Friday

Went out for a walk with Loki…

… he was as happy as could be.

Sometimes  it’s nice to give it over to puppy, because they are just happy.. No need for me to do anything.

I’ll be back in a week or so – I need a break.

Wouldn’t You Know…

I went out this evening to pick some mountain cranberries for my uncle who can’t get out in the bush himself. So what happens?

I see a loon not even 5 meters from shore!

I left the camera at home since I had my hands full with the berry picker and a pail + Loki on the loose – so no picture of the loon. The one above is the only one I have of the berries – better ones will appear in a day or two!

This one from the other night at the lily pond. This tree was already broken off once before when a storm this past winter did a number on it again – but it still has branches full of leaves. Amazing!

Slow News Day

Normally Loki does his business in the morning around the first bend of the path, but today…

…after 20 minutes I was looking out over the lake. I finally had to return home, mission not accomplished. That is, not until we were outside the apartment block… The rotter!

After that I spent the entire morning, waiting for the technician to figure out why I couldn’t access certain workfiles on the PC after he had done an upgrade of memory capacity. I’m still amazed I  managed to just sit there, watching him – without going ballistic because of all the work I wasn’t able to finish during the 3½ hours he was at it! Does that mean I’m mellowing?

Nah! Couldn’t be!

A Visit to Water Lily Pond*

Despite having both my knee and ankle bandaged, I ventured out to “my special place” to take some pictures. The weatherman is promising lousy weather the next few days, and I simply couldn’t wait any longer – or hobble around for that matter! Watching my step and taking it oh so easy, I made it all the way around the little pond – unscathed!

This is such an unassuming plant but I like the colour it gets in the sunshine like this. Notice the ant? I wonder how it got out onto the plant almost half a meter from land!

Oh, to have a little cabin on top of the rise! That will never happen as this is in the middle of a small Nature Preserve – but one should be able to stay overnight if using a camp stove… That’s something to do next summer!

*I haven’t been able to find a name on any map – probably because it’s such a small pond, so now it has a name:

Situation Report

First day of a new school year. Our class is the same and still not the same. Almost everyone seems to have grown at least 5 cm since spring and some of the boys have much darker voices.  The girls appear more poised, more grown up than last year – looking at their school pictures from Grade 7 I can hardly recognize them!

I’m still hobbling around, so for now I’ll have to resort to posting “old” pictures. The trees are beginning to turn different hues of  yellow and red – and I fully intend to be out there taking pictures come the weekend!

Father and Son

I’ve been looking after Loki’s father for the last few days and we’ve been walking along the shores two evenings now.

Raikko just loves digging up rocks and then either carrying them in his mouth or moving them around with his nose. Loki thought it looked like fun, but Daddy was not amused when he wanted to join… In fact, he gave his son a good talking to and really put him in his place!

Yesterday Loki was attacking the foam along the shore but unfortunately I didn’t manage to get a picture of him with a white “beard” of the stuff.

I’m hoping that Loki will learn a thing or two from his Dad – and not just the bad stuff. Raikko is mostly well-behaved but sometimes he forgets that…

In other news: I managed to sprain my ankle AND twist my knee yesterday…. I stepped wrong while taking out the garbage and landed in a heap with the contents of the bag draped like garlands all over me. As this was around 9 PM, I don’t think anyone saw me (no one came to my rescue, at least) and it took some doing, picking up myself and the garbage while in pain.

Excruciating pain, I might add.

This is the same ankle that got mangled during a softball-game about a hundred years ago and the knee that took the brunt of a skiing accident almost as long ago, and the rest of the evening was spent with an ice pack on my knee and a package of frozen mixed vegetables around my ankle. As the saying goes – “poverty is the mother of all inventions” and I couldn’t think of anything else that would wrap nicely around my ankle!

Oh well! This too shall pass!

Random Shot

Yesterday morning before work, I took Loki for a walk along the old stretch of a road outside town. The area is very popular with fishermen, and I saw one through the foliage along the old road. He was standing on the other side of the new bridge and I thought it would make a nice picture.

Well… In my hurry to make it to work on time, I didn’t check how the picture turned out until I came to the office, but I still sort of like the result.

Grrrr

… and today I left the USB-cable at work!

Grumble

The title stays, but I think I’ll skip what I intended to write about… Some things are better left until they have gone from a roiling boil to a slow simmer. I will however say this much – there is no known cure for Stupid, but it does seem to be a prerequisite for getting elected to our Board of Education.

I will try and write about the situation a bit later – in the meantime; Enjoy!

Worn Out

… are the two words that best describe me today.

On Friday I drove close to 700 km for an appointment with the Migration Board for -H- and today I made the same trek with my new guy -W- so he could have a first meeting with his lawyer.  Of course it would have been expedient if these two appointments could have been arragned for the same day, but… Like the lawyer explained – we’re on different teams and the Migration Board is not known for being accomodating at the best of times!

In any event, there has been some recent developments in the cases of my youths. -H- has been denied asylum and the interview we went for on Friday was about him returning to Iraq. I’m not going to go into great detail in regards to that – suffice to say that we’re hoping for some kind of miracle right now. That his Mom and uncle can make it to a country where they can obtain refugee status and then send for him, for instance. The Migration Board are not granting refugee status for anyone from Iraq these days – but they aren’t sending any people back either… Go figure!

The other youth I was trustee for, -B- was given a new trustee after he had been AWOL twice and spent a few weeks in a lock-down facility. I was prepared to carry on, but at the same time we felt that he might do better with someone else, someone whom he hadn’t tricked and lied to…

Enter -W- another 16 year-old boy from a North African country, orphaned in a car accident, placed in a child care facility, mistreated and finally sent out of the country by a kind employer and a smuggler. That’s about what I know at this point… I have no clue what his chances are to be granted a visa, but the least we can do is to hope!

This is a picture from the other night when I was walking around town to clean out the cobwebs in my brain.