Whoa!! Snow????

What???? It is snowing!! Fortunately it won't really stick around. :)

First frost

Our first frost - 7am October 4th.

Foggy foggy foggy

It is very foggy this morning. I took this photo after I returned from walking the dogs - you couldn't see the lake at all! In fact, the fog was thick, my hair got wet from walking in it.

Finally, some rain!

After a long dry spell, we had some rain. Torrential rain, actually, for two days in a row. It was nice to have the rain as it broke the oppressive humidity.

August 4, 2010

Rain fell so heavily that the water couldn't run off the path faster than it was falling! We had about an inch of rain in 40 minutes. Some parts of the city had flooding and power outages. Fortunately we weren't affected like that.

I had left the towels out to dry (we dry the dogs off after their afternoon swim) yesterday, and didn't bring them in before the rain started. So I left them out to dry overnight and during the day, but they got soaked again in the rain.

August 6, 2010

We have only seen a few monarch butterflies around this year, far fewer than we normally see. I was able to snatch this photo of one when I was out with the dogs on their morning walk.

Flowers, beautiful flowers!

Okay, this isn't flowers - this is an approaching storm coming over the lake after a hot Hot HOT summer day.

Two bees in a portulaca flower. You can see pollen all over the bees (click photo to see larger version).

Beautiful Explorer rose!

This is a Huchera plant - not sure if I spelled it properly (sorry!).

Berries and Birds

I found some blackberries growing wild. They were tasty. I might go back tomorrow and pick some.

This is our big elm in the front yard. At the top, just to the left of centre, there are some yellow and dying leaves. Oh no! Does this mean this big tree going to succumb to the dreaded Dutch Elm Disease too???

After supper and the news, we sat outside and enjoyed the beautiful evening. Strangely, there were no birds around except for two robins that mostly just sat on the fence.

Here they are sitting on the fence (one at far right and the other ar far left).

A close-up. We think this one is the female of the pair.

And this is the male bird (we think).

Later in the evening, the sky got very dark and we could hear the rumble of thunder. We were hoping for rain. The dark cloud passed over us and then the sky started getting brighter and we though, how disappointing, no rain. But then it started, and it rained for about an hour and sometimes quite heavily too. As you can see from the brown patches in the lawn, we really needed it!

Tomatoes are doing well

All the warmth and sun means the tomato plants are doing well. Although we have to give them a good drink every day since they are in pots. There are two different kinds of tomatoes, a cherry tomato and beefsteak kind of tomato. Can you tell which is which?

All the hot weather lead to extreme weather warning. First we saw dark clouds around us. We could hear thunder and saw rain falling to the north and west.


And then we got some quite severe winds. The red lines indicates the normal line where this little maple tree usually stands. It was almost bent over.

The elm tree in the front yard was really blowing all over - we thought that perhaps some branches might break off. The sign was blowing past horizontal - as indicated by the blue line.

We got a little bit of rain, but not enough. The lawn is looking parched as you can see. I put the hose on for the elm and the service berry tree on Thursday.

Cathcup

May 10, 2010
Some beautiful tulips that have escaped being eaten by the deer!

May 7, 2010
The colts from the horses down the road. Sometimes they are playing - chasing each other around the filed - as we go by. It really is like a postcard everywhere you look.

May 8, 2010
It was quite cool when we werw walking the dogs on Sunday (May 8th). Sure enough, we walked through a bit of hail - see the white spoks on Taz's back.

More snow!!

It's snowing again!! It seems like it hasn't stopped snowing since I returned from Edmonton. At least it has been mild, near 0C, so that part is good - even though it does make the snow a sloppy gloppy mess, especially on the roads.

a mild day for Primer

It was very mild. I went on poop patrol in my painting shorts, my wellies, and a toque!!

Since I was painting the primer in the basement, I also slapped a bit of primer on the closet patch.

This is what the basement looked like when it was painted with primer. Much improved!

Blizzard!!!

12:45pm, January 28, 2010

This photo was taken just behind the garage, looking toward the back yard -- you can barely make out the fence here. I posted this photo on The Weather Network's photo gallery.

12:48 pm, January 28, 2010

I took this photo when I was standing under the cedar trees behind the fence, looking toward the house. This photo doesn't do the storm justice, and it doesn't convey the bitter wind which was blowing the snow into a frenzy. In order to take this photo, I had to stand right in the middle under the tree, to get some protection from the snow so the camera didn't get covered in water.


Update: I made this post only 30 minutes after I took these photos and now the snow flurries have passed and the sun is bright through the clouds overhead. More updates below.

2:10 pm, January 28, 2010
4:30 pm, January 28, 2010

Snow panoramas

11am, Jan 26th, 2010

We had a sudden round of snow flurries around 11am. It looked like a snowstorm, but it was very short-lived.
5pm, Jan 26th, 2010

Of course, the flurries were very brief and we received less than 1 cm of the white stuff. This photo shows that it didn't even cover some of the slope on the hill that was exposed by the warm weather and rain.

Record January rainfall

A warm front moved in last night, bringing freezing rain with it. It was +6C this morning and the freezing rain was just plain rain. This photo was taken around 11am when the rain was quite heavy - not sure if you can tell in this photo. Needless to say, I expected the rain to melt a lot of the snow.

The rain finally stopped around 3pm, and I took this photo around 5pm. It was still +6C at that point, and you can see the effect of the rain and the warm temperatures on the snow. Virtually all of the snow and ice on the road has melted, and the lake is covered with large puddles of water.

According to this CBC report, Ottawa received a record 45mm of rain by 3:45pm, the previous record was 11mm. A number of roads were flooded - including parts of Highway 401 and some on/off ramps on Highway 417. Cross-country skiing trails were also closed, as was the Rideau Canal which was closed to skaters.

Snow.... and the Weather Network

Well, it's snowing. Big surprise! But this is a real surprise.

I looked at the Weather Network to see the forecast, and I saw that the two photos I uploaded to the Weather Network Gallery appeared on this page! The sunset on the left and the crystal fence photo. Cool! And that is a surprise.

Not snowing... yet!

Pano January 6, 2010

I took this photo out over the back yard because the sky was so very dark. It's not snowing at the moment, but snow is forecast. If we don't get any snow today then it will be the first day it hasn't snowed this year.

Update: it didn't snow after all, so the "it snowed all year" jokes have to stop now...

Snowing all year

Pano - January 5, 2010

This is a picture of a snowfall. And I should tell you that it has snowed all year, every day this year! Yes, it started snowing on New Year's Eve and hasn't stopped. Oh, it hasn't been a heavy snowfall but to make up for that Mother Nature made sure that it was very cold and windy, which made it most uncomfortable to be outside - and that includes running the snow blower of course!

The above panorama photo is composed of 4 images, stitched together via Microsoft's ICE program (a free download). The only problem is that sometimes I don't get enough coverage with the photos and I get a black section somewhere - essentially a space not covered by any image. The photo above was one of them. I had two programs that I had tried before but with disappointing results for both of them, so I didn't use them. I tried again with this photo, and ImageMender worked quite well for this photo with only a few artifacts, and the leftmost branch of the tree on the right side of the photo was repaired quite well too. The other program, InPaint, didn't work very well as it stuck pieces of branches in the middle of the sky at the top of the image. Not good.

Still cold!! And still snowing!!!

Well, yesterday the forecast for today said -2C and it is -7C and high winds so it feels like almost -20C. And of course, the snow is continuing - it's a light snowfall, but still a snowfall.

The photos below are a bit blurry - sorry. The dogs were on the move and I was trying to take a photo of them before my fingers froze off.

Even though it's cold, Taz sometimes sticks his whole head under the snow to sniff something particularly wonderful.

Tawny was on the move with her Kong Wubba toy. Normally she will drop it so we can throw it and she can fetch it, but not today.

Freezing rain

Boxing Day dawned with freezing rain hitting the window. This was the view out the front where you can see glittering ice sheathing the tree branches (on the right side of photo).

The freezing rain was coming from the northwest, so the windows on the back of the house were coated in ice, as you can see from this photo.

There were a lot of little icicles on the eavestroughs.

Our poor little sugar maple is bent over with the burden of the ice. This reminded us of the ice storm back in 1998 that completely bent birch trees over, where the trees were bent double and the tops of the branches were touching the ground.

This photo was taken just after 9pm, when the freezing rain had turned to snow. It sounded like the freezing rain was still falling, but that was just the sound of the ice creaking on the trees as they moved in the wind.

The Million Dollar Storm

The first winter storm is OVER!

Pano - December 10th, 2009

I took this panorama this morning before I took the dogs for a walk. We got something on the order of 20 cm of snow. You can see the lake is still open in places (might need to click on the photo to see the full size version). The press is reporting that the snow clearing for this storm cost a million dollars, as if it's a big deal or something. Well, that cost was budgeted so it was expected - I think they just like to throw big numbers around.

The really tricky part was that although the snow had stopped falling, the wind was pretty strong and created a lot of drifting. I had to call for the road to get plowed when I came home. Someone had made a path down the road before the snow plow went down the road.

At least it wasn't cold (like it is out west), except for the wind.

First snowfall!

Tawny enjoying the light snowfall on our walk this morning.

Pano Dec 7, 2009
The snowfall was so light that you can't even really see it in this photo. Although you can see that there was some snow because there is white snow on part of the lake - where the snow fell on the thin layer of ice that's on part of the lake.