Holy Crap!

As many of you may have heard already, there's news at the Barter house. Within 10 seconds of peeing on this thing, we got the results.
Those results were later confirmed by yet another pee test at a doctor's office (I don't know if the peeing was done in the office or not). I was pretty sure I got the job done three weeks in advance, call it father's intuition.

It's kind of funny how it works. You get this test and it tells you that you're going to have a baby, but there is little evidence of that fact otherwise. For the first month or so, it was a little unreal. Then my wife started to feel a bit tired and regular physical changes began to follow. She's doing well and to this point has no morning sickness. I think it's in part because she is determined not to be sick, because she hates it so much. After seeing the results of the test it took all my energy not to tell it to the world (until I got the green light from the Mrs.), but now that most of the people I keep up with know, I can make this announcement digitally official.

I will never look at the end of Star Wars Episode IV the same way again. There's just too much double entendre when it comes to baby making not to have a laugh at it. Guys: think back to high school when you had some old man teaching you sex-ed (the experience may be similar for women too) and now replace that image with another old guy telling a group of young fighter jocks that they need to maneuver straight down a trench, shoot their torpedoes and hit a small opening which will set off a chain reaction. One positive thing that I learned, was that you don't need any high-tech targeting computers to get the job done.

That being said, it's been a little busy for me over the past couple weeks. I will have some new stuff up for you soon though.

Newfoundland -it's a little wet

Being on an island, I naturally got a lot of photos near water, so here are some of the more interesting aquatic themed shots I took.

This is Bottle Cove, one of the places I visited on my westward venture. I think I mentioned this place in my last post, but I didn't have the pan all cleaned up for upload. Shooting a pan across a wide angle in changing lighting conditions (as you get with this cloud cover) and having a polarizer on, makes for a lot of photos that are hard to merge cleanly. If anyone has some tips on getting a real clean blend, I'm open to them.

This photo shares a few of the same problems as the last one and took a while to get looking like this. I took this just outside the Tablelands in Gros Morne. The opposite side of the top of the mountain on the right is pretty much where the Tablelands begin. Such a drastic difference from one peak to the next.

As I had mentioned earlier, Toshina and I took a trip out to Blow Me Down Provincial Park. There are walking paths which take you along the valley between the mountain peaks, then there are hiking trails (it's not really a trail, just a few markers on trees) which take you up the side of the mountain. We had started out walking along the foot path and then realized that we were going away from these falls (which was where we wanted to go). We didn't have a map of the area and so I thought we'd just start making for the falls directly. That turned out to be a difficult choice. We spent the next 1-2 hours picking our way through trees, bushes, mud and rocks. There were a few times where we would step on some small brush or moss and it would be covering a hole. Fortunately, there were no injuries from falls like that. Eventually Toshina spotted trail markers going up the side of the mountain and then some hikers passed us, leaving me feeling a little dumb over our choice of route. When Toshina had enough of climbing up the mountainside (about half way up) -and in fairness, we were not really wearing the right shoes for that kind of business anyway- we stopped for some food and then I made my way to a nice tall rock to get above the trees and take this photo. Afterward we made our way down the marked route, which was a lot easier than the way we went up.

This is a boat launch from a little shoreline shack in Frenchman's Cove. This was a place where my Dad went as a boy with his family to hang out and do family stuff. I don't actually know what he did here, but I'm going to guess that it was fishing, fooling around on the rocks, and maybe grabbing crabs and muscles. When we were driving along the coast, my Dad remembered this about this place, but couldn't remember how to get there (since it has been nearly 45 years since he was last here). We ended up going down the wrong road, where my Dad stopped at house to ask directions. It went something like
"Hey dere bye, how d'wee get ta Frenchman's Cove"?
"Oh, ya wants ta go back up dis road and make a right and follaw 'er down a little and you'll be dere".
"Ah, we turned too early, I taught so. Just a little ways den"?
"Yes mi bye"....
My Dad and the man briefly exchanged stories of what they were doing here and we were on our way again. Hearing Newfies speak is a pretty cool thing I think. It's English, but the dialect is so different at times, that it's almost like speaking a different language. It's too bad that globalization is causing the distinctive accent to disappear. Listening to my Grandfather speak, I can hear the accent quite strongly, but when I hear younger people speak, it's quite faint by comparison.

Another photo from Gros Morne. We stopped on the side of the road for a break and to take in the view (which is spectacular) as we were making our way into the park from the south. Most of your trip through Gros Morne is on winding mountain roads, with a new impressive vista around each corner. It's really something to see. There was a little waterfall coming off the side of the blasted road -probably just some spring melt water- and I got this photo. Another nice thing about the water that is coming off the mountains is that it's drinkable (drink the moving water, not the standing stuff) and refreshing. Sadly the same can't be said for Lake Ontario.

These photos come from St. Anthony. It was a windy day and the waves were beating on the rocks, making for some nice blues and greens as the water was churned around in the shallows. This was actually taken from the top of hill where the lighthouse is, using my zoom lens. There were a few boats going in and out of the harbour, setting up one of those classic Newfie scenes. Toshina and I had planned to come here to take a boat tour to see icebergs and whales. A couple hours after these were taken we were off in the Atlantic on a little boat with Newfie jigs playing on the radio. The boat was a converted fishing boat -a testament to how the fishing industry has changed in Newfoundland. The guide had gone to Memorial University in St. John's to study marine biology, but before that he had worked alongside his father on the boat when it was catching fish. For the first 20 minutes or so, Toshina and I were having fun listening to the music, and rolling on the waves, but not long after that we discovered that we weren't cut out to be baymen. At least neither of us lost it (though it might have come as a relief). The return trip (from which we saw this impressive iceberg, but no whales) was spent below the observation deck just wanting the trip to end quickly. Ah, memories. The operators of Northland Discovery Tours were nice enough to offer us a free return trip the following day since we missed the whales. Unfortunately, we had to get moving southward again so we passed on that one. We weren't going out in prime whale watching time either, which is usually in July, so at the time we went it was kind of hit and miss.

The following day, we stopped at Port Au Choix, which is another historic site in Newfoundland. Natives, French colonizers, and something called the Limestone Beds are here. Well, I think the native people have either left, been removed or become extinct -I can't remember but there is a visitors centre there which explains all that. The Limestone Beds are a bit like the Tablelands,
which is to say, pretty barren. There are a few flowers and small plants that grow on it, but nothing else. These photos were taken at "Gargamelle", though that place is also pretty empty. At the top of the point, there is a lighthouse (which was being restored at the time, so it didn't make for a nice photo) then a steady descent of rock to the coast. Because of the flat nature of the rocks, a lot of tidal pools have formed, up and away from the ocean. There are muscles and fish living in them and I suppose the gulls are happy about that.

In all of the coastal towns I either visited or passed through, I was amazed at the extent to which people in Newfoundland (past and present) live off (and until recently in harmony with) the ocean. The early inhabitants moved with what was available in the water and depended upon it for their lives, not just food but even their clothing and their homes came from things like seal and whale. In modern times, that dependence is similar, with many Newfoundlanders making their living in the summer when the fishing and trapping of crustaceans is good, then going on unemployment in the winter when there is no money to be made. That is the unfortunate side of commercialized fishing. That and the fact that we are fishing more than the fish populations can sustain. The sad part of it all, is that when your ability to provide is dependent on catching a lot of fish, destroying an eco-system pales in comparison to watching your family starve.