Green vs Red

Another day, another soccer game for the sporty Girl-O! 

The weather was looking a little grim at 6 pm, just a half an hour before game start, but things brightened up and I’m glad the Girl-O had a chance to play today.

I brought both my camera along, and my tripod, and caught these snaps using the tremendous zoom function of the new camera. I’m happier with this compared with my old camera, but I’m gonna have to take a digital photography to make the most of things, especially for capturing fast action and similar sporting play like what occurred in today’s game.

  

While the Girl-O was playing, her grandfather showed up, too, and was very happy I had brought along with me two folding chairs.  He very much enjoyed the high energy of today’s game. There’s a picture of him in this set, too, one I took from across the other side of the playing field.

    

Green won today, 2:1, and the Girl-O got one of her team’s goals, which thrilled her to no end!

::B::

Canada Day and Beyond!

We had a rather subdued Canada Day yesterday.

We all slept in until very late in the am.  After performing my morning ablutions I played some boardgames (Cariboo, and Guess Who, and then some terribly boring Princess Castle game with the Girl-O before she got fractious when I won one game of the 5 we played.  In the afternoon she went to visit her maternal grandparents, while

mrs_dm

  and I did some other stuff, like read, clean up a little,and I noodled around taking some more pictures with my new camera.  The weather was kinda grey and drizzily, and not very inviting to do outdoor stuff. 

The Girl-O came back a few hours later in a much better mood or supper with her grandparents, and

mrs_dm

  and I made dinner for everyone. After dinner, we watched a bunch of Bugs Bunny cartoons (

mrs_dm

 ’s father had a sudden hankering to watch them, and both myself and the Girl-O were keen) , and then my inlaws left. 

mrs_dm

  wasn’t up much for fireworks, so we stayed home, but the sound of them popping kept the Girl-O up so the two of us went out walking in the dark to try and see some (we didn’t) and look for fire-flies (we saw one) before she finally went to bed.  I did some more reading, and finally hit the hay at 2 am after finishing my latest book.

Today? I think we’ll be visiting a humungous bowling alley in Burlington, and have lunch at the attached diner.  I’m trying also to connect with my secretary’s son about meeting their 9 month old cat that we may decide to take in as a non-human companion for the Girl-O.

::B::

[Book 40] The Secret of Hangman’s Inn by Bruce Campbell (1951)

Joe, the taciturn janitor for the Brentwood Advance has mysteriously not shown up for work, the first time this has ever happened in 10 years.  Teenaged amateur reporters / sleuths Ken Holt and his buddy Sandy Allen (the latter whose father is editor of the family run newspaper) are not convinced after a letter belatedly arrives saying all is okay.  Ken and Sandy quickly suspect the letter is written under duress after recognizing some cryptic typography clues pointing all is not okay.

Stubbornly, and doggedly the two start following Joe’s back-trail and soon discover an ingenious criminal plot to steal a vast fortune.

Book 5 in the 18 volume superbly written Ken Holt juvenile series.  All the books were written by veteran wordsmith’s Sam & Beryl Epstein under the Bruce Campbell pseudonym.

::B::

[Book 39] The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (2008)

It takes a graveyard to raise a child…

A young toddler narrowly avoids a bizarre assassin’s knife, and miraculously makes his wobbly way into a nearby sprawling and ancient British graveyard. Death seems certain for the young boy as the killer stalks nearby.

And then one of the ghosts decides to let pity win out over common sense…

Winner of this year’s John Newberry Award, and short listed for a Hugo, The Graveyard Book of the few fantasy books I’ve read this year that’s worth the hype.  Gaiman, inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s “The Jungle Book” puts his own macabre and surprising spin on things inspired by the image of his own 2 year old riding a tricycle among the gravestones one fine summer’s day.

Two ghostly thumbs up.

::B::

New Camera Photos

  

Here are a few London pictures I took with my new Canon Powershot SX10 IS camera, starting with a threatening sky near the Covent Garden Market upper L, and a shot inside City Lights Bookstore on R.

  

Front counter at City Lights Bookstore, with close up near ceiling on L seen in R image.

  

Girl-O meets Kirk-O inside City Lights (L), and meets swimming-pool Frog-O (R).

    

Second floor of Attic Books overlooking Dundas Street.

  

Girl-O eating ice-cream in the Market, with her tonsils & uvula zoomed-in close-up on R.

::B::

Wiped out on Vacation!

We all here at Chateau Mystery just got back from a day trip to London (a repeat for me!) to do a little shopping and to meet up with some old friends.

Before we left for our trip, I visited Black’s Photography at University Plaza. After showing the manager’s a competitor’s ad in today’s paper for a camera I was looking for, they agreed to match their price.  So I bought myself a new Canon PowerShot SX10 IS ‘super-zoom‘ camera (big thanks to

shadow_maze

  for his tremendous help in selecting this super digital camera with a 20x optical zoom!).

[Book 38] The Prometheus Project by R. Karl Largent (1993)

A dying billionaire has assembled a oddly assorted team of ‘experts’, one including Elliot Wages, an adventure writer who also is familiar with some of the remote islands of the Caribbean Sea. 

The crippled billionaire’s goal?  A sunken freighter located at the bottom of the sea fifty years ago, one with a secret Nazi cargo of cylinders loaded aboard during the dying days of WWII.  A cargo developed by a secretive German cryogenics expert under the direct supervision of Adolf Hitler to save the embers of the Third Reich… 

Brisk fast paced techno-thriller from an author I never heard of.  Wages is no Dirk Pitt, and regularly gets the sand pounded out of him by various villains in the piece.  He’s more a thinker and a fighter, and surrounds himself with some pretty capable friends. The shaggy dog ending was a bit of a let down, but I was interested in this enough to finish it through to the end.

::B::

A Day at the Beach!