Gratitude and Glimmers #98

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our sense to grow sharper.

--W. B. Yeats

Welcome to my post of glimmers (of joy and wonder) and gratitude for the month of August. It is a week late, partly due to Brady being here for nine days, and partly due to a commission of four project bags. You can find links to more posts like this one at LeeAnna's blog, Not Afraid of Color.

1. If you follow me on Instagram, you will know that caterpillars and butterflies have captivated me this month. Last year we intentionally bought several perennials and annuals that are good for pollinators, and boy have we been rewarded. I've had monarchs, pipevine swallowtails (the black one with iridescent blue and orange and white markings), gigantic yellow swallowtails, a hummingbird moth and Mason wasps, to name the prettiest ones.

You can see several little videoclips on my Instagram, @mmmquilts.

2. The most fascinating event was watching Monarch caterpillars eat (voraciously), get nice and plump and wriggle off somewhere to pupate. And I've finally, just on Wednesday, found a chrysalis! Last year I found one on one of our cedar trees, so I've really been examining them daily, but no luck so far. Finding this one on the back of one of our plastic Adirondack chairs was a glimmer of epic proportions!

3. This story gave me a glimmer of hope for endangered species such as rhinoceros, who are poached for their horns. They hope to use this technology for elephants and pangolins too.

Source: CBC (Denis Farrell/The Associated Press)

4. This story gives me another glimmer of hope. We are pretty much unaware of the decimation of life going on in our oceans thanks to climate change. We also know very little about our oceans; MacGyver told me he read that we know more about space than we do about our own oceans. Scientists are among the most dedicated patient humans I know, and this story certainly shows that. A Canadian team of scientists who have spent a decade studying the sea star wasting disease, in a cross-border collaboration (love that part too), has found the cause. A mass die-off occurred in 2013. Below is Alyssa Gehman, part of the team, seen diving in the Burke Channel off the coast of central BC. Sea stars have 24 arms!

Source: CBC (Bennett Whitnell/Bennett Institute)

5. And I love this story about the discovery in August 2024 of a neon orange shark off the shore of Costa Rica! A paper was just released theorizing that a rare combination of genetic mutations gas occurred which gives the shark this never-before-seen colour.

Source: CBC (Garvin Watson/Parismina Domus Dei)

6. I enjoyed this round's U of A Alumni Book Club's pick so much that I have bought a copy. I'm an avid library user, and have toned down my personal purchases, not because I don't wish to support authors and literature, but I am consciously buying less, for a few reasons. The book is Birding to Change the World by Trish O'Kane, and if you love our planet and the flora and fauna which inhabit it, enjoy watching birds, want a gripping memoir of the life of a journalist, activist fighting for human rights, teacher, professor, survivor of Katrina, budding birdwatcher, and student working on her doctorate, then rush out and get this book. Have I mentioned how much I love books?!

In that vein, I love this post by Margaret Atwood in response to the government of Alberta's banning of books which started out with just four, all LGBTQ2+ themes, one of which Brady read two summers ago, and enjoyed. Several school boards compiled lists, and one, Edmonton Public Schools (yay) leaked their list to CBC, where they were proposing to remove hundreds of books, (I mean the ministerial order said 'explicit sexual content'). On it were the entire Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, all of the ACOTAR books by Sarah J. Maas, and many many more.

For my non-Canadian readers, Alberta's government is following along, tongue hanging out, chasing after all the tactics in the MAGA movement; they even have MAGA hats (Make Alberta Great Again), so original. 

7. I like ITV's Victoria TV series, of which I caught about a third when it was on PBS a few years ago. Well, I watched all three seasons (thank you local library) and wow, it sent me to the Internet many many times, much as The Crown did, fact-checking and delving into historical events. I like history! I knew Prince Albert was a visionary and mathematician, but I did not know about his drive to have the Great Exhibition in 1851, the ridicule he faced, and the ultimate triumph of it. 

Source: Wikipedia

8. As always, I loved having Brady here. The best thing was going up to Toronto the day before he flew home and taking him up the CN Tower. He loved it.

Shortly after we'd got to the top and were gazing, rapt, at Lake Ontario, and the harbour, even a couple of tall ships sailing away, I looked over at him because he was pinching the bridge of his nose. He has some pretty severe allergies, so I asked if he was okay. Well, he was actually tearing up at "how beautiful it is; I've never seen anything like this." 

Lake Ontario, and Billy Bishop Airport on the island. We got to see a plane land and another take off, very cool!

It took me probably a good hour or more to get used to how much he's grown (height, filled out, voice changed) since I saw him last year. I like and am in awe of his medical team at the University of Alberta Hospital. The meds he is on clearly are giving him a new lease on life.

And I like (and had to get a photo of myself for obvious reasons), the butterfly wings, this one a Monarch, in various spots around the one observation deck.

I liked seeing the roof on Rogers Centre where the Blue Jays play open from high above!

Brady walking on the glass floor - I did too, but man, it made my stomach plummet.

9.I like plane trees, aka sycamore trees. Their bark mesmerizes me.

10. I love my mandevilla vine! I bought it last summer, and over-wintered it in my yoga room. It is thriving, and taller than me. those are two babies sitting on the deck rail in the black pots, and another older baby in the pot on the deck to the left. The first pot on the left is cockscomb which I grew from dropped seeds from a bouquet a friend gave me last summer! The Mason wasps love it. I've gathered a bunch of seeds from these plants for next year.

I'll be back tomorrow with a post on the project bags commission, as well as a couple of RSC updates!