Status quo

Sometimes, a lack of change is good.

While others muse on Autumn after moving to a far, fair city, or wax eloquently about their new home after wandering to the Antipodes and back, I find myself, in many ways, where I was last year, and the year before, and the year before that. Which, I confess, suits me well.

I've an upcoming trip to Southern California, to the same general area as I visited before. That fits my comfort level nicely - I've been to LAX before, and rented a car from the same agency as I will this time. The trip down the Interstate I know well, and the final destination won't be hard to find. Even better, I know the hosts of the conference I'll be attending - it'll be a social visit, as well as business.

On the home front, despite frightening weather recently, things are calm - and pretty similar this year to last, too. The notable exception being that Mrs. Ricardipus is now a fully graduated, and (temporarily, we hope) unemployed school teacher.


A graduation rose.

And other things haven't changed much - still employed, still dealing with early-fall grant-writing season, and once again relaxing following the Mobil 1 Grand Prix of Mosport, which I and my brother also attended last year. We had the annual cottage weekend earlier in August, and it was pretty much as it always is, too. Which is a good thing.


The red Ferrari was around last year, too.

I really find that I'm content, in a Jane Austen, settled-in-the-neighbourhood, kind of manner. Yes, it's a quiet life, but I know my limits. I'm well in my comfort zone, and happy about it.

Memento mori

The Ricardipus-mobile, prophetically parked in a cemetary.

Friday morning, an enforced day off to deal with the sadly-stricken vehicle. Having been suffering from a mild case of throttle-lag over the last half-year or so, it decided yesterday that enough was enough.

About ten minutes from home, the CD player decided to cut in and out. At first I wasn't too surprised, since it skips from time to time, but fairly quickly it became obvious that this was an electrical, not mechanical, problem. Next, the car did something really weird - it refused to change gear. I'm pretty sure I was stuck in third, and nothing I did with the shifter (ok, you standard drivers, I know it's not really a shifter per se) would make it change - off with the overdrive button, which should have moved it from fourth to third, or into either second or first with the stick. Neutral, it could do fine, but that's hardly helpful for forward momentum.


Not so useful.

Nursing it around the last set of streets on the way home, all kinds of electrical gremlins started creeping in - the windshield wipers stopped working, the indicators started flashing at double-speed, which is usually indicative of a failed bulb, and the car was distinctly lacking in "get-up-and-go" (or, at this point, "keep-going-please"). Flipping off the headlights helped a little, but by the time I actually wheeled into the driveway, it was done. Just for fun, I shut it all down and then tried to re-start it... you could hear the crickets chirping.


That would be about right. Zero kph.

Maddeningly, it started just fine this morning and I was able to drive it down to the local dealership, a nice bunch of people who just opened, and are only taking delivery of their diagnostic service equipment today.


Maybe they'll lend me this one instead?

They are optimistic, but I rather suspect that the poor old Protege is not going to be ready to go for the annual cottage weekend, which is approaching fast. And, for added fun and games, with a train strike likely to start today, finding a rental car next week will likely be nigh impossible.

Cars. Stupid things. Too bad I love them so much.


This is where I need to get to.

Once again, an August weekend

Wheeling down Highway 401, listening to Neil Young, his guitar either whimsical and plaintive or like a horde of demented bumblebees, as he rips through the litany of classics on disc 1 of Decade. I'm on my own this trip, as Mrs. Ricardipus and the kids have driven down to Kingston ahead of time. I spent the last Wednesday in July breaking the back of a forty-plus hour consulting project, and the three-hour drive is a welcome break. Sharing the car with a couple of Ikea mattresses, some miscellaneous things for the annual cottage trip, and a budgie, this is maybe the first time I've driven any appreciable distance on my own in ten years or more.

This, of course, enabled by the still-reasonably-novel situation of having two cars, a first for us. Mrs. Ricardipus, driving her iPod-enabled Honda Civic, still with that "new car " smell:


It is shiny.

and me, in the aging Mazda Protege. Which has but a CD player, meaning that I've got a perfect excuse for trolling through my music collection, including that of Mr. Young and his Crazy Horse compadres.


The grill is slightly bent. I didn't do it.

Opinions vary among the smaller members of the family as to which of these is best described as the "stinky car", by the way.

The cottage trip was its usual self, with the addition of a family of friends who haven't been able to make it in recent years. At its top, ten adults, six kids, six automobiles, three inflatable boats, a canoe, and a sailboat. Oh, and seven fish, tying the record from two years ago.

While on-and-off rainy, there was enough sun and heat for plenty of swimming, and the rain and clouds made the lake and sky particularly beautiful, at times:


Big sky, big lake.


There was mist one morning.

And there was the usual selection of flora and fauna to look at. I've been trying for years to get a decent shot of a dragonfly, and I think this might just be it.



So there you have it. A mainly relaxing, occasionally hectic, and thoroughly satisfying long weekend on Desert Lake. More photos, if you will, are in the cottage set.

Endearingly geeky, as always

Playa_pixie, over at Flickr, whose home state I rather mercilessly dumped on in a couple of earlier posts, somehow or other got me to admit that I have, in fact, on one occasion eaten parts of that plant up there - the bullrush. Well, not that particular one, but you get the idea.

And the obvious question, of course, is: why?

Well, the answer lies in an endearingly geeky part of my youth when I was a dues-paying member of the Kingston Junior Field Naturalists. A group with meetings where we would learn about identifying birds, examine museum specimens and, on one memorable occasion, even skin small rodents. I was rather proud of the vole skin I produced, stinking of borax though it was. And I only nicked the bowel once with the scalpel, which was, truth be told, probably better than average. Let me tell you this - vole excrement smells like, well, crap.*

On a couple of other occasions, we had field trips to the Prince Edward Point Bird Observatory, overnight trips in the freezing cold where we patrolled the mist nets at regular intervals, plucking out Northern Saw-Whet Owls who'd gotten stuck in them while happily migrating along minding their own business. Cute little fellows, glaring stonily at us while they were subjected to a variety of indignities: being weighed, measured and having bands attached to their legs. They also have sharp talons, believe me. And we only hit one skunk with the car, another memorable experience that I strongly suggest you avoid at all costs.

But - the bullrush.

One of our KFN "activities" was a picnic, where each of us was supposed to bring food that was "found in nature". Thank goodness nobody brought bugs, but the rest of the fare was a bit suspect, there being not a whole lot of fruit and nut trees in that part of Southern Ontario at the best of times. I suspect that small, hard, bitter apples probably played a part, but I confess I don't really remember a whole lot about it.

What I do remember, though, is learning that you can grind up the tubers of the bullrush and make flour out of them. You can also eat the pith out of the stems, and maybe even the fuzzy part at the top if you're brave. Playa_pixie says these remind her of Corn Dogs, but I'm not convinced.

What I do know is that wading around in a muddy swamp, with Red-Winged Blackbirds dive-bombing your head, in search of tiny little roots that when ground up and baked in scones end up tasting, like, well, perfectly ordinary scones with bits of fibrous crud in them that gets stuck between your teeth, is not perhaps the best way to spend any part of a summer afternoon.** But I did it nonetheless, contributed my effort to the picnic, and as a result, 25 years later, you've all learned something about bullrushes and me that you didn't know before.

See? It's all about education here at the Ricardiblog. Really.

*I'm going to have to pay Scaryduck royalties for this one, you know I will.
** We may have a new contender for Longest Sentence On The Ricardiblog™

The annual cottage trip, again

Just like last year, but with fewer fish.

Five adults and four children under the age of seven, all under one roof for a long weekend. It wasn’t restful, but it was fun, and a nice break from all of those reports I keep whining about. I think this is the twentieth year in a row we’ve done this on the August Civic Holiday weekend, but I confess that I haven’t really been counting since 1989 or so.

Except that this year, there were no fish to be caught. None. Probably because the only morning we all didn’t sleep in, it was raining, and if there’s something I like even less than getting up early, it’s getting up early and getting wet at the same time. By the time the rain had stopped, it was way too late and the fish were engaged in other pursuits, like hiding under the dock, lounging around chatting with each other, and generally not eating rubber and epoxy imitations of food items that they probably wouldn’t be interested in even were they made from meat and skin and bones and tasty, tasty worm-flesh.

How’s *that* for an image, hm?

Anyway, there were some nice fungi:



a walloping great insect or two:



a lot of trees and undergrowth:



and some really impressively curly birchbark.



As well as a rather nice white-tailed deer, running off into the bush, lots of very attractive orange-and-black Monarch butterflies, black-and-orange Netwing Beetles, and the usual not-so-attractive mosquitoes. Plus some rather nice spiders down on the dock. It always helps to have a friend who's a technician in the entomology department of the Royal Ontario Museum along for the trip to identify these things.

And no major quibbles, problems, hassles or other hiccups – just minor ones like slightly damaging the car’s front fender while executing a less-than-elegant three-point turn rather close to a large rock. Fortunately, my brother was around, and with his experience in rallying he’s become rather adept at fixing cosmetic (and not-so-cosmetic) damage to a wide variety of vehicles, including our aging Mazda Protegé, as it turns out. So all is well.

It wasn't, however, exactly a vacation in Antigua. And for that, I am thankful.

(More photos on Flickr).