Ken Bodnar

@kenby.bsky.social

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Techie, AI guy, Humanist, Watcher at the Gate, daily photographs, Critically thinking rationalist with an artistic shiny-object gland in my brain. I publish articles on Substack: https://kenbodnar.substack.com/

My software: https://payhip.com/b/qQ87v

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I have become quite proficient at making jam by the single jar. This Christmas past, we had a flat of ripe figs. There were about half a dozen left. I boiled them down in a can of maple syrup, added pectin and this jar of fig jam resulted. On sourdough toast, it tastes like a giant maple Fig Newton.

I don't know what it is, but it sure is pretty. The neighbour lady really has a green thumb and an encyclopedic knowledge of things gardening. I don't, but I sure can appreciate the results.

Switching it up. It is still strawberry season in Québec and with the hot weather upon us, it's nice to have chilled strawberries and real spray-on whipped cream from a can. We still douse the berries with maple syrup to add more delicious sweetness.

I could cry. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I got this new electric weedeater. I used it in my garden. Since Christmas, I've been growing Medjool date palms from pits. I put the containers in my garden. I accidentally snipped off the top of my date palm tree that I was growing

Who the heck buys this stuff? I was in the chi-chi organic food store & I saw these pre-mixed cocktail mixers. This drink in particular is a classic cocktail, an Old Fashioned. It has just 4 ingredients: Whiskey, Angnostura Bitters, sugar and an orange peel for garnish. Why would I want to buy this?

This is a winter scenes in the 1950's at a Québec auberge or inn, taken by my great uncle. He was intensely interested in seeing as much of Québec as possible in his lifetime. As a civil servant, he had a lot of holiday time (& a lot of money), so he traveled a lot, domestically & internationally.

These photos are not mine. My iPod died. I listen to music while running on the treadmill at the gym. So I bought a new mp3 player on Amazon. It came today. These two sample pics came with it. The country cottage photo is called Life, and the other one is Waterfall. The mp3 player was made in China.

I don't wear baseball caps much at all. My job keeps me indoors. However, I wear them when I mow the lawn to keep the bugs out of my hair, or when I play golf. I just read a study that baseball caps have more bacteria on them than a toilet seat. Yuck. Mine went into the washing machine with bleach.

I can relate to the sign. For Christmas one year, my daughters gave me a remaindered book by Ray Kurzweil called "Age of Spiritual Machines". I thought it was far out in its predictions, but a 3 page appendix called "How to build an intelligent machine in 3 easy paradigms" started my career in AI.

Lobster is still available in the grocery stores in eastern Canada & although it's higher in price, it's not stratospheric. Decided to have one last lobster feed while we still could without breaking the bank. My cousins who live in the Maritimes where lobster is ubiquitous, don't eat bottomfeeders.

I am not an urbanite at all. I have never lived in a large city in my entire life except when I transitioned homes for a little while before I bought a place in the country. Hence, I find small town main streets really attractive. This "Town & Country" look in cottage country is appealing to me.

I often post about walking the deserted pioneer roads of yesteryear in the alpine boreal forest. They lead to interesting, quiet places like a little lake near home where I go to meditate, or a pioneer millpond that was a swimming hole when I can skinnydip in private. I rarely if ever, meet others.

Instead of tramping through the 7,861 square kilometers (3,035 square miles) of Parc des Laurentides with his merry band of Indians every summer over many years, the government of Québec eventually put a de Havilland DHC-3 Otter airplane on floats at his disposal. I've many slides taken from the air

What self-respecting bird just lays its eggs on the ground without a nest? It would be a flying rat - a city pigeon. This french-fry eating scrounger isn't exactly house-proud. Saw a pigeon exit from under a bush & I investigated. No wonder that you never see baby pigeons. They're in the bushes.

Contrasts again between town & city life. The left photos are kids playing in the Tay River in Perth, Ontario. On the way home, we stopped at the Parkdale Market in Ottawa, Canada's capital. In the park near the market, kids were playing in splash pool. I think that playing in the river is more fun.

The huge park, Stewart Park in the middle of the town of Perth, Ontario, Canada was a great place to escape the heat of yesterday. It's an island made by the Tay River. Kids were swimming & playing in the river as spectators watched. We had lunch on the riverbank. It was a summery, restful place.

Perth Ontario was named as the retirement capital of Canada once. It is an old Scottish settler town. The Scots were stone masons so a lot of the buildings, now converted to condos are 200+ year old stone buildings. You can't see it, but the condos in the right pic have balconies over the Tay River.

Contrasts. We took a(nother) road trip to Perth in the neighbouring province of Ontario. We again played golf at the Perth Golf Club, the oldest continuously operating golf course in Canada, since 1894. It's pictured on the left. On the right is a scene from a golf course near home. No rough edges!

These are women skiers in the Laurentian Mountains of Québec in 1954. I've already recounted why my great uncle was a bachelor all his life, waiting for his first love to quit the nunnery & rejoin him, but he liked photographing women. However, in his line of work, he didn't see very many of them.

I have never seen these anywhere for sale except in the Niagara region of Ontario, which of course is the fruit belt of Eastern Canada. Yellow raspberries even taste better than red raspberries. They are sweeter, plumpier and juicier than the red ones. More expensive too, but worth it. A real treat.

Growing up on the farm, I used to see these everywhere on farm & field. There were spots when a corner of a pasture would have a windmill that would pump water into a big trough for the cattle. It would be unattended and provide water whenever the wind blew. Used mostly for pumping water everywhere.

Someday soon, this bloom should have a cheery, yellow sunny face. They don't call it a sunflower for nothing.

The thing that I like about being in the towns & country around Lake Erie, is that a lot of the restaurants serve an incredible piscatorial delight - Lake Erie Perch. The flesh of this fish has to be the sweetest meat, and the least fishiest of all of the fish on this lonely planet. It's a delight.

So while we drove to visit an aunt who lived on the shores of Lake Erie, we decided to actually take a look at Lake Erie. Yep. It's a lake all right. As the waves gently lapped the shore, there was a thin patina of green slime at the water's edge. I'm sure that it was a "safe" type of biologica.

I mentioned in a recent post, that my great uncle had a brother who was a Catholic priest. This slide from the late 1960's shows my great uncle's siblings. From left to right is Tante Simone, Le Révérend Père Said & Tante Berthe. The siblings often got together regularly and took holidays together.

So I came home to find this huge weird moth on the clapboard of the house. It's a Walnut Sphinx Moth - Amorpha juglandis. We don't have walnut trees, but they like beech trees and we have a pile of them in the ravine in the alpine boreal forest. It's sad that adults don't eat. They just breed & die.

This light bulb really puzzled me. It's really huge & dim. It still works. It comes from the 1940's and it looks like it was first screwed into a lamp socket and had a bigger thread for a receptacle. It was in a box of stuff that I inherited from my great uncle. Mystery solved. It's a darkroom lamp.

Why wasn't this printed on the bag of bamboo barbecue skewers? Online, a recipe that told me to soak the skewers in water before using. The ends still burn off when over the coals, but at least the middle doesn't burn out make the skewers break into pieces. Charcoal is a lot hotter than gas grills.

I've mentioned that there are several pioneer roads in the alpine boreal forest that are now abandoned, but once were used to access settlers farms. They are overgrown now, but I use them as walking trails. I think that this no parking sign is a little redundant and a bit of an overkill.

I was told that I could keep the Sedum (flowering plants called Stonecrops -favourite deer veggie) from being eaten by marauding deer by using small containers, cutting up a sponge, soaking it with ammonia, punching holes in the lid & setting it out. The deer love them. Use them for asthma inhalers.