You might have seen in the news that Northern Ontario Canada was on fire recently.
The city of Toronto had the worst air quality in the entire world at that time. The air outside smelled like a campfire, specifically like burning cedar wood to me.
When it first started there was a strange yellow glow coming through the windows at work and at home. It looked like the apocalypse was happening outside. Someone referred to it to the deleted scenes from Bladerunner 2049.
That was the most fitting description that I heard and it made me chuckle. The hospital was super busy of course. Its a nightmare scenario for anyone with lung issues and especially COPD diagnoses. The winds ended up shifting after about 3 days and the air quality went back to mostly normal.
One random day at work a strange purple rice bowl showed up on the sidewalk of the parking lot. It must have either fallen out of someones lunch bag or more likely was left by someone living on the streets. No garbages in the lot, plus social loafing, no one was going to grab it and carry it off to throw it away. It had a lid on it for a few days but eventually that fell off. We could all watch the progress of the food inside rotting in the hot sun. Exciting. The bowl stuck around for a good 7 or 8 days in total and I really got a kick out of wondering how long it would last on that sidewalk.
I thought about making a shrine for it like I did the dead gopher a while back, but I never really got around to it after it left.
Our back yard has a lot of wild garlic growing in it.
Every year I try and harvest the scapes for cooking. They are an edible part of the plant that if left will eventually form a flower.
You can cut them when they make their first curl and they are essentially like a thick chive with a strong garlic flavor.
Cutting them strengthens the bulb of the plant as well.
I chop the scapes up fine and use them as a garnish on potatos or in this case on ribs.
Close up.
I'm still at it on Duolingo, learning Dutch.
I like to show some of the funny or ridiculous phrases that it tries to teach me.
It seems like the app, or its creators, has an obsession with Ducks.
This sentence just sounds wrong to me. Its not dirty, but it definitly sounds dirty. Saying "her crab" just isn't right. Its like saying, "we're munching on his sausage." There are better ways of speaking, thats for sure.
Here is a random photo of my dog sleeping. His beard is the same color as my beard.
I stained my mom's outdoor deck for mothers day. The photo above is the before image and the two photos below are the after.
She picked out the stain and helped me paint it on. It was different than the stuff she bought the last time. She wasn't thrilled with how it turned out when we were finished.
The stain was meant to protect and water proof the wood but the color was a lot thinner. The next two photos are what it looked like after she originally did it herself with different stain. It looked a lot better then.
She was disappointed with the look this time around but happy that it was protected. You can't really redo it after its done unfortunately.
We basically have to wait until it wears off and then needs redoing again.
Next are just some random cut flowers I bought a while back.
I just think that they look nice.
Next is a random dinner at a restaurant that we went to. We very rarely go out to eat anymore.
Here we had potato bites with dip and I had a pork chop with fennel salad as a main. I forget her main and didn't take a photo.
The last thing that I have to mention is a small forest hike that we did close to home a while back.
It wasn't anything too special but it did have a few rocky look out points that created a little interest.
The views were nothing special, just dense forest, but they were high enough to create some minor drama.
Speaking of drama. Here's me catching and holding a massive boulder that was starting to slip from the earth. Luckily I got there just in time to heave it back in place. Just call me Atlas.
