Harriet the junkie

Home for a quick visit a couple of weeks ago. Gave the lawn a long-overdue mow, then spent a little time wandering around with Ozzie and Harriet, inspecting the late-summer/early-fall jardin. Here's what the deux chats think about manual labour:

But once the work is done, they can be persuaded to join in the walk-about.

Lots to see: the apples are hanging on, the spiders are working hard, the ceanothus is so relieved I didn't hack it back that it is having a second bloom.

We headed around to check out the asters and the helianthus.

This is when Harriet remembered what is really great about a freshly mown lawn. Quite apart from the fact that it is pretty, and easier for someone whose belly is only a few inches off the ground to walk across, there is also inevitably some inadvertently-shorn cat mint.

Whoa! Quel arôme!

Mmmmmmmmm.

MMMMMMMMMmmmmyumyumyum.

Oh yeah, this is great stuff.

Life is good.

A party in the Rockies

I've been away this fall, so not so many updates on the deux chats, but wanted to show you some splendour from my trip to Lake O'Hara this past weekend, where we gathered to celebrate and say goodbye to our friend Brian Everest. Lots of chuckling about his trickster ways when we arrived to find a foot and a half of fresh powdery snow that had not been there the day before! It was a wonderful day.

Snow fell steadily as we set out around the lake and started up the switchbacks to Opabin Plateau. Up...

...big and small...

...happy...

...up...

...until we emerged amongst the larches, which had kindly hung on to some of their orange needles, to give us even more drama.

We arrived at Opabin Prospect to some eddying gusts of powder.

We settled in anyway, ate our lunches, and then Joanne read a beautiful poem and we told stories and laughed and cried. Tod led us through Pete Seeger's "We Shall Overcome".

The spirit was with us, if not the words.

At this point the sun started to peek through the clouds, illuminating first one peak, then another. It was like celestial powerpoint. It kept this up for the rest of the afternoon. Here is a picture of Opabin Prospect taken from back down at the lake:

And here's Wiwaxy:

It was a wonderful day.