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I posted a video to YouTube today of the launch of VE3REX-11 this past Saturday:

I’ve also posted a few pictures in an album on Facebook that you can view even if you don’t have a Facebook account.

Sunrise this morning was particularly pretty…

People in Ottawa experienced yet another day with rain. Today’s weather, however, included torrential downpours, lightning and strong winds. I noticed within the span of about 15 minutes that the air temperature dropped by more than 5 degrees, confirming that there was a cold front blasting through. As I drove westwards back up to the cottage, I drove through the front and emerged into relatively clear air. Looking back towards the east, I saw some really impressive clouds trailing along the backside of the cold front, so I stopped to take some pictures. (In fact, a couple of the photos were looking west, but still impressive.)

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At least we didn’t experience the weather that people living north of Ottawa did. Mike (VA3MPM) was on his way to his cottage near Maniwaki to check on damage caused by the storm. when I talked to him while en route to Golden Lake. I gather he lost a tree that was holding up an antenna, while one set of neighbours had their house dumped in the lake, contents and all, including some of the people and their three dogs. No one was hurt, fortunately, but their house is a write-off, as are most of the boats on the lake. Another neighbour of his was on the couch when he saw “stuff” normally found in/on a house blowing through the sky à la Wizard of Oz. Yikes!

I’ve posted all the pictures I took of KISS on-stage at the Ottawa Bluesfest. You can view them here.

I headed down to the Cisco Ottawa Bluesfest at Lebreton Flats Wednesday evening to see KISS in concert.

This was my first KISS concert, which apparently put me in the minority based on the fact that there were tons of people in KISS makeup. I enjoyed it enough and can put a tick next to “Seen KISS in concert”. Rock and Roll All Nite was pretty impressive, with lots of fireworks and confetti cannons. Very cool!

I took a lot of pictures, some of which you can see by clicking on the images below. Sooner or later I’ll get around to putting the rest of them online. They’re now available here.

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I hadn’t been planning on going to Bluesfest, but a call from a friend changed that. I hopped on a bus and made my way to Lebreton Flats where I met up with my friend. We listened to some amazing improvisational electronic music from Holy F*ck for a while before heading off to see Ana Miura.

Watching and listening to Ana, it was clear that she was singing from the heart. Her music was warm and full of rich tones and she even played one song on a ukulele that she’d made herself. Very talented and a likely addition to my iPod in the near future!

Once Ana finished, I made my way to the main stages. Metric was about half-way through their set when I showed up, so I listened to the rest of their set while I munched on some mini-donuts I bought from one of the vendors.

The last act of the night was Ben Harper and Relentless7. He played a mix of guitar and slide guitar while singing a great selection of songs, including  a cover of Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie. Wow!

All in all I had a great time at the Ottawa Bluesfest and I’m thinking of going to a few other nights because it sounds like there’s a bunch of great performers lined up.

I took some pictures of the various shows I watched and put them in my gallery. I haven’t gone through them with a fine toothed comb, so you’ve been warned.

There’s always been a fair bit of wildlife at the cottage, but this year there seems to be more birds than past years. And there’s a new species in the neighbourhood: a family of Eastern Phoebes. Sayornis phoebe is a species of flycatcher and these have made a nest on the mast of our sailboat that’s hanging under the eaves of the cottage. (Needless to say, we’re not doing a whole lot of sailing right now.)

The map in our bird book indicates that we’re within the summer range for the species, but this is the first time in the roughly 25 years that my parents have owned the cottage that we’ve seen them. Being flycatchers, we’re quite happy to have them around and hope that they’ll return next year.

There also seem to be many more members of Sitta carolinensis, too. The White-breasted Nuthatch is not a newcomer, but this year there’s a lot of them flying around.

And, as always, there’s a plethora of red squirrels and chipmunks, all of whom have realized that there’s absolutely no need for them to forage and fend for themselves because the humans in the neighbourhood are quite happy to provide a virtually infinite amount of sunflower seeds for them to squirrel away (small pun intended).

My parents feed these critters around 20 kilograms of striped sunflower seeds each summer. (They don’t like the black sunflower seeds and will literally turn their noses up at them.) The amazing thing about this is that there isn’t a field of sunflowers because though they go to great lengths to hide the seeds, they don’t remember where they hide all of them.