In addition to the pictures I posted of yesterday’s storm, I took a couple of videos as a massive wall of rain and wind crossed the Ottawa River just upstream of Bate Island.

I love storms, so I headed out to Bate Island in the middle of the Ottawa River this evening a few minutes before the storm arrived to take some pictures.

It was a big storm, as evidenced by the fact that I had to paste together five photos to capture some of it:

If you browse through these photos, you can see the wall of rain crossing the river upstream near Britannia before it arrived where I was. What you can’t see in the pictures are the bolts of lightning that were hammering things on both sides of the river.

VIEW SLIDE SHOW

I picked up my bike from Fresh Air Experience at lunch on Wednesday and headed out after work with a friend for the first ride of the season. We followed one of my regular routes, which starts at the north end of Parkdale, follows the bike path along the Ottawa River to the locks below Parliament Hill, continues up the hill beside the locks, heads through the NAC and the along the path next the canal to Dow’s Lake. From Dow’s Lake it heads a couple of hundred metres along Prince of Wales to the greenspace just past the O-Train cut, through the greenspace and then along Sherwood and some local streets to home. It was nice to be back in the saddle and with the early spring I’m looking forward to many more rides.

There are many type of hazards that can be found on golf courses. Ponds, ditches, sand traps and rocks are some that spring to mind.

While playing a round of golf at Palm Beach Gardens Golf Course this afternoon, I encountered a moving hazard on one of the holes:

It was a bit more than 2 feet long and started gently hissing when I crouched down to take its picture.

On the next hole there was another one that was 8 feet long lumbering along towards one of the ponds.

Everyone on that hole was letting it play through.

It’s days like today that make me particularly grateful that I can walk to work, particularly when the traffic layer on Google Maps shows this:

If you’re unfortunate enough to be out on the roads, drive safely!

It would be great if I could capture a snowflake like this, but sadly they only seem to show up when I’m on my way to work:

It was snowing on the way to work today. I noticed one really nice snowflake that landed on my glove so I tried taking a picture of it.

It’s a bit overexposed, but given that I shot it with my point-and-shoot in macro mode hand holding it while waiting for the light to change it’s not too bad. It looks like a stellar dendrite with a bit of rime on it.