On walks, the dog thinks I am dense: how can this human possibly miss all the great smells? How can this human walk right by the place where deer romped, and ignore the route deer took into the Gabriola woods? How stupid is that? And then snow comes, and I can see where the deer [...]
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Ah, Village Food Market. There you in in the dying light of late afternoon, covered in snow. The white becomes you. I’d suggest that you wear white more often, but then all of Gabriola would have to wear white more often, and that wouldn’t do.
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Weather’s gettin’ serious, kids. Environment Canada has given us a snowfall warning. For tonight, they predict: Snow at times heavy. Amount 5 to 10 cm. Windy. Low minus 2. Brrr. This is all because I don’t have my snow tires on yet. Sigh.
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We’re at the start of Gabriola’s monsoon season, but think ahead to summer, when we’ll all be short of water as the island’s summer visitors arrive. Maybe a sink like this would help get the message across about water conservation.
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It’s hard to think about winter when Gabriola’s in the middle of lovely warm weather, but look what the Seattle Times says: Winter could be a whopper. The most intense La Niña conditions since 1955 are brewing near the equator, raising the odds of a wild winter in the Pacific Northwest. Meteorologists say more rain, [...]
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Gabriola is easing into autumn. I watch alder and maple leaves swirling to earth in the forest, then come home and look at my green tomatoes. (Sigh.) And what comes to mind, you know, is Autumn Day – Rilke‘s poem. It is ever in my mind at this time of year.
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Gabriolan’s post about the woolly bear caterpillar reminded me that some people use these little guys to forecast the severity of the winter. According to a 2006 article in the Comox Valley Naturalist Society website: The width of the orange-brown band is known to predict the winter to come: if it is narrower than the [...]
We’re looking out at Mudge Island from the picnic table at Brickyard Beach. The table’s covered with leaves and rain, and so are we!
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You know it’s been a dry summer on Gabriola when we get excited at the sight of a puddle. Here’s the first puddle we’ve seen on the island since, oh, June or so. This is in the 707, and it’s a favourite puddle of ours because it freezes so nicely in winter. (Dog likes to [...]
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We’ve had stunning amounts of rain on Gabriola in the last while, so lots of people on the island are wondering where the sun has gone. Here! Here’s some Gabriola sun for you, or at least a reasonable facsimile. This is on the gate of the garden plot that belongs to People for a Healthy [...]
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It’s warm enough on Gabriola that we leave our jackets at home some days, and cold enough that we’re often sorry for it. It’s warm enough that we head to the beach more often than we did in winter, but cold enough that we take our hats. It’s sunny enough to make seagulls seem bright, [...]
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Having just had a rather long power outage, I’ve had plenty of time to compose this list. These are the good things about a power outage on Gabriola:
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Gabriola’s just had a monstrous storm and a 29 hour power outage, which has made life more interesting on all sorts of levels lately. One can never have too many beeswax candles, that’s what I always say. Fortunately our emergency kit includes both candles and vodka, so we fared well. I read Food Security for [...]
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You know you live in a (seasonally) wet climate when even the imaginary poultry holding down the end of someone’s driveway are wearing gumboots. I almost wrote that this fine feathered specimen was a duck; Min E. Mouse set me straight. In my mind, apparently, only ducks wear rubber boots. No, said Min E., it’s [...]
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Some readers of this blog are in other parts of Canada, dreaming of their next visit to Gabriola, or the Gabriola property they’re planning to buy very soon now. They imagine an early and perfect Gabriola spring, full of sunshine, warm breezes, and early-blooming flowers. Um, people? Just so you know, it’s snowing on Gabriola [...]
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Sorry about the snow this morning, kids. It happened because I thought about taking my snow tires off, and that always makes snow happen.
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Ok, Gabriola gardeners, here’s a question for you. When’s our ‘last frost’ date in a typical year? Have any of you been keeping track of this? Some of my seed packages say plant after last frost, while others say things like sow indoors two weeks before last frost date or some such. So that’s why [...]
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We get serious amounts of rain on Gabriola in the winter months, and we know people on the island whose basements and crawl-spaces flood every year. We also know some people whose Gabriola property is very swampy. With that in mind, I was fascinated by the land-locked floating house. (Go look!) How amazing is that? [...]
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