Category Archives: marginalia

Talkin to Mom and Cathi’s found her first novel :)

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Monday, July 6th, 2015 -( 19˚C / 66˚F @ 12:59 am in the dark up here in Atlantic Canada )-

Lighthouse.

The Lighthouse on the Green in Fredericton, one of our favourite Ice Cream, seafood and sandwich places- We’ve had our second visit of the season, and it ice cream is sensational, as ever. 🙂 Photo taken in September 2013.

Talked to Mom and Sharon (my sister) tonight via Skype. They’re in Alaska. And I’m on the other side of the continent. I tried to take a couple screenshots of the conversation, but in my hurry, I pushed the right keys on the wrong computers and then wondered why the pictures didn’t take. -duh!- Both Mom and I felt slightly under the weather for part of today. I thought my problem was going through a box we haven’t opened since we got here and maybe breathing in mold or something. After I ate something for dinner and chilled for an hour or so I was fine. Maybe the electromagnetic atmosphere around mother Earth isn’t feeling all that great and sharing her blahs with us sensitive human beans. 😉 Anyway, I had a very nice talk with Mom and my sister and we’re hoping we can talk again on Friday when we may experience fewer interruptions. 😉

& recently – Getting ready to clear 757 photos from the card in my camera, I uploaded those to a backup computer and founds lots of yummy stuff from the past five years – much of it might only have been on the backup computer, which now has a couple lovely screenshots that were not of me and mom skyping happily earlier tonight. I’m thinking some of those older photos should be on a History page here in this Archives blog

For right now, let me say that the Lighthouse on the Green here – the above photo is from a stormy day two years ago – is charging $2.00 Canadian $’s for people to climb to the top and look out over the city- proceeds to benefit SPCA Fredericton 🙂 🙂 🙂

Al Fresco

This is a shot of the Lighthouse on the Green’s ‘Dining Room’ taken on September 27th, 2013. See what you’re missing?

— Achy but optimistic in Atlantic Canada –,

~~~~~ Jim

Yesterday? Today? or Tomorrow?

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Cat with a 'lion cut'

Moe after his visit to the hairdresser’s 😉

Cave and other stand alone stones

The other side of the below cave- with human silhouettes for scale

A cave that had been eroded into the base of a now standalone stone at 'flowerpot rocks'

Hopewell Rocks from well below the high tide line.

Saturday, 30 August, 2014 -( 15˚C / 59˚F @ 11:11 pm )-

It’s been a busy week- Cathi had the week off. Neither one of us was feeling all that good all week. We took Moe to the vet’s to get his matts trimmed away and he was pretty darned good about it until the groomer got the ‘buzzy’ too close to spots where cats want no one to go with a hair trimmer- So- nobody got slashed or shredded and he only refused to talk to us for a couple hours and now he looks like a lion, and he can strut around showing off- Cathi said he was much better in the temperament department after he realized he could lick his fur without anything pulling.

On Friday we drove to the Bay of Fundy. The map we got with a visitor’s guide stunk. The GPS wanted to send us straight east to Moncton and then down. Friends, and daughters, had told us to take the seaside route, down to Sait John and turn left. We got going a little bit late. The map looked like we were about to make a wrong turn and I told Cathi we needed an exit that the map looked like we needed to take. So we only got a little bit lost, and the most direct route to ‘Hopewell Rocks’ had a few too many construction sites along the way, but we did stop for some home-made ice cream and made a friend, I think- Nice guy who uses all natural ingredients, he’s 73 years old and looks younger, and he thought I looked younger than I told him I am. I left him a link to a web site and an email address and never thought to ask his name. He lives on the west side of highway 114 a bit north west of Alma.

We got to the rocks at twenty minutes to closing and the light was not so good when we got there. But I think I got one decent photo to replace another photo at the top of one of my blogs and that worked out okay, I think.

Today I felt lousy and had strange fever dreams, one of Tony Soprano’s enforcers came around to axe me what was the hold up with getting my mother out of the house she had sold to a nice little old Italian lady who had bad friends and no patience. And a melancholy girl who had been kicked out of her home by her mother, supported by her grandmother for a couple years and then told not to come home without a job or money for rent and grandma and aunty didn’t care what she had to do to get it, wanted to know if she could make a lot of money posing nude for a photographer and I guess I looked like a photographer and I felt awful for her and gave her the keys to my travel trailer (In the dream I had a small travel trailer- not the tiny- made in Canada ones, but small and when I got her there she was afraid to stay in it alone, so I slept at the kitchen table while she slept in the bed and I don’t know how that turned out because I woke up.

The photos did not load where they should have- and when I tried to click on one to try to see if I could move it down and write above it- everything else on this page disappeared.

But I got it back, I can live with this- so I guess I can’t complain too loudly-

(—AAAaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggh!)

~~~~~Jim

Earwigs – (shudder)

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Saturday, August 9, 2014.

While flattening out once-crumpled packing paper in the basement, to empty and flatten boxes and make room to move stuff around down there- I moved a pile of clean kitchen towels and discovered two earwigs hiding beneath them. (‘creepy’)

So then I wondered what earwigs eat.

And then tonight, I looked it up on wikipedia and this is what I found there:

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Earwig

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Earwig (disambiguation).
Earwigs
Temporal range: 208–0Ma

Late Triassic to Recent
Earwig on white background.jpg
Female common earwig, Forficula auricularia
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Subphylum: Hexapoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Dermaptera
De Geer, 1773
Suborders
Synonyms
  • Euplecoptera
  • Euplexoptera
  • Forficulida

Earwigs make up the insect order Dermaptera and are found throughout the Americas, Africa, Eurasia, Australia and New Zealand. With about 2,000 species[1] in 12 families, they are one of the smaller insect orders. Earwigs have characteristic cerci, a pair of forceps pincers on their abdomen, and membranous wings folded underneath short forewings, hence the scientific order name, “skin wings.” Some groups are tiny parasites on mammals and lack the typical pincers. Earwigs rarely use their flying ability.

Earwigs are mostly nocturnal and often hide in small, moist crevices during the day, and are active at night, feeding on a wide variety of insects and plants. Damage to foliage, flowers, and various crops is commonly blamed on earwigs, especially the common earwig Forficula auricularia.

Earwigs have five molts in the year before they become adults. Many earwig species display maternal care, which is uncommon among insects. Female earwigs may care for their eggs, and even after they have hatched as nymphs will continue to watch over offspring until their second molt. As the nymphs molt, sexual dimorphism such as differences in pincer shapes begins to show.

Some earwig specimen fossils are in the extinct suborders Archidermaptera or Eodermaptera, the former dating to the Late Triassic and the latter to the Middle Jurassic. Many orders of insect have been theorized to be closely related to earwigs, though the icebugs of Grylloblattaria are most likely.