks past. Big trucks idling next to the building cause a good shake. As do people carting crates around through the back tunnels of the mall. Queensway traffic thunders along and vibrates us too.

Natasha and I gave eachother a questioning look while we were touring the Catherdrale De Notre Dame in Ottawa Sunday afternoon – the floor started rumbling while we were admiring the stained glass and stone columns – probably just construction equipment rolling by on Sussex, but in the back of my head I was evaluating the structural integrity of a building put together in 1841.

I’m sure it’ll wear off, but I’d be back to normal a little faster if everything st-st-stopped sh-sh-shaking for a while. Meanwhile… enjoy the live Seismogram viewer from the Ottawa ground station! *rumble rumble rumble*

Space Station Flyover

jcobill — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 02:58:09 +0000

I was lucky to catch a (blurry) photo this evening of the ISS flying over Ottawa as it does a couple of rare orbits across the night and day line of the earth (the terminator). As it goes over us in the dark, it’s still in the light of the sun, reflecting super brightly. Here it is on its descent towards the eastern horizon, into the glow of the city of Ottawa.

I’m hoping to get a second chance so I can override my autofocus… trying to lock on something the size of a pinhead as it’s moving across the dark is apparently not something my camera is good at. Maybe tomorrow night if the weather holds clear!

You can see it yourself for the next couple of nights by checking the time of the next flyover at Spaceweather’s Satellite Flybys site.

Dragonboat Sponsorship

jcobill — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 18:17:03 +0000

So the original dragonboating prize-pack I had in mind didn’t materialise in the way I’d hoped, so I’ve thought of something way better: Sponsor me for my dragon-boat race this weekend and I’ll compose an epic song about you detailing your incredible awesomeness. It will even contain an assortment of rhyming words!

Sponsor me here!

Your sponsorship money goes to local charities (CHEO, Sens Foundation, etc) and motivates me to paddle harder (and sing better)!

On that note: Our last practice is tomorrow and I’m stoked – we’ve been interval training and my arms are feeling amazing. I’m not sure if she’s just playing to our egos, but our coach has been really impressed with us and she’s expecting us to have a really great run on Saturday, definitely making it through to the final round of heats. (We’ve been posting good times in practice, so… hopefully we can keep it up) Plus, my team are hoping to grab the coveted “most violent ending for cute mascots on a t-shirt” award.

Sloan at Westfest

jcobill — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 18:39:27 +0000

It surprises me how many people still haven’t heard of Westfest. Westboro’s clever new business development association reacted to a huge street & sewer repair debacle that nearly wiped out a number of businesses on Richmond by throwing a huge yearly street party. It’s getting pretty massive.

This year’s Saturday night headliners were Sloan, who I haven’t seen since like 1998 (in Waterloo!), but they made a huge impression on me and I’ve been following their album releases ever since. You’ve probably heard some of their stuff recently: “The Good in Everyone” is the theme to George S15s’ ‘The Hour’ on CBC.

The Westfest venue is in a park that works really well for small audiences, but they struggled a bit with the larger Sloan crowd. It was standing room only from the stage to the condos across the street, and the food shacks inconveniently covered a lot of the stage viewlines if you got caught behind the hill. I managed to elbow my way through the crowd to a great spot about midway through the concert, and camped out there in the wash of the bass coming out of the speakers. They were great! They crammed a bunch of their best songs in their time on the stage, jumping from song to song with clever transitions.

I heard Crash Test Dummies are coming back, too… it’s like 1998 all over again! I’m going to get a huge square pair of glasses and never tie my shoelaces!

Dirty Bird

jcobill — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:17:37 +0000

Be on the lookout for this little feathered hooligan, going around from neighborhood to neighborhood taking baths in people’s backyards. (In my replica roman rain chalice! The nerve!) I snapped a couple of pics of him making a mess before flying away.

This is actually how I take a bath, too. Stand up on my tippy toes, put my head under the water and thrash my arms around until there’s no water left in the tub. Gotta be enthusiastic to get the dirt off!