How many flags can you see?

As we were driving down the street, I only noticed the Canada flag on the top of the clock tower. . . as I was looking through the photo I noticed that there were a few more :) I guess Canadians are patriotic too.

Ontario, CA vs Ontario, CA

The 2 Ontarios . . . we had to take this picture of a sign for Ontario California, and then I couldn't resist having a corresponding one for Ontario Canada

What's lurking in your backyard?

You can find all sorts of wild life in Southern Ontario . . . This giraffe was seen lurking in the trees in Zurich, On. on Bean Festival day.

And these are cows :)  

I don't really know anything about horses, but as we were driving by a field, I took a random photo. . . turned out there were horses in it :) 

Swans, Swans, Everywhere Swans

Apparently they have swans everywhere in southern Ontario. I don't know why Stratford thinks they are so special :)
These ones are in Mitchell. But I saw some in Victoria Park in Kitchener too the other day.

Donkey

This lonely donkey, who lives at the Mitchell Lions Park, was trying to get out of the rain. Did you know that donkeys need to have friends. They prefer to live in pairs, and tend to get angry and lonely when they are forced to live alone. This donkey had a sign over the pen that said he bites . . . . but he's still pretty cute.

Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty . . .

Well, for those of you who haven't figured it out, I'm a crazy cat lady. Well, not quite, but probably will be in the future if I'm not careful :)
Here are some more pictures of Saru and L.E.

Saru



L.E.

Sedona

Here are some photos from my first trip to Arizona. These were taken the weekend I bought my new camera. On the way to the Grand Canyon we visited the nice people at Tempe Camera. After three hours and a small loan from George we were on our way with a brand new Canon Rebel XT Digital SLR camera. (Thanks George!)
Well I took a lot of photos that weekend. For those of you that have had to sit through me showing them to you . . . :P
Anyway, for the rest of you, here are a few taken in Sedona, on the way home.

Ontario Fields

This photo is taken in South-Western Ontario. A much different scene than the desert in Arizona.

Comment Spam

Hmm, I didn't realize that it was a problem, but I think I was just the victim of comment spam. But thanks to the advice of Ryan I have since removed the comments and turned on the verification word check on my comments. Geez. And I thought for a minute that I was popular :P
Anyways, this was just a post to vent. Have a great night.

C.

Birthday Party

I was at a birthday party today for my nephew. He is turning 4. It was a rather wild party. :) This is a picture of one of the animals there.

Back to Nothing

Well, I'm back in Canada, and clearly I've been to busy to do any updates. Too busy, too lazy, depends how you look at it really.
There hasn't been anything overly exciting going on. I spent a day at the Tai Chi Center gardening. That was a welcome change from life in the desert. Other than that it is pretty much just back to life as usual. Working, Tai Chi, eating, and sleeping (well I could use more sleep). Oh yeah and I read a book. Tuesdays with Morrie. It was a really good. I was very impressed with it. I highly recommend it to anyone.

Life may be tough some days, but atleast I'm not this bird. . .
:)
Actually, I'm quite happy to be back in Canada, and having a pretty good day today.

Pretzels

Apparently pretzels have a riveting history. Actually, it wasn't really riveting, but it was kind of interesting. They were first created by a monk who had some left over dough. He formed the dough into a shape that resembled the children as they worshiped. Then they were given to the children who studied hard in their religious studies as a reward. The word pretzel comes from the latin for "a little reward". After that, they have had a long history, but I kind of stopped paying attention to the tv at that point, so you'll have to find the details elsewhere.

Things I've Learned

• There are a lot of incompetent people in the world; many of them have higher paying jobs than me.
• Meetings are generally a waste of useful time.

Updates cont'd

Ok, so I did it. It took all day, but there is my month worth of updates. I think I will update on a more regular basis now. You may want to start reading at the other end of the blog, so that it makes more sense. (That is supposing that I am capable of making much sense.)

other Cities and Windmills

So do you think the people that live in the "other Desert Cities" feel bad that their city is not worthy of its own sign, but that "other" isn't even capitalized?

Notice the windmills in the background. I have never seen so many windmills as I saw on the way home from L.A. there must have been thousands of them. It was amazing.

What's in a name?

Do people think about what they are naming their companies? I used to work for a company named F.A.G. Bearings . . . This bakery company seems to suffer from a similar plight. . . . Although it does make you remember their name. I had some cake the other day and was very excited when I was reading the label to see in small print that it had been produced by Bimbo bakeries.

Night Photography

During the long drives back from the Grand Canyon and Los Angeles, I discovered that I could take some fairly cool photos using the lights on the road, and the motion of the car. Here are a few examples.

Mountain Monograms

Ok, what is with putting letters on mountains. In Arizona, and I assume in other places, they put the initial of the nearest city on the side of a mountain (or some other related letter). Now, that is fine. I just can't seem to find out why. Is there a purpose for these letters?


Mountain Near Coolidge

Boyce Thompson Arboretum

Today we went to a lightning photo exhibit. Ok, so it wasn't quite what we were expecting. There was a tiny room with probably about 20 photos on the wall. I mean there were some pretty neat photos, but just not quite what we were expecting. So after we looked at the lightning photos, we walked around the Arboretum. There were lots of desert plants from all over the world. Most of which seemed to be members of the pea family. There were some interesting insects, birds, and lizards. Unfortunately, I had been playing with the ISO levels on my camera, so my photos are kind of dark.








Here are some photos from the Arboretum (after a little bit of cropping and brightening). Enjoy.

Going to the Big City

Well I've always wanted to go to California and now I've gone. Was it everything I expected? Hmm, that's hard to say, I don't really know what I expected. I did have fun and the Ocean is cool, and the weather is soooooo much nicer than Arizona.

We were going to go to San Diego. After seeing the prices for hotels in San Diego, there was a slight change of plans. Friday afternoon, after work, we were off to Los Angeles.

So I booked a hotel through expedia.ca, after much searching for a place that wasn't too sketchy or too expensive. They sent me the address, and there were directions on the website. I wrote down the address. I figured, you know, we are going to get a map of L.A., and if we have the address, we'll be able to find the hotel no problem. . . . yeah, well, there are a lot of Dominguez Streets in Long Beach. And the one with our hotel on it was not in the street index. Needless to say, directions and addresses are not fungible. (Fungible is one of my new favourite words, well, actually I don't really like it, but due to work I get to use it a lot now.) Thanks to the help of some one not securing their wireless network, we were able to find directions using my laptop while driving around sketchy neighbourhoods. We arrived safely at our hotel shortly after midnight.

After a good night's rest, we travelled to Hollywood. We spent much of the day wondering around Hollywood Blvd. Although I don't think we saw any famous people (atleast not any that weren't wax), we saw lots of stars and hand prints.

We drove around Bel Air, looked at all the houses on the hill, well, mostly at the gates in front of the houses. There were spots on the road where we could see out over the city as we were going up the hill. It was an amazing view. It still seems silly to me to build your house on the edge of a mountain in earthquake country. But what do I know, I'm not rich :)

After that we went to see the Ocean. I really like the Ocean. I had been to the Atlantic Ocean before, but this was the first time I had seen the Pacific. They are very similar. They both just look like a lot of water :D. I really enjoy watching waves. I used to want to be a physicist so that I could study them. But that is another story. Any way, I got to take lots of photos of the Ocean and the beach. We were at Santa Monica beach. (That's where they filmed Baywatch apparently.) I hear that other beaches are nicer, but it wasn't bad.

On the second day we went to the Getty Muesem. It was quite the building. It is worth visiting just to see the architecture itself. You have to take a tram in order to actually get to the muesum itself, from the parking garage. So you have to wait in line to get into and out of the place. But overall it was a good place to visit, and I will probably go back if I get the chance.

After that it was just the long drive back to Phoenix. Six hours is a really long time. . .