Lovely mail

Look what finally arrived in the post this week...

I was so very excited to receive it.

And I'll be even more excited to use it at the border crossing next week when we head down to Coeur D'Alene in Idaho. Woo hoo to this new Canadian citizen with her flashy new document and photo ID.

It's such a shame that, rather like my driving licence, I look like I've just been released after serving ten years!

Yellows and blues

 The Alberta farmland is looking stunning right now.

The yellows of the rapeseed/canola is in full glow.

And as the little puffs of clouds pass by, they create shadows galore over the fields.

Happy SkyWatch Friday.

Canmore - before the flood

A week before that awful deluge of rain in Canmore, Alberta, my family were up driving around some of the back roads in the area.

 Again and again I will say - what a damn 

pretty part of the world.

Beautiful hues and reflections.

Big skies.

Big landscape.

Big mountains,

and big smiles!

We will be keen to visit again later in the summer, and hopefully the devastation to the town, homes and roads can be repaired soon.

Happy SkyWatching 

and I hope you find those Big Skies in your part of the world.

Happy garden!

I moved to this home (and to Canada) six years ago.  After the first year of looking at a square of boring grass, 

I have spent many pleasurable, achy and expensive hours coaxing, poking and persuading the wee patch behind my house to play ball, and have pleaded with it to grow some nice "stuff" for me.

Finally, this year, the flowery borders have a bit of height, a decent splash of colour, and the lawn looks kinda OK.  

Free plants are the best kind!  I was given a few of those at the end of the 2011 season.  Everything came back up again last summer, but didn't really flower much or do itself justice - it was still getting used to it's new home,

but woohoo, this year - bang!  

Colour.  

Yay!

Flooding in Southern Alberta

Admittedly, I do bang on about the weather a lot on this blog. Alberta is so interesting you see - some of the most variable weather there is.

Today I have a legitimate reason to waffle on.  You may have seen some news footage about flooding in southern Alberta. Well yes, it has been a bit damp.

I live in a small town about 25km northwest of Calgary - and the Bow River runs through my town of Cochrane.  There are a lot of rivers criss-crossing this area, many fed at this time of year by the snow-melt off the Rockies.  Now let's add several day's worth of torrential rain.  It ain't pretty.

A month ago, my view over the river looked like this.

Yesterday it looked like this.

And this afternoon, it looks like this.

 There's a island under that lot somewhere.

The rail line needs a tidy up, from mudslides.

And the drains under the rail line are barely keeping up with flow coming off the hills around the town.

Poor old Canmore (about 45 minutes west of us) got hit hard. Raging waters and mudslides.  The TransCanada Highway has been shut since yesterday morning, effectively cutting off Canmore and Banff.

Photo courtesy of CBC website and John Gibson/Getty images.

There has been some startling footage showing the immense pressure and volume of the coursing waters.  What was once a creek became a gushing torrent of filthy muddy water, tearing through gardens, decks and houses in its powerful rage through the town.

Photo courtesy of Justin Kripps @ twitter

Downtown Calgary is another muddy mess.  Evacuations of some 75,000+ people began yesterday.  The Stampede grounds (which are due to host the Calgary Stampede in two weeks) have been flooded.  

Photo courtesy of Jeff McIntosh/Canadia Press

Even the Saddledome, home to the Calgary Flames hockey is apparently flooded inside, up to at least row 10 in the seating!

Colleagues from work have suffered terrible damage - one poor girl almost hysterical this morning as her whole home was filled with water, and others evacuated from downtown apartment blocks as main thoroughfares were under several feet of water.

And as I type, it is still pouring with rain - the roads are gushing mini rivers too - which all flows downhill back to the raging Bow River below.

It's gonna be messy for a while.

What a difference a month makes

On the 17th April 2013, we had a nice dump of snow.  

Again.  

April was long and cold, and it seemed that winter was simply going to refuse to give way.

But by the end of April, the temperatures finally rose quickly and the icy lakes melted and single blades of green grass proudly emerged from the dull landscape.  

And one month later, wow, what a transformation.

Foliage is alive.  The landscape has awoken.  

Calgarians have come out of hibernation.

And I have managed to spend a few hours weeding some flower beds and gathering some instant colour from hanging baskets and pots.

Colour, at last.  Yay.

Bad blogger

I am so behind on blogging and reading blogs.

I have been up to my ears in kid's dance competitions, choral rehearsals with a new director, and evening classes for the terminally insane (it's an accounting course and I'm barely keeping my head above water).

In fact, I am only typing this up now because I am off work today under the guise of revising for my final exam tonight, but it's lunch time and I am trying not to get sticky fingers on my keyboard as I munch my way through a Rappleberry bagel smothered in peanut butter and jam.  Yum! And if you are interested, it's being washed down with a blackcurrent tea and a chocolate chip cookie.  In fact, I had a yoghurty granola bar thingie earlier too, so it's a bit of a "Carbs R Us" day.  Great stuff.

The accounting course is killing me slowly, and giving me an inferiority complex.  I am a normal intelligent woman (on most days) but anything with those squiggly lines - you know,  numbers - gets me every time.  I cannot do mathematics.  At all.   Brain just flicks a switch and says "whatever".  Accounting is not quite maths - it's learning, by rote, a series of steps and entries to make your book-keeping work.  Which is fine, until you forget one little step.  Then you're buggered and everything you try to work on after that is a complete waste of time because the answer will be wrong.

I like words and language.  I like to be able to talk about things, talk my way out of things, to elaborate or to explain something three different ways. Accounting doesn't want to play like that.  Apparently, I won't earn extra points if I write some nice explanatory paragraph in the margin of my final exam explaining why I am a doofus and, sorry Miss, but I forgot how to enter discounts in my journal, or the ratio for working out inventory turnover.

And the crucial element really is that I can find no way in my brain to apply what I am learning.  I have somehow managed to get to 47 years old without knowing this stuff.  I can balance my bank account, I can run as good a household debt as anyone, and I am not about to apply for a job as a book-keeper.  So I am only doing the course because I have to, because it is part of a Management Certificate program that, at one point, I thought would be a good idea.

Onwards and upwards.  Four more hours of revision, then it's too late.  I will be lucky if I scrape together 50% to pass this exam.  And then I'm done.  Thank God!

Hopefully, normal blogging will return soon.

Oh, if that bloody Anonymous spammer could please just f*** off, that would be great, thanks.