
Category Archives: Nature
Fiddleheads
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Quiet Neighborhood

It is quiet in the cabin, with just Anne and me here. A bit chilly today, but the stove keeps us warm. Tomorrow, Bob the bug guy shows up to spray. Everything is ready for him. We plan on doing laundry, having lunch in town and maybe touring Portage and the locks, if we need to stay away a little longer. We are fortunate that it is just the two of us here and that we have not been here that long, because these facts make preparations a little easier than they would be otherwise.



Royal Ontario Museum

We went to the museum all day and then walked back to the hotel. The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is an impressive natural history museum. First thing we did was take a tour of the museum, which turned out to be a tour of just the Chinese exhibit, but it was all good. We had taken the subway there. I had wanted to take one of the streetcars that run by our hotel room all night, but that was not to be. Lots of things to see, including dinosaurs, art, everything Chinese and cultural artifacts from around the world. Like the British Museum, ROM believes anything not nailed down in this world is fair game.
Octopuses

Octopuses seem to be having a moment now or maybe it is just me. There is the recent film Remarkably Bright Creatures, which dropped just last week. Featuring an octopus and a couple lonely humans, it is a sweet sentimental movie that was a joy to watch. Before that a Japanese archeologist had announced his discovery of giant cretaceous octopuses. He found their fossilized beaks embedded in ocean floor nodules that had to be microplaned apart to find. Earlier this year, when we were in Monterey, where we went to their aquarium. We closed it that day, but before we did the Giant Pacific Octopus that lives there came out of hiding and interacted with the few humans still around. A few years ago, I was scuba diving in the Virgin Islands and with the help of our guide, saw an octopus in the wild. Finally, harkening all the way back to childhood, I owned an octopus or at least its remains. It was small, a little over an inch and had been dried. A little bit gross but fascinating still.


