Maritime Fall Fair - Preview

My parents and I went to the Fall Fair today - I'm working on a photo journal of the event, but here's a shot by way of preview...I got to see some moo-cows! Yay! :D

Sunny Autumn Day

Thanksgiving Time!

Beautiful fall foliage means it's Thanksgiving time here in Canada! Thanksgiving is the day we've set aside in Canada to reflect on all we have to be thankful for, and to celebrate the harvest (which is just finishing up here). A time when family and friends come together to eat! :) We don't have the iconography of Pilgrims and Native Americans that the American Thanksgiving holiday has, but we do have the associations of sharing the bounty with others which that iconography implies.

The traditional meal is roasted turkey with stuffing (dressing) and mashed potatoes and gravy. In addition, fall vegetables from the harvest, like squash, are enjoyed. And most people will have a big slice of pumpkin pie (with whipped cream on top) for dessert.

Dave's not a huge fan of turkey, so we're saving it for Christmas. Instead our menu was:

* Pork Tenderloin, roasted with a coating of (garden-grown!) sage and rosemary
* Home-made stuffing (aka dressing) - I got a spice mix from Farmer John's Herbs at Agrifest this year, so I'm making homemade stuffing instead of my usual Stove Top (I do LOVE Stove Top though - it's so easy and yummy!) Home made stuffing is made with either bread or potatoes (or both -- I made mine with bread), mixed with savory herbs and a little water. Mix well and bake in the oven till crispy on top, and a little soft inside. (I added some garden-grown sage to Farmer John's mix, because I really love sage, and it was PERFECT!)
* Ukrainian mushrooms in red wine/beef gravy - a standard that I make for most holidays now. Yummy! :)
* Cold corn salad with crushed garlic, onion, yellow bell peppers, celery, garden-grown tomatoes in a mayonnaise base
* pork gravy
* mashed potatoes
* fresh-baked bread
* home-made pickle (made with mostly locally grown produce) - celery, cabbage, cucumber, onion, etc.) - crunchy and good!
* and a little yam :)

Corners were cut, of course - I use powdered gravy mix (Club House brand) - it's excellent gravy (really!), and the extra amount of effort it would take to make it from scratch could be better spent elsewhere. I also used instant mashed potatoes - they're a little softer than regular potatoes, but still tasty!

The dinner plate! From the bottom, going clockwise - roasted pork tenderloin, herb dressing, mashed potatoes, a baked yam in skin, Ukrainian mushrooms, fresh baked bread, cold corn salad, and in the middle, home-made pickle.

Happy Thanksgiving!

More fairy flies!!

Got some more great pics of my fairy flies! It was funny, yesterday evening I caught one that wouldn't leave! He stayed on my hand for about 5 minutes, until I finally figured out that the little guy was cold, and needed to feel the evening sunlight on him before he could take off! Once I put my hand in the sunlight, he spread his little wings and floated away! :) These pics I got early this morning, as the sun was warming up the air.

Look at the puffs of fur on this guy!! They're so long!!

This guy has fur puffs going all the way up his back! It's so funny, because I don't look at bugs too often, I never noticed how unique each bug is, even within the same species. Just like every other animal type! :)

This shot shows off the beautiful rainbow iridescent wings that they have. So cute!

Update Sept 2007: I wrote to the "What is this pest" photo identification page, where specialist volunteers and others identify photos of bugs people send in. Their mega-contributor, retired entomologist Ed Saugstad, id'd this as a flying Wooly Aphid. An aphid! My sworn enemy, second only to slugs as a destructive force in my garden - "farmed" by ants, aphids suck the very life essense from my plants, and now here, it turns out my beloved fairy flies are one of them! Bleargh! Now I'm actually glad that there aren't many of them around every year.

I think I'll still call them fairy flies though...there's still something magical about them... :)

BeanDreams: my inspiration

This is my Gidu (or Dido, however you like to spell it, it still means Grandfather) in his garden in Cape Breton, NS, back in the 1980s. As you can see, it was Prolific, with a capital "P"! Enormous quantities of beans and other vegetables, and tons of gorgeous flowers, most of which were bigger than I was! Huge Dahlias, and as you can see in this pic, gorgeous poppies (told ya Ukrainians love poppies!)! His soil was always rich and black, thanks to his composting. In the winter time, I remember visiting his house and seeing many coffee mugs lined up on the window sills, full of drying beans gathered over the summer.

It was pretty much every Ukrainian's dream, upon coming to North America, to have a property of their very own, to grow crops on. In Ukraine, the vast majority of people were serfs, who worked the land but weren't allowed to own it. So North America was very tempting, even if it meant leaving your brothers and sisters and parents behind. He worked in the steel mill in Cape Breton for decades, as did many other foreigners who came to this land around the 1920s (hard, hard labor), but he still had time to follow what I believe was his first love - gardening. As you can see, he was very good at it!

Aside from all these things, he was an excellent singer, actor, accordian player, liked to make jokes, read, cook, play solitaire and do jigsaw puzzles. But more on that another time. :) Right now, I just want to focus on his gardening - the man had an incredible green thumb, and did everything "organically" before that was even a buzz word.

So I definitely take Gidu as my biggest gardening inspiration! I hope to do him proud in my own vegetable gardening over the coming years. :)

I miss him...

Creeeeeppppyyy...

I just went outside with Casey for a minute: the sun set about 20 minutes ago...I looked over to the East and saw the huge, full harvest moon just rising, wreathed in a halo of clouds...off in the distance, I heard a large murder of crows screaching at each other in the twilight...the wind was cold and gusty...


Spooky out there...really! A great Hallowe'en type atmosphere...

Morning Pheasants!

This gorgeous group of Ring-Necked pheasants (what's a group of pheasants called, anyway?) paid us a visit on our front lawn this morning. They sat in the same place for a long time in the sun, I assume to get warmed up from a chilly night. Rarely, we've seen one lone male, but usually we see them travel together in groups like this. You can see the two males clearly in the foreground, but can you spot the female traveling with them, in the background? It's amazing how excellent the camouflage works for the females, eh?

Eventually, as they warmed up, they started to groom their feathers, and wander around, pecking away at the grass-seeds in the lawn. They stayed a really long time! Very fun! (except for Casey, of course, who had to wait some extra time for her and Dave's first play of the day--she didn't understand why, of course!) :)

We haven't seen any pheasants since the spring, it's nice to see them around again!

Autumn at Sunset

Got these great pics tonight - as the sun set, the light got this beautiful golden-orange tinge to it...

I was able to capture this gorgeous red maple catching the last light of the day.


And here you can just see the sunlight catching the tips & stem of this Jerusalem Artichoke (it's a weed, but it's so pretty, like a sunflower). :)

Golden sunlight + autumn reds, oranges and yellows = a beautiful Nova Scotian evening. I'm so blessed to live here!

What a relief!

I always felt bad about Neil Armstrong's supposedly screwed-up quote when he took his first step on the Moon - but it turns out, due to new audio analysis, he did not drop the "a" after all: he did, in fact, say:

"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

Read the interesting story of why it sounds like the "a" is missing, and how they discovered it. I feel so much better now, and I'm sure Neil Armstrong does too!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5398560.stm

Fairy Flies

I call these flies Fairy Flies, but I don't know their actual, Latin name. They appear at a distance as sky-blue/purple round spheres floating in the air. As you can see from the photo, they're VERY easy to catch - as I mentioned, they mostly float, they don't really buzz around. From the angle shown here, they don't look as bluish and bright as they do when they're in the air. They have their butt end covered in what looks like fur, and their attenae (which you can't clearly see here) look almost like feathers. And their wings in the sunshine shimmer like dragonfly wings, with a rainbow type shimmer. They look to me like a Fairy Princess decked out for a ball! :D They only come around in very late summer/early fall - I wish I knew what they're called, I'd like to learn more about them. If anyone knows anything, email me @ ann@learnpysanky.com. :D It's interesting too, I've never seen them in any other area of Nova Scotia, certainly not in Dartmouth where I grew up. Maybe they're just an Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia bug? Hard to say...

I'm so glad I finally got a picture of one of them! I look forward to their arrival every year!

[EDIT: October 8, 2006 - got more pics!]

Update Sept 2007: I wrote to the "What is this pest" photo identification page, where specialist volunteers and others identify photos of bugs people send in. Their mega-contributor, retired entomologist Ed Saugstad, id'd this as a flying Wooly Aphid. An aphid! My sworn enemy, second only to slugs as a destructive force in my garden - "farmed" by ants, aphids suck the very life essense from my plants, and now here, it turns out my beloved fairy flies are one of them! Bleargh! Now I'm actually glad that there aren't many of them around every year.

I think I'll still call them fairy flies though...there's still something magical about them... :)

It's Christmas Time at the Gift Shop!

Today is the grand launching of the Christmas Section of my Ukrainian Gift Shop for 2006! Check out six brand new designs featuring angels, Christmas stockings and more, all with a Ukrainian theme! There's even Christmas cards with greetings written in Ukrainian or English!


Some changes have been made to the navigation of the shop as well, to make it easy for you to find just the right Christmas ornament, card or present!


Have fun!

BeanDreams finally updated!

Sorry it took so long! If you want to get all caught up on BeanDreams for the last half of the summer, check it out:

http://ann.learnpysanky.com/blog/beandreams.html

BeanDreams: time to put the garden to bed (shortly)

I'm going to have to put the garden to bed soon - it's so late in the season, there really isn't much more time for the tomatoes and cukes to grow. And with the frost warnings starting to appear regularly on the weather forecast, the time to dig up the garden has come. I've picked several tomatoes already (for ripening inside), and I'll have to do the rest in the next couple of days.

It's kinda sad: on one hand, you don't really want it to end...but you can tell from the chill in the air that Nature's saying "it's time to button up for the winter!" So it doesn't feel unnatural, you can clearly feel in the air that growing season is over, that it's reached it's natural conclusion, and it's time to move on.

Thanksgiving is in a couple weeks - just in time for the end of our growing season. I'll process my tomatoes for freezing, and serve them as part of our harvest meal. :) I'll give lots of details on my prep for this feast coming soon!

Sorry I haven't been updating my garden stuff more - with the big server migration last month at my web server's company, I wasn't able to do a lot of updating, and I got behind. But I've almost done catching up, and will upload it shortly. :)

Great idea for sprucing up office buildings

Nice story from Japan this morning: Shinji Kato is an official who came up with this great idea to beautify a tall office tower. He had them plant "Heavenly Blue" morning glory plants from each landing - when the vines grew long enough to reach the landing beneath them, officials attached them together, so it looks like a giant waterfall of vines. The flower are expected to bloom in a few weeks, and should make for an even more gorgeous display.

Isn't that wonderful? What a fun idea to beautify an office building, something which might ordinarily be seen as something cold and imposing, now brought back to nature a little bit. Wonderful! It makes you wonder what we could do with our own office or other areas that might be a bit too bland and cold - now's the time to start dreaming these things up for next year! :D

Read the whole story on Mainichi here.

I won a little piggy! :)

Too fun, had to share: my mom's birthday was yesterday (Happy Birthday, Mom!) and we went to the Dragon Buffet King to celebrate. Yum! Great selection of Chinese food, including soups, salad and dessert bar. Very nice, fresh dishes were brought out from the kitchen constantly. General Tao's Chicken was my favorite, definitely went back for a second helping there. :)

On the way out, I saw they had the Crane Game (like this sort of thing) in their lobby - $2, play till you win. It's not as easy as it looks on tv, that's for sure. :D I had my eye on this little piggy, and we had a lot of time to kill (waiting for the supper hour traffic rush to end so we could drive home), so after about 20 minutes, and several close calls, I was able to get him! I was very happy! :D He's some cutie. Then we went around the corner to Michael's (a big craft store chain from America, this "branch" is the only one I know of in the Halifax Regional Municipality). Holy moley, I've been to big craft stores before, but being in Chain Lake (home of the IMAX and tons of big box stores), this particular craft store is ENORMOUS! I was in Heaven!! The sheer volume of products was almost overwhelming! Showing incredible restraint, I managed to come away with only a few items, but I tell ya: if I ever win the lottery, that's probably the first place I'm going! :D heh heh heh

Important: Foreign Dignitaries, when visiting Canada, MUST go to Tim's!

Glad to hear that foreign affairs minister Peter McKay (a Nova Scotian) was making sure Condi Rice had the full "Canadian experience" and took her to Timmy's during their walkabout in Stellarton today. (She was here for some 9/11 ceremonies yesterday, to thank the people of Canada for all their help when all of those planes who couldn't land in the States were diverted here).

There are Tim Hortons doughnut/coffee shops EVERYWHERE in Canada. You cannot drive very far in any direction without hitting one (not literally HITTING one, of course). Their coffee is highly addictive (to those who love their coffee), and bringing a box of "Timbits" (little round ball-shaped doughnuts, in a mixed variety of flavors) is practically mandatory for business or group meetings. Truly a cultural institution here in Canada. Tim's has added a variety of foods to their product line over the years - their bagels and cream cheese are really good, as are their soup and sandwich combos (bread's a little dry, though). But by far, their coffee and doughnuts are the most popular.

See the CBC's story on her visit to Tim's: Rice has time for Tim Hortons (A play on Timmy's motto: You've always got time for Tim Horton's"). And there's more here.

Photo Journal: The Beauty of A Swamp in Fall

We're really lucky - here in Nova Scotia, there aren't any poisonous creatures or plants in our swamps! So I was able to go into our local one the other day, squishing along in my rubber boots, and got some photos showing the beauty of our swampland/wetlands in the early autumn. (It's still a little creepy in there though, there's a lot of weird noises in there, in the ground under your feet...clicking noises, and squeeking noises...I didn't go in as far as I had planned!) :D Fall always comes first to the swamp areas, so the leaves are already starting to turn there.

The best fall leaf viewing for Nova Scotia (outside of swamps) comes around the 2nd to 3rd week of October, so plan your visits for that time of year to get the best show! It's pretty amazing. :)

These first few shots just show the abundance of plant life in the swamp area - some evergreen fir trees on the periphery, with tall bullrushes' leaves starting to brown on the tips. The gorgeous ferns are showing their autumn colors in full, in deep oranges and reddish-browns. Beautiful! There's a million other plants in there, too - thick mosses cover most of the ground, and many different bushes and small trees that enjoy the wet ground. There isn't an inch of bare ground, everything is covered with vegetation!



These following two shots show a common sight in wet soil in Nova Scotia: the pitcher plant. I think it's called that because the leaves act as a pitcher, collecting water. The first pic shows the flower, and down below you can see a closeup of it's "pitcher" action, with water filling up the leaves. Neat! :D

So you see? You can even find great beauty in a place with a name like "swamp"! :)

Fun new novelty designs added to the gift shop!

I've added a few new fun novelty designs to the gift shop, for Ukrainian Moms and Dads everywhere! It features a bold geometric pattern based on traditional Ukrainian folk embroidery inside the "Mom" and "Dad" text. The design comes in both red and blue. Check it out!

A lack of obstructive goats....?

A Swiss driver was ticketed for speeding in Ontario (in Canada, east of NS) and according to the BBC:

"A traffic officer's notes said the Swiss driver had said he was taking advantage 'of the ability to go faster without risking hitting a goat'."

*snort* ha ha hah hah hah...

Read the full story...

Its true though, you know, I never have seen a goat on a highway around here...

Adorable Dog & Pony Friendship

Cute story from Gloucestershire, England: Freddie the dog loves to ride around on Daisy, the Shetland Pony's back as she walks around her owner's fields.

Of course Freddie is a Jack Russell Terrier - what other breed would have the guts to give horseback riding a try? (Dave's mom has a Jack Russell, and she's absolutely fearless!).

Read the full story on the BBC.