unsolicited opinions on random things
I was in Ottawa for the last 24 hours with Camp Tech. I had a couple hours to kill before my flight home, so I checked out the Tulip Festival. It’s so beautiful! Here are some pics of my favourites. Some of them don’t even look like tulips, like the Yellow Pomponettes. And some have funny names like Sensual Touch. Gorgeous. If you get a chance to check it out, I highly recommend!
There’s a seismic monitoring station in Ecuador known as Casa del Arbo (“The Treehouse”). It has a rickety swing hanging from one of the tree branches, and it swings over a 100 foot drop. No harness, no net, or any other safety feature. The swing is commonly known as “the swing at the edge of the world.”
Would you swing on it? I don’t know if I would!
via Atlas Obscura. Top photo by David Silo, bottom left photo unknown credit, bottom right photo by Adam Rifkin.
El Ateneo Grand Splendid is a theatre-turned-bookstore in Buenos Aires. Aren’t those pictures gorgeous?
My dog Isabel is a Border Collie/Australian Shepherd crossed with something small. I think she’s part Corgi because she’s so long and short. Whatever she is, she LOVES snow. Here’s a video of her running in the fresh snow earlier today. Makes me smile.
Okay, not really. I’m not Danish at all. But I have been hearing a lot about a Danish concept recently. I’ve seen a bunch of articles all about hygge, the concept of well-being/cozy/social/friendly/warm-ness that is a central part of Danish culture, particularly in the winter. The more definitions of hygge that I read make me think this isn’t just a strategy for getting through long, cold winters… it’s a way of life (this is the best definition of hygge I’ve read). And it sounds a lot like how I live my life (prioritizing time spent with friends and family, warmth, comfort, art, good food, drink, conversation, etc). Now I really want to go to Denmark and experience hygge first-hand.
[the blurry photos above are from an evening spent with my best friends, in the yurt at the Ceili Cottage in the middle of winter. It doesn’t get much more hygge than that]
Yes, that’s a trite blog post title. But seriously, space is so cool. Earlier this month NASA released a high-definition image of the Andromeda Galaxy from the Hubble Space Telescope. You can’t see the image (it’s over 4 gigs!) but you can watch this video that YouTube user daveachuk made, zooming in on and panning around the picture. Mind blowing.
Isn’t it funny how little things in your house can drive you nuts? We’ve lived in our place for over 6 years, and I’ve always hated the wall that runs through our living room and up the stairs. It was beige and so boring. And our stairs were looking pretty tired too – the paint was chipping in many places, and the carpet runner had seen better days. It took a consultation with Joanne from Resolution Design to finally get us to do something about it… and I’m so glad we did. Here are a bunch of before and after pictures for you to see the difference. There’s fresh white paint on the stairs and railings, a new carpet runner on the stairs, and (obviously) the boring beige wall is now a gorgeous teal blue. Yay!
I saw this link on SwissMiss’s blog. 4-year-old Hawkeye Huey (first picture, above) is a photographer with his own Instagram account. He shoots analog (using a Fujifilm Instax 210 camera) and his dad, a National Geographic photographer himself, uploads the photos to Instagram. His pictures are amazing. See them yourself here.
Ian, an avid home-brewer, is participating in Indie Alehouse’s Home Brew Tap Takeover for the second year in a row. He’s been working on a beer of his design for the past month or so with Jeff (head brewer at Indie, and pictured with Ian above) and it will be available next Sunday, September 14 in a special session from 1-4pm at Indie’s Barrel House. Last year the event was packed, so this year they decided to sell tickets in advance. Read more about the event and book online here. And if you’re going to be there, let me know so we can say hi!
Image above of Ian and Jeff Broeders, and Ian’s beer from last year’s Home Brew Take Over. That’s not this year’s recipe – it’s a secret!
I’ve been feeling unmotivated at work lately, and have been procrastinating and slacking off. I think it’s end-of-summer malaise. To shake things up a bit, I wrote to a couple of friends who also work from home, and asked if they’d like to meet up in coffee shops and work there instead. The change of scenery is great, and casually co-working with friends is fun. Today we’re at Brickyard Grounds in Leslieville (pictured above).