This is a stoned cat...stoned on honey suckle...evidently that's what they use out West instead of catnip! It's too late this year but next year I'm going to harvest my neighbour's honey suckle...

I know - I'm cheating! Only one blog per day! But I'm trying to get back into the habit and so I am making up for August.
Speaking of naming devices...who in their right mind would call this duck a wood duck when it is obvious to anyone that it is a duck with a very blue bill that is not the product of photo shopping!

On the topic of naming: I have always been fascinated in naming devices. How could my parents know by looking at this bit of humanity that Pat would work perfectly? Not Patty...Not Trish...not Trisha...definitely not Patricia...How could they know that it would take me years to learn how to spell Patricia?
The simplest answer would be that they didn't know, that they were honouring my grandfather, Patrick Philip...in those days no one could predict the gender!
But Pat it is and Pat is who I am.
The other night in a group someone referred to me as Mach...and that horrified someone at the table, "Your students called you Mach?"
Actually one of my students explained that they called me Machin because that was the fastest way to get my attention. By the time they called me Miss Machin, my attention was elsewhere. He defined my attention span as that of a a fly with a lobotomy...I loved that definition!
But I think in fact that the origin lay elsewhere. Until recently there has been a stigma attached to a woman of a certain age who is not married. If one were not married by twenty something, one was abnormal.
After the age of thirty, one was considered a spinster...and spinster teachers were always called...Miss Machin. I like to think that my students and the other teachers could not get their minds around the fact that I fit the stereotype of the spinster teacher. And so they compromised...they called me Machin.
As I write I realize that that is fading. I am more and more Pat now...the transition was so subtle that I didn't notice...but even my friends are calling me Pat!
And I can't resist mentioning Miss Craze. She was definitely not the stereotype of a spinster. She was cool and elegant and she climbed mountains in Nepal. But she could never be called Craze...for obvious reasons.

I met this lady on a walk by the Lachine rapids. I try to coordinate my photos with the content. One minute after I took this picture chaos reined as she sensed danger and took her fledglings and the whole flock to midstream. I found this quote which she would appreciate:

Live your life in such a way that when your feet hit the floor in the morning, Satan shudders and says, "Drat! She's awake!"

OK so I censored it. I am perfectly capable of cussing...but only orally. I can't actually write the words down!

We eat cold eels and think distant thoughts.


For a moment I had trouble thinking of a picture to go with this quote. I found the quote a long time ago and liked it. I like it even better now that I have put it in context.
In a 1900's interview with champion boxer, Jack Johnson, he was asked why white women were attracted to black men. He replied with the above which was both his ironic and poetic way of pointing out the ignorance of the question.

On my first trip with that friend I learned about clouds...I have become very fond of clouds...

Pobody's Nerfect!

I have learned something new in this last trip to Newfoundland

...make that this first trip to Newfoundland. I learned that one has to keep one's horizons straight! I listened to two photographers talking about a third whose horizons were crooked. I had really thought of it until I looked at my pictures. There is a certain drunkenness about them!