Former Primeminister of Greenland 09/29/24

We were supposed to do a landing this afternoon but MJ made the call that we would stay in the shelter of the fjord. Fine by me. I’d decided to stay on board and loaf anyway. We are now underway, making for the mouth of the fjord. The weather looks like it will be better tomorrow and the hope is that we’ll be able to get to Nuuk. The former prime minister of Greenland, Aleqa Hammond,  is onboard, she will be giving a talk shortly and she is to leave the ship at Nuuk.

Aleqa left

Aleqa Hammond's talk was supposedly about climate change but it was more about how Greenland can move forward and the coalition of Arctic countries, Greenland, Canada, the US, Russia and one more I can’t think of. She said that she wanted Denmark to build 2 new airports in Greenland because it is becoming quite important in terms of Arctic security. Denmark wasn’t going to build the airports or lend Greenland the money so she  went to the US who weren't going to fund the airports either. She said she then invited the Chinese to tea. They were ready to build the airports and supply the labour. All of a sudden the US and Denmark became interested and Denmark came up with the loan at low rates of interest. She talked about how there were a lot of oil and gas resources under the polar cap, and there were also a bunch of rare metals and countries, like China, which has no access to the Arctic wanted to have a presence there. I gather there are a lot of ambassadors clamouring at the door to get a spot in Greenland,

 What we didn't hear anything about on the ship were the spicier parts of her financial dealings which, according to Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleqa_Hammond included two cases of misuse of public funds. From my perspective she was an interesting storyteller and enjoyed sharing her knowledge of Greenland.]

It’s a little bit annoying not to be able to set my watch to the proper time. I really do look at my watch a lot. My phone got the message so I’l just have to look at that. The e-sim I bought for Greenland seems to be connected but I’m not getting anything even though I have 3 bars. I’ll see what happens in Nuuk.

On another technology front, I carefully wrote down the instructions for getting photos off my phone and onto the computer. It

My messy part of the cabin on OE

 all sounded very straightforward and I practiced a bit before I left home. When I tried it just came up with blank rectangles where there should have been photo thumbnails. I guess I’ll do what I’ve done in the past, hope that all the data on the phone remains and then sort it out when I get home. Sigh!

We are going for a zodiac cruise in the morning down one of the fjords and then we are sailing onto Nuuk the next day. There are going to be bus tours but I think I’ll skip those and walk into town and just putter around with my phone and my camera. The last time we were there I was madly searching for a camera charger for the Olympus mirrorless (no luck). I’ll hit the museum again and the stuff around the old town and then go in search of some qiviut for Richard. 

Arrival at the Ocean Endeavour 09/29/24

Well this is a whole new experience! I don’t have internet and I assumed I could work in Google docs offline. I do think this is possible. I just don’t know how to do it and, of course, because I have no internet I can’t Google it to find out. So, here I am using Pages for the first time. I have no idea how this works and my sense of it is that it is somewhat cumbersome and it probably does not play well with Google docs which is what I normally use to write my blogs.

So let’s back up a bit. I’m currently on the Ocean Endeavour anchored in Kangerlussuaq Greenland. There is a storm brewing outside the fjord. Even here in the shelter of the fjord MJ [Matthew James Swan, expedition leader] clocked the wind speed at 37 knots. That doesn’t mean much to me so MJ said to multiply that number by 1.76 which gives us 65 kmh. I can see why we don’t want to be out in that. We are going to hunker down today and try to make it to Nuuk tomorrow. There is an excursion scheduled for this afternoon if the seas permit and I said I would go on the photo walk. Now I’m thinking I might just stay on board. I’m still feeling quite tired and maybe I need some time for my soul to catch up.

Yesterday we were late leaving Toronto because the plane was late arriving. When we got here it was dark and the ship stood glowing offshore with its lights reflected in the water. I used my phone to capture some photos and a video as we took the zodiac to the ship. I’ll have to try downloading the info to my computer a bit later on. I think it turned out not too badly. The phones now are certainly impressive. Did I mention that it was raining when we were out in the zodiac? Good thing we had our trusty AC jackets although I don’t think these are quite the quality that they have been other years. I noticed that parts of the jacket were wetted out even though it wasn’t a hard rain, just a steady one and we were only out in it for maybe an hour max. Like I always say, two choices in the rain, wet from condensation on the inside or rain from the outside. My trusty Grimsey sweater served me very well on this occasion. I will be very sad when it wears out. It’s one of those items of clothing that is going to be hard, if not impossible, to replace unless I take up knitting myself and I don’t think that will happen anytime soon.

I was lucky on the zodiac ride because I was right in the bow and nobody else seemed crazy enough to even try to take photos. I wonder if I can put a link to the video in my blog. There must be a way to do it. One more thing to figure out. [I couldn't get it to work but there is a link in the last blog post I made to YouTube where I eventually decided to place it.]

This morning we had a safety briefing and a lifeboat drill only this time we didn’t actually have to put on the lifejackets. Maybe because it was rather brisk outside and normally when we’ve done this it has been the middle of the summer. I wasn’t exactly crying briny tears that we didn’t put on the lifejackets but it is curious how the protocols change from one voyage to the next or, more properly, from one year to the next.

There are a handful of people that I have met before and it’s almost like coming back to a summer camp where you know the kids from last year.

Riding in the zodiac at night was very cool.

Saturday September 28: Haiku 1

Night rain soaks my head

Hot chocolate laced with booze

Through the dark, ship glows

https://youtu.be/g1MDR_7yNOo

And I'm off to Greenland

I think this may be a bit of a mishmash and I’m going to try it anyway. I took many many photos and I can only use a few of them in a regular blog post so the plan is to do some posts the regular way and some that are mainly photos with captions. 

Since I’ve just finished downloading all the photos from my phone I thought I’d start at the beginning of the Greenland to Newfoundland trip. As I think about it I might do one of these short ones for each day and then longer ones to talk about various aspects of the trip. At this point, I haven’t got a clue so hang onto your hats, or skip a bunch, whatever appeals to you.

It took me a while to actually find the hotel in Toronto even though I landed in terminal 3 and the hotel was in terminal 3. First I tried Google maps and ended up outside where one of people working at the cab stand told me I'd have to go back inside and up one floor.

I did that and wandered around not seeing anything that even remotely looked like a hotel. I wandered one way as far as I could and then started back the way I had come. I saw a sign for, I think it was terminal 2, and I thought I couldn't be going the right way. Just then I glanced to my left and there was a very small sign saying 'hotels.' It pointed up a set of steps. I went up the steps which looked more like a fire escape than a hotel entrance. By that point it was after 11:00 pm and there seemed to be no-one around. I kept following the signs through more back corridors and eventually arrived in the hotel lobby. I was happy not to have to find my way back again! When we went back into the airport to depart for Kangerlussuaq  we went out the front door of the hotel, across the street and into the departures area.

A warm day in YYC

Bye bye Rockies for a while

Not bad airline food

Where or where has my duffle gone? Don't panic. That was before any of the luggage came off.

Toronto hotel room. Lots more space than on the ship.

Images of fall

Larch tree with cones

As I noted in my last blog post, fall is my favourite time of year. It’s not too hot, not too cold, and there aren’t any residual icy surfaces like there are in the spring. I’ve been trying to get out for a walk every day and each day I notice more and more yellow leaves on the trees and on the ground. At first there were a few yellow leaves on the odd tree. Then there were more trees that sported their fall colour. A few days ago I noticed the first yellow leaf from our Manitoba maple had fallen onto the lawn.


Since this is a different kind of year for us and we don’t have any camping trips planned, I thought I’d take photos of some of the signs of fall that are within blocks of home. While I like to go to the mountains to see the larches, it turns out that there are several larch trees in the neighbourhood. Today they are still green, turning colour later than their cousins in the mountains. I’ll be watching for their needles to turn yellow and, for this year, once they turn, I’ll be satisfied with seeing the neighbourhood larches.

More yellow than not

One of many

Mountain ash berries

Red leaves in a hedge

Flowering plants

Ornamental grasses

Sunflower

Larch just beginning to turn

It's raining

It’s raining today which is a good thing. We are on the highest level of water restrictions again. Apparently the pipe that broke in June has other issues that need to be repaired so it won’t break again. Calgary is getting all of its water from the smaller of the two water treatment plants. The birds will like the bird bath filling up with water and the lawn and the trees will like the rain. We didn’t get a rain barrel earlier in the year so we aren’t collecting that water. Maybe next season we’ll get one.

Rain drips off one of the deck lights

I don’t mind the rain as long as I don’t have to be out in it for very long. I’ve done my share of cycling, hiking, and paddling in the pouring rain and it isn’t my favourite thing. Today I’m fine with it. It gives me a chance to drink tea, put on a fuzzy shirt and hunker down,  I don’t feel guilty about taking the car to an appointment this morning rather than riding my bike. I have another appointment this afternoon that is a few blocks away and I can walk there. Even if I get soaked it's a short time before I can get home and get dry again.

Reflecting puddles

I’m enjoying the cooler weather. It hasn’t been overly hot the last week or so and I really do like ‘sweater weather.’ It’s currently 9°C which makes it perfect for a light wool sweater and a breathable rain jacket.

With cooler weather comes fall, my favourite time of year. The leaves, though not like the red maples of Central Canada, are lovely enough for me. The nights are cool and one of the things I like to do is camp in the fall when I can reach up from my sleeping bag and turn on the furnace to take the chill off before I crawl out to face the day. Pretty luxurious camping and I love it. We won’t be camping this year but I will call to mind the fall trips we’ve taken in the past. Last year we camped at Writing on Stone provincial park and got to hear and see a rattlesnake at fairly close range. A couple of years before that we spent a week at Tunnel Mountain Campground in Banff and had a lovely time wandering into town for lunch or dinner and then returning to the van. Often we have left Little Elbow Campground in Kananaskis Country on the day it closes for the season and we have watched in our rear view mirror as the park staff tip up the picnic tables for the winter.

While it isn’t fall yet, the signs are there. I spotted the first yellow leaf on our Manitoba maple today. The wasps are super annoying and nighttime temperatures are dipping toward freezing although tonight is the only one forecast to be in the single digits for the next week.

A sign of fall

Then there’s the fact that the kids are back in school tomorrow. I hardly even notice that milestone anymore, this being the beginning of my 17th year of retirement, and also of this blog.

So what’s the point of all this? Nothing earth shaking, except to say that it’s a good day today. I’m comfortable with my cup of tea and Odie beside me whistling softly. I have work to do on my latest ukulele and I’m looking forward to actually having a reliable source of heat in the shop as the days grow colder. For now, I’m going to sit in the quiet of the house, drink my tea and admire Odie. Today I am content.

Odie enjoying a snack

Battling bugs and weeds

Creeping bellflower

I’m not much of a gardener and we had our back yard set up with as many perennials as we could when we had the shop built 15 years ago. Of course they do need some maintenance and we’ve taken out some; some have died, and some new species have volunteered.

Normally I’d say that volunteerism is a good thing but not when the volunteer is creeping bell flower. It’s all over the place in our neighbourhood and it’s very hard to get rid of. In order to finally eradicate it you have to dig down and get the rhizomes out. That’s a bit difficult to do because some of it is coming up in the middle of the juniper and the juniper has every right to be there as far as I’m concerned. There was a big patch by the back fence and I spent some time earlier in the year layering newspaper and mulch over it. That sort of worked but I see leaves of the pesky plant coming out on the sides of the newspaper patch.

I’ve kind of given up except to pull up any stalks I see with flowers on them. It won’t make the nasty stuff go away but, at least, I can keep a bunch of the flowers from going to seed and that has to be worth something, or so I tell myself. Since there is plenty of it in neighbouring yards and in the alley it’s probably a losing battle. At least I get the satisfaction of yanking it out.

The second pest I’m battling is of the insect variety. We have a Manitoba maple tree in our front yard. I’m sure it’s as old as the house is and it’s the only tree left of the three big ones that came with the property. The green ash was a city tree and it got cut down after a wind storm brought down some of its bigger branches. We had a weeping birch until a few years ago and we chose to take that down because it was infested with aphids. I’ve since learned that you can buy ladybugs to release at intervals and they will happily eat the aphids. I think we’ll get some next year because the Manitoba maple has aphids now and that tree serves as our air conditioning during the summer.

It’s not the aphids that I’m battling at the moment though: it’s the box elder bugs. Box elder is another name for the Manitoba maple. I had never seen these bugs until about a year ago and now they are everywhere. They don’t pose a hazard to humans or pets and they are quite striking looking. They do, however, leave nasty reddish brown stains on the siding and if they can get inside to keep warm for the winter they will. I’d just as soon not share my indoor space with a bunch of bugs.Only very desperate spiders will eat them because they, apparently, taste bad. I have to wonder if there is some poor sucker somewhere who has actually tasted them.

Adult box elder bug

Incidentally, they are true bugs not beetles and they change up to 7 times before they become adults. Apparently you’re not supposed to squish them because they stink and the smell attracts even more of the little devils. You can kill them by soaking them with a solution of water and dish soap. I decided yesterday it was time to take on the insect hoards.

I got a spray bottle, filled it with water and dropped in about a tablespoon of dish soap. Then I headed out in the heat of the day to battle the bugs. They like to congregate on the south side of buildings but there were a bunch of them on the west side as well. That’s where the Manitoba maple is. I have to say the dish soap solution is pretty effective at dispatching them but you have to really soak them and they, of course, will try to run. They also have a knack of clinging onto the building after they’re dead so you need to spray them some more to get them off.

Younger box elder bug

I’ve been having trouble with tendinitis in my elbow and I found that using the trigger on the squirt bottle didn’t help it much so I made a quick trip to Canadian Tire for a garden sprayer that I can pressurize. That is a lot easier on the hand and arm and I made my way around the west and south sides of the house killing bugs. When I checked today there weren’t quite as many and I saw fewer adults. I think going after the bugs will be part of my daily routine for the next little while and I need to clean up the leaf litter near the foundation of the house before it snows.There will probably be a new crop of bugs next year but I’ll get on it at the beginning of the season now that I know what to do.

Now, if only I could get rid of the creeping bellflower by squirting it with a little water and dish soap.