tales from the Forest of Lothlaurien
Yesterday the snow was almost gone.
Today I need a snow blower.
Except I’m a purist, I’ll use a shovel… not only is it better for the environment, it beats having to pay for a gym membership. 
At this point, though, I’m dreaming of spring.
These perenials have always been my favorite spring flowers.
It’s coming… really.
Just to give you an idea of how deep my backlog is, after a photo shoot last fall I took some gorgeous shots in Victoria Glen Park with the intent of posting them here. And I’m only getting to it now. Eep.
Victoria Glen Park is a small forest that runs alongside the Kissing Bridge Trail which leads to West Montrose, home of the last remaining covered bridge in Ontario. [I'll try to get out that way this summer to get some photos of the only designated heritage site in Waterloo Region.]
I couldn’t believe all the varieties of fungal growth I found there.
When trees fall in a forest, they break down, and as it decays, it generates nutrients.
When I was small we used to take nature walks with my dad.
I’ve found tree fungus cool since then.
I haven’t the slightest idea of the proper names for any of these things.
“Fungus” is about the best I can manage.
Of course I recognize these: maple leaves.
In 2009 Woolwich Council thought Victoria Glen Park was expendable, but the citizens let them different. Read about it in Preserve Victoria Glen Park
Victoria Glen Park still stands, but today it is under a different kind of threat.
Local landowner is pushing for a Biogas facility a stone’s throw from Victoria Glen Park. Biogas waste management systems exist in Europe in small scale, generating ‘green energy’ by being situated right where the waste is generated. Kind of like a farm scale composter. The problem here seems to be that the business interests want to situate the garbage facility beside the Kissing Bridge Trail, and this is planned as the largest such facility in the world, situated yards away from residences, an elementary school, the downtown core and Victoria Glen Park.
Even if by some miracle the waste processing in the facility does not smell bad, since all the waste will need to be trucked in, and the anticipated 80 or so trucks a day are limbering through town are unlikely to be hermetically sealed. The irony is that since both what goes in and comes out of the Biogas will require trucking, the ‘green’ energy ends up not being green at all. Victoria Glen Park may still be in danger.
I’ve been working hard on a couple of projects and so haven’t yet had time to blog about the just past Elmira Maple Syrup Festival.
Though I don’t have time to make a blog post now,
The community rallied to tell the Woolwich Council how important it was to save Victoria Gen Park. Job well done. It’s terrific to see an environmental success story.
Victoria Glen Park, Spring 2010
But there’s a new threat. It seems that there is a push to locate a BioGas facility pretty much next door to Victoria Glen Park. If it’s as bad as predicted by Elmira’s Ed Speers, who has been doing the research, Victoria Glen Park may still be as beautiful come summer, but once the BioGas operation is up and running people will need to wear a gas mask for a walk in the park.
To the Editor,
The issue of the biogas plant has returned and I thought there were a couple of things that I think should be considered when people think of how to respond to this issue.
A number of years ago I had the opportunity to visit a biogas plant in Markham, a plant very similar in nature to the one proposed by Bio-En for Elmira. The process they used, anaerobic digestion, and the material they handled and the process they used to handle the material, as near as I can tell from available documents, was similar to that proposed by Bio-En. They also used a biofilter as Bio-En is proposing. The most significant memory I have of my visit there is the smell of garbage everywhere. In fact the smell was very strong a kilometer away, as I noticed several times when I was in Markham. I believe this plant has since been shut down.
Secondly, the people who propose to build and operate this facility are proud of the fact that they have been working together for a long time, and indeed they have. During that long relationship they have initiated more than one project in Elmira that has caused grief to the community, often from terrible odours, and they have resisted repeated requests and even demands to correct the problems.
So we have a project that has every potential to be a real stinker being constructed by people who, in the past, have demonstrated that they don’t mind doing that to Elmira, and they’re not particularly responsive to making changes if their project is a problem. Now you can dress up this biogas plant proposal which ever way you want but those are the facts.
Ed Speers
Elmira, Ont.
Letter to the Editor
The night before the Elmira Maple Syrup Festival
The proposed plant won’t only affect Victoria Glen Park; the site is close enough to Riverside Public School to have a serious impact on our school children. A great many residences will also be affected. The downtown core will most likely be in easy range. Who is going to want to go through garbage scented air to buy cheese or sausage at Kitchen Kuttings. The smell will likely decrease food purchases from the fledgling Farmer’s Market as well, and may well curtail business at Elmira Donuts & Deli.
The Gardens in Summer
Local landscaper Doug Mooder has carefully constructed and maintained what is essentially a life sized portfolio of the kind of work the firm does. In practice this is a privately funded local garden open to anyone caring to take a stroll through the manicured grounds. Called The Gardens, this is a lovely bit of green space for residents and visitors to enjoy. However if biogas smells reach it they might as well fold their tent.
So sad.
Chuck Martin and company, the people proposing the biogas facility at the pet food plant north of downtown, are holding an open house at the Lion’s Hall:
It’s very worth showing the company and the Ministry of Environment that people here are paying attention.
[Thanks to local environmentalist Susan H. Bryant for the heads up.]
I wanted to share links to some interesting websites I discovered through that contest. Videos from these websites were my favorites.
I rather liked One Hundred Jobs since Aimee Davison is rather like Bridget Jones in the flesh. You must check out her blog. There were a few “funny” contest submissions, but this was easily the best of them.
Cow and the Moon Paper Company created another of my favorite videos. The video’s theme was that the website allowed Kelly Linhares to be a stay at home mom This certainly resonated with me having lived it myself. (And it was worth it!) The problem I had with this film was that it didn’t tell me about the home business. I had to go to her website to find out that she creates fun invitations and greeting cards (and she certainly seems to have a better business sense than I do). This video made it into the finals, but she decided to pull out rather than continue the way the contest was being run.
The Cake Lady is another of my favorites because it led to a really good website. I felt that Vanessa Le Page’s film suffered from framing; it would have benefited from tighter editing and close shots of the website. The website is excellent… visually stunning and *gasp* a fluid layout! Woohoo! I gained five pounds just popping in.
Ibsurdities is an excellent website showcasing the talented Lori Watson’s wildlife art, “Scratchboard Prints” and graphic design work. Take a look at some of the exceptional work she’s done.
Studio Diva Lynn Davies is a terrific artist. The website shows off some of her really fine artwork. But it goes a bit further than that, she takes a serious look at the process of creating art. Definitely worth a good look, particularly if you’ want to learning how it’s done.
Bram Timmer’s Beside is a domain name (part of a series of domain names… along with aside and reside…) with a pun I can appreciate. I found the film interesting, but it went on too long for a “talking head” without actually showing any of his websites. This talented guy has a great body of work, but I prefer the fluid aside photo page because the images are available large.
I haven’t been out to Kleinberg in quite a while, but The McMichael Canadian Art Collection is certainly an important Canadian art collection. My bone to pick is that the site only displays teeny images of the artwork in the collection. This is a common failing many people make with websites, only putting thumbnails or inferior images online, or stamping “sample” on their artwork. This comes from the worry that “giving it away free” will compromise the business.
My thinking is more on the line of building an audience. A thumbnail image is not going to make a fan out of me. Looking at paintings on a website is not the same thing as looking at them in reality. I suspect the website would bring the gallery much more business if it was opened up. The only way people become fans of art is through exposure.
In the old days of radio that was understood by the music companies: giving it away for free was how the fan base was built. I don’t listen to the radio anymore, so the internet is where I tend to go to find new music.
Which leads to Jane Paddy‘s beautiful folk music. This is another good website that cleverly allows visitors to listen to the music, which allows people the opportunity to experience the music so that they may become fans. This is crucial to building a fan base. Nobody is going to but a song without having first heard it.
I discovered more music on Nathan Michael Marcuzzi’s site. You can hear portions of his music for his new album billed as being “about materialism, religion & politics” here. Personally, I’d prefer to hear a few full songs rather than many partial songs. Like a story, a song has a beginning a middle and an end, so partials are clearly unsatisfying. Although I like some of his beginnings, I have no idea if I’d like how any of his songs end.
Radio stations play entire songs– that’s how brands are made and audiences are found.
Another music site I found was Roland Karl Bryce: Whistler Suite. This modern classical music seems to have been written as a musical score for the environment, kind of like Beethoven’s “Pastoral”. One of the best things about the internet is the way you can find the right audience for your creation.
As an environmentalist I really liked the Sustainable You website, which offers useful information that can help us all make the world a better place.
I realize that many people use PDF files all the time. They have been around for years, and I believe the intent was to make them deliberately rigid, so that it would be difficult or impossible to tamper with the content. Well, over the years there are all kinds of ways and means developed for getting around them. But they are still around with an undeserved reputation for security. And PDFs continue to be clunky to use.
Yet many people continue to use PDFs.
Maybe its because they have learned how. As I get older, learning new things does not come as easy as it once did. So I can understand not wanting to have to learn new software if you’re using something that works for you.
Maybe it’s because that’s just how it’s done. The company bought the software, so that’s what we use.
Regardless, I have grown to thoroughly dislike dislike PDFs over the years for a variety of reasons.
My chief complaint is that PDF files are difficult to both read and work with. Maybe if you’re used to them it may not seem difficult to you, but compared to everything else we do in email or on the internet, PDF files are excessively restrictive.
1. You can’t send a PDF file as a PDF as part of your email message, it has to be sent as an attachment.
Email attachments can be very insecure… one of the most common ways computer viruses have been distributed has been to send the virus as an attachment. As soon as the recipient opens the attachment the virus is launched. Whenever there are viruses going around the first public safety warning is always:
“don’t open email attachments!“.
Even if the email appears to be from someone you trust, the sender name can be “spoofed”. I can’t tell you how much spam– for Viagara, no less– that I receive from what appears to be myself. (Pfizer should be ashamed!)
2. PDF is proprietary software. This means that it is deliberately not easily accessible. Even if you find a PDF file on a website, you can’t read it there. You need a special software (a PDF reader) to be able to open the PDF.
The "pop-up" tells me I have to download the PDF. I can't just read it like the rest of the website.
Whether you get a PDF as an email attachment or want to access information from a website, if you don’t have the software to look at it you have to download software in order to read it. Why should I have to download software in order to read a document, particularly when I did not have to download special software to look at the website that tells me the information I want is locked up in a PDF? Maybe I’m being unreasonable, but the only software I put on my computer is software I want on my computer.
3. Public information should be easily accessible to the public.
I get particularly annoyed when public service websites like the one for the school board or the township have important information locked up in PDFs. There is no reason for this, all it does is make the information inaccessible. My father is a really bright guy who uses email all the time. Even so, he can’t originate an email. he only knows how to reply. Yet he’s still probably far more computer savvy than most of his contemporaries. And all the people like him (still the majority of citizens) are denied access to public information locked up in PDF files.
For me, if it isn’t crucial information, I usually don’t look at it if its in PDF form, because I assume that who ever locked it up there really doesn’t want me to see it. If they really wanted to share the information they would have made it easily accessible.
If I do decide I must look at the PDF, I look at it in Ghostview, an open source PDF reader that I have chosen to have on my computer. So I can read a PDF file if I absolutely have to.
PDF files are hard to read on a computer.
Because the PDF format is so rigid, (designed in the old days when screens were not wide) it is hard to read on my computer. It doesn’t easily conform to my screen. Oh sure, I can make it larger, but that makes it even more difficult to navigate through the document.
Instead of just scrolling down the document, as you do on a web page, you have to use the little arrow to “turn the page”. If you find information of value, you can’t just copy it. There are tools available for taking apart PDFs, but they require far more effort than simply highlighting and copying something that is either important or interesting.
The controls are in the upper left hand corner.
4. Environmentally Unfriendly
The only comfortable way to read a PDF is on paper, after you print it out. So if the information is something that you only need to read once, it silly to have to waste our precious resources by printing it out. Certainly, the paper can be reused, then recycled. Except those options are still much more wasteful than reading it on a screen without printing it out at all.
The most ridiculous example of this was when I was doing some research on the environment. This municipality offers its citizens a Community cleanup guide which actually looks pretty good. The problem of course is that its miserable to read online, and its 100 pages long.
It strikes me ridiculous that their idea of cleaning up the environment includes forcing the citizens to print out 100 pages of paper they’ll likely read once, before it comes back to the municipality as garbage or recycling.
One of the reasons that digital files have become so important in our lives is the fact that it makes transmission of information far easier than it has ever been. Digital files are easy to copy so we can share information. PDFs seem to exist to try and make this more difficult.
Trees are good
The Victoria Glen Forest
It was such a beautiful day I had a great time taking pictures.
Victoria Glen Park is an important part of our community.
The leaves are starting to change colour. Must be fall.
Nothing seems to match the beauty of thistle purple.
Playing around with the camera settings can be interesting.
Looking closely the white fuzz is actually a mass of spider web.
Its hard to beat the green of clover
or the white of Queen Anne's Lace
or the rich yellow of goldenrod
Or the blue of this little guy.
I wish I knew the name of this blue wildflower. It’s really beautiful, but I have no idea what it is. It’s funny, pretty much all the plants I know by name are ones my Dad taught me. For the most part the names of plants I’ve tried to learn since go in one ear and out the other.
I love taking macro photos because it makes me look at the world differently.
September 20th Victoria Glen Picnic Poster
For more information on how you can help preserve Victoria Glen Park visit: http://preservevictoriaglenpark.blogspot.com/
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