oh really weather, you think so?

It is October. This should not be happening. I mean, really...

Snow? Enough to stick to the front of the car and create actual visibility problems? In October for crying out loud?

This was the side of the car after hanging out at my parent's house for a bit eating home made muffins and drinking coffee. This shouldn't be happening in October where I live.

Mind you, the presence of snow and fall colour at the same time can make for some really gorgeous partial colour photographs which don't require photoshop. This is something to be thankful for. One thing I do look forward to is the diffuse, even light which envelopes everything once the snow starts.

Also, horses be frisky in this kind of weather. This guy was just motoring. Not when I took the picture, but just after. Honest.

This morning, though, the sun was out, the sky was blue, and any snow present came while we were all asleep and was therefore less offensive. It was also melting like crazy which was encouraging.

Coffee though was warm and good.

And seeing as this is Canada, the beer store is open seven days a week...

old revisited

Yesterday, a good friend of mine and I went out on the bikes for a wander around the city rather than go on a longer ride on the cyclocross bikes. I am still recovering from a bad cold that has settled into my lungs and longer rides are not happening yet. The weather was about perfect for it with temperatures hovering around 14 degrees Celsius with a fairly stiff wind. For November in Southern Ontario, that is almost idyllic.

We ended up on a trail which follows a creek in the south end of Kitchener that I have not ridden down in a very long time.

 Unlike many suburban trails, this one actually goes someplace and connects several different subdivisions together and links them, in a round about way I will grant you, to the city's major trail networks. It is very pretty, and with yesterday's wonderful weather, quite heavily used. I will have to make a point of returning again for another look around.

The trail ends at the remnants of an old settlement and still contains several buildings of note. The one pictured here is a car garage which used to be an old stable house.

Again, on my list to revisit, preferably when it is open, to see if they mind if I wander around the property and take a few pictures of the building.

remnants

Two times of year rate as having significant change.

We are in the midst of one of them.

Change always brings the leftovers, the holdouts, the things that must go in order to make way for the new.

Not always a bad thing this. Sometimes, beauty presents itself in that last gasp before succumbing to the inevitable.

ten minutes plus one

The other day I had a chance to tour around the city again on my bicycle and bring my camera out for an airing.

This past month has seen some incredibly wet weather. The region's weather patterns shifted from abnormally dry, almost drought like conditions through most of the summer to abnormally wet conditions - October received something in the order of 100mm more rain than normal and approximately five days when it did not actually rain. And not all of those days were sunny.

It was a joy to see blue sky and the sun again.

The center of the older part of Kitchener has as its crown jewel Victoria Park. It is a place of majestic trees, water, and older homes.

I spent approximately ten minutes on the island in the middle of the park taking pictures of fall colour in some of the most rapidly shifting light I have seen in a very long time.

 Plus one.

Those clouds hold a promise of what is to come for us regarding our weather. On the right is the old Uniroyal Rubber plant, and on the left some other buildings dating from the same time period. I am standing on the main rail line through the city. Those clouds? They are snow clouds.

Winter comes.

you can keep november

I am not a fan of the month of November.

Before I discovered the joys of winter riding a couple of years ago, November heralded the start of the end of the cycling year for me and began a several month hiatus from one of my absolute favourite things to do.

Usually, by March, I was a basket case.

This has not happened for a couple of years now. March is no longer a time for becoming a total loonie, and the riding hiatus does not happen.

However.

I still am not a fan of the month of November.

It is wet.
It is cold.
It is miserable outside.
It is dark.
It is damp.

Being rained on when it is a few degrees above freezing is worse than being snowed on many many degrees below freezing. Trust me.

Regarding November, you can keep it thanks.

60.5 in the rain

Normally, I don't bike in the rain.

This is not to say I leap off the bike and hide in the trees should rain start while I am out - in fact, I have ridden my cyclocross bike down a MUP in water so deep that the front wheel was setting up a pretty serious bow wave and have scared myself silly in a massive thunderstorm with hail that I got caught in while mtn biking - but I do not like leaving the house all warm and dry while it is raining out. Snow does not bother me, the more the better in fact, but the rain?

It seems somehow wrong.

Today was different.

Today, I went out and wandered about the city to the tune of 60.5km in the rain. It rained the whole time. At times, it was raining fairly heavily, and at times it was more of a gentle mist.

It was wonderful.

I did the same thing yesterday as well.

While out, I took some pictures.

This was the only storm damage I could find on my usual rounds on the bike. And I was looking. A massive willow tree lost about 1/5th of its trunk. Power was still out in some parts of the city yesterday, but mostly, things here were back to normal. We are quite far inland and did not get hit that hard.

We did get some seriously cool looking skies though as the tail end of the hurricane blew over. I wish I had had the time to spend just sitting and photographing the sky. It was amazing.

Water levels at Columbia Lake were very high. This is in part due to the storm, but mostly is due to the fact that it has been raining for almost three weeks now with only a few days off. Columbia Lake is not a real lake - it is part of the water management system created by the Grand River Conservation Authority and helps regulate the level of Laurel Creek which feeds into the river. Normally, the culvert these ducks are sitting on is about 3/4 to 4/5 exposed.

My usual path to my usual bird watching spot was under water. Again, while this has happened in the past, it usually does not happen in the autumn. Usually, it is like this after the spring melt.

If you know the lake, and most of you reading this won't, you know that this spot here is the spot where the creek feeds the lake. Normally, it is possible to easily wade across to the exposed clay bar picture left. Not right now though.  The creek is about four times as wide as normal, and at least two feet deeper with more current.

One big benefit of all the rain though has to be the beauty of the City's wood lots. This one is about 2km from our house, and is a very pretty spot. It makes a good shortcut on the way home depending on where I am coming from. Today, I found an excuse to go through it and pause to look around.

I am glad I did.

fog is better

One of my friends, a fellow photographer, made an excellent observation on facebook this morning that goes something like this: "this light and fog is killing me slowly as I weep in my cube :("

What light you ask? Why this light.

It was divine. Just enough light to make everything glow, and just enough fog to put a sweet sweet soft filter over everything visible.

Unlike those in this building, I got to spend my morning in a cubical free world (although, to be fair, I am not sure that there is a single cubical in the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, but still and all, I was outside, they were inside. 'Nuff said.)

My office looked more like this.

It is not that I had no work today, it is just that it did not fall first thing in the morning. Thus, I was able to get out and about on the bicycle and really enjoy myself before heading off to my job for the day. 

My favourite way of photographing fog is to do what I usually do not do which is to shoot directly into the sun. The contrast and shadow it produces is marvelous as the fog acts like a huge light diffuser over the sun. The results attained when shooting like this appeal to me very much.

This may be it for the sun for a while; the weather forecast for the next week, starting sometime tomorrow mid-day, is for a serious amount of rain.

I do hope they are in error though as I wish to ride the bike. I worked out that I need to do at least 30km a day until the end of the year if I am going to reach my mileage goal of beating last year's total of 8345km. A recent and painful crash sidelined me for almost two weeks from any real riding, and mechanical problems on my cyclocross bike cost me almost 2000km of mileage due to it being out of commission while a frequently breaking wheel and some drive train woes got sorted (turned out the whole entire drive train, including the rear derailleur and the inline barrel adjusters were smoked, so too was the rear hub - I had cracked it!) 

Now though, I am good to go and am hoping to make it.  

Incidentally, I neglected to mention that I was able to ride the 'cross bike today for the first time since my crash a couple of weeks ago. It was like being gifted with wings.

out riding because I had no other choice, really

It happens to me sometimes. I have no choice. A bicycle has to be ridden.

Today, I spent a rather pleasant half hour talking to a person I have not spoken to, but have seen before; had a nice visit with an old friend I "bumped" into while riding; and talked to a very nice construction worker building a new high rise condo about the rigours of working through a Canadian winter. He says he has done this for years, and is dreading it.

Oh, and I used my new light as a bright "lookit me!!" light again. A review will be forthcoming when I get the rest of my pictures taken with it sometime this week or early next. I also logged a pitiful 32km or so - at least 30-50km per day needs to be logged by year's end if I am to break 8.5k km by New Year's Day.

But here is the light:

And some more of the new building going in at Allen and Park Streets in Waterloo. I have been watching this go up with interest all year as it is going to change the face of the neighbourhood I grew up in rather significantly (and that is a neighbourhood that I still love.)

why looking down can sometimes matter

I have been enjoying a rare perfect fall day. The appointment that I had for the day fell through, which left me at loose ends for part of the day. I took advantage of that, and the perfect weather, to head out for a walk around a local plot of land owned by the University of Waterloo. Often, it is possible to find and record a significant amount of wildlife at this location if care is taken to be quiet and respectful of animals and their habitat.

A family (I assume it is a family - but I have seen only one of them) of beavers have moved into the area and have made a dam on the stream that feeds Columbia Lake. This has resulted in the creation of a duck pond and a deepening and widening of the creek back of the dam. It is quite impressive actually:

The above video shows the dam, and the new pond which was created back of it.

Here are some of the other things I found while there.

And here is why you look down...