By the Lake

Lakeshore Walking Path, Penticton

High Pressure Blue Sky

Strolling by the old ships...

....And the patterns in the sand and ice

Resting Gulls

Lots of ice on the Lake today. Usually the Ring-Bill gulls float on the water together. Today it was their choice to sit on the ice facing the warm sun. Tomorrow we will have fog and minus four degrees Celsius. That means black ice on the roads. We have already seen quite a few dramatic road crashes because of invisible ice in this part of the world. People ending upside down in roadside rivers for instance. We hope our coach driver does well for us as we negotiate the Coastal mountains in the morning...
Wish us luck!

High Pressure

High Notes

Snow in Enderby

Watch Out Hanne!

Shushwap River in February

Dinner with Friends

We are sitting on the weather map under a big "H" for high pressure, so the air is still and the sun is bright. We are off soon to the West Coast so our photos will change.... We hope you enjoy some warmer air wherever you go this week-end!

Yasuni

Evening Sky

Windy Walk

Old Barn

The Blue House

Yasuni is an interesting place in Ecuador. It is now a National Park full of diverse species of all kinds, some have said the most diverse on Earth. It has become a fashionable ecotourist zone. Another interesting fact about the park is its vast oil deposits, which will at least for the present remain untapped, as the government is not permitting oil drilling. This will protect the biodiversity, the resident native's way of life, and prevent pollution somewhat. There is a good video on this link you should enjoy watching.

Word Wild Wednesday

I don't usually go in for these "day" things but here is my own contribution.

Woodland Scene

Bald Headed Eagle

Snow Melting

SW English Harbour ( Painting)

(I love playing with words!)
1. I was interested to find that I could add every vowel to the ending "nkle" ( or "nkel" ) and still make a word. Ankle we know. Enkel is German for grandson. Inkle is a piece of coloured linen tape used for trimming. Onkel is Danish and Norwegian for uncle. Uncle is the last. (c is used in English for k).
2. Locomotive. Motive means "causing motion" and loco means "from a place". Loco in my early schoolboy days was slang for "crazy". No connection. ( "Loco" means "crazy" in Spanish! who knew? I didn't.)
3. This all started in the night when I heard noises in my tummy. These are called "Borborygmi" . That leads to onomatopoeia, ( a word that has almost all the vowels) and so we come full circle.

"The cat meowed for attention,
The phone crackled by mistake,
I crunched on my food,
What noise do you make?"

This is an onomatopoeic poem by Marinela Reka, you can learn more about her here.

4. Finally borborygmi leads to Borabora, a wonderful tropical holiday resort island in the Leeward Island group. Maybe you would like to go there to escape from this winter's arctic air, or to escape from crazy bloggers....?

World Events

Escape to a stroll by Mission Creek, Kelowna

Or with a stroll by the Okanagan River......

......In February

We are quietly going about our everyday lives, meanwhile world events seem to be acceleratingly more numerous and sometimes more threatening. The answer: stop reading the newspapers. Oh yes! another problem with a simple solution: head-on collisions will not happen if we have one way roads. In the meantime, comment on whether you prefer life in bright or dull colours: the two paintings here on today's post are two interpretations of a day in February by the Okanagan river....

Controversy

Some colour  amidst the winter snow

Okanagan Lake from Summerland

More Blue Sky

I was interested in reading about the successful American novelist Jonathan Franzen ( his father was Swedish, mother American) who has some controversial ideas. He came to my attention as a speaker at the Hay Festival in Cartagena just ended yesterday. One of his ten rules for writing a novel is to never use the word "then" as a conjunction; use "and" instead. Another rule is to write without an internet connection. He uses head phones to block out extraneous sounds whilst writing. He also believes that serious novel reading is only possible using a printed book. However his own books are available on e-readers. I suppose most novelists are somewhat eccentric. Some still write with a fountain pen, standing up....He was upset when one of his novels was picked by Oprah for her book-club choice, because he thought her book choices were just for women readers. Well, Jonathan writes about controversial subjects in his novels, so no wonder this spreads to his own life. I prefer that he is just eccentric, so I won't get upset by his controversial ways.....

Ice

This post is quite topical for today: I noticed a headline " Severe cold weather heading for UK".
 We have had unusual cold here recently, which led to frozen pipes, which caused several house fires when folk tried to unfreeze their pipes with a blowtorch.

Water expands when it freezes, causing also burst pipes. Ice floats too, and our lakes freeze over in some parts. When the whole surface freezes over, the rest of the water underneath is protected, so living things can survive. It could have theoretically frozen from the bottom up. We all know the common forms of ice, snow, hail, icicles, glaciers, pack ice etc but I didn't know that ice is a mineral; that ice making machines make three different kinds, called flake, tubular, and plate; that  there are other forms called pancake ice, ice pellets,and feather ice; that the reason we can skate on ice is because the layer next to the air has a different structure, being more unstable and therefore more slippery; and that quite a few other volatile liquids can make ice, for example dry ice from carbon dioxide. There are also a total of fifteen different chemical/physical forms of ice....

Frozen Dock, Okanagan Lake. Snowing on the Hills.

Block of floating Ice (thanks to Wikipedia)

Enough said. As you can see from our first photo, there is no sailing today.( Hey! wait a minute! what about going ice-sailing on Vaseux lake?? )