Strange things

This entry is updated - see blue text below.

I had the misfortune of having to take a sudden trip to Edmonton. Actually, it was a misfortune for my whole family as the reason for the trip was my dad had a massive heart attack and passed away. That is the reason for the change of colour scheme on this blog - to indicate that the world has changed for us. We miss you Dad!!

February 11, 2010

When I was away, Freda was walking the dogs and noticed this strange alien looking claw sticking out of the snow. Freda had to use my old camera, which doesn't really work that well anymore, and this is what it captured. This 'claw' reminded me of ET, from the movie of that name.

Strangely, on the flight home from Calgary, I watched an old episode of Dick Tracy from the 1930s or so, and had a villain who was called The Claw. I am just guessing at the year of the movie as it was listed as 2009, which clearly it was not.

Yesterday we went and looked for The Claw and took another photo. I put my winter glove in the photo for scale, and you can see that the claw is huge!! It also looks a lot like it's from a large bird. Freda was talking with a friend Isabelle who said that it is a red-tailed hawk wild turkey. Apparently foxes bury their food for later consumption.


Red Tailed Hawk - photo taken August 8, 2009

I did take a photo of a pair of red-tailed hawks last August, unfortunately they were almost all fuzzy. This is the best photo that I have of a Red Tailed Hawk, it's only one of the pair because the other photos are blurry (sorry). As you can see from this photo, they are quite large birds. Yes, it is true that Red Tailed Hawks are large birds, but they are still too small for The Claw... (I should have thought of that before...)

We are dog sitting this week. Toffee joined us for a week in mid-February last year, and is visiting us again this year. Toffee is a yellow lab but has very different colouration from Tawny. It was a beautiful temperature this morning, so I got the dogs to sit at the end of our walk and pose for a picture. Aren't they cute?


Panorama February 16, 2010

I got the dogs to sit while I took 11 photos for a panorama, and this is the full panorama. As you can see, we haven't had much snow since January 1st, and of course the heavy rains that we had melted quite a bit of snow. Edmonton actually has more snow than we do here in Ottawa.

The dogs were very tired this evening, because we had a long walk this afternoon. As a result, they were all quite well-behaved. Freda wasn't though, as she's having some fun at Toffee's expense!!! haha :) But Toffee is a dog and doesn't mind at all.