The Brown Knowser

Friday, February 28, 1997 I remember the sunshine and how it illuminated the landscape, so far below. The Rocky Mountains—how they looked close enough to touch, the jagged ridges and snowy peaks. Up the Alaskan Panhandle, following the shoreline of the bay, the water was so clear and clean. The snowy land came to meet the water and plunged into the emerald depths, still visible on that sun-soaked day. Approaching Anchorage, the horizon to the north became blanketed in low, feathery clouds, through which the peak of Mount McKinley—Dinali—rose like a resting giant. On the long journey, from Vancouver to Tokyo, there was lots to do besides stare out the starboard window. Having been seated in the centre aisles of the oversized but under-filled Canadian Airlines flight, the only time in which DW and I could capture a glimpse outside the cabin was when we got out of our seats to stretch and wander to one of the portholes of the exit doors. We had plenty of time to do that. We had ...

One of my colleagues and close friends didn't think we'd do it. I believe that Phil was projecting his own reluctance to pulling up roots and beginning a new adventure. "You're not going," he'd say. Maybe, he wanted us to stay, wanted me to continue working side-by-side with him. But that wasn't the path I wanted, wasn't where I wanted to continue. If I didn't go, I knew I'd remain in a life that I hadn't carved out for myself, but rather had fallen into. And I wanted out. I don't know why my buddy thought I wouldn't do it, wouldn't leave the country and head to the other side of the planet, to start a job that I had never done before, never trained for. Throughout our friendship, everything that I said I would do, I had done. I said I would fly to England, Wales, and Paris. I did that. I said I would hike from Frontenac Provincial Park to Kingston (a 60-kilometre walk). I did that. I said I would backpack out to the Gas...

On Tuesday, as I was getting ready to leave the office for the day, I began to think of my upcoming evening. I had my stand-up comedy class to go to and I would probably pay a visit to the Arrow & Loon , where I would try the latest February seasonal from Beau's . And, there was still the matter of my POTD project . At more than 50 days, I'm looking forward to a change in season. I'm running out of ideas for winter shots and there are plenty of images that I'd like to capture as soon as the snow is gone. I have some springtime ideas, summer shots, and autumn images lined up. Because I can't take a photo of the same subject, I'm finding that I'm running out of ideas. I do have some leeway—if I take a picture of Parliament Hill, for example, I can still shoot the site again, as long as I don't capture the same angle, the same time of day, and so on. I've already taken a photo of downtown Ottawa, from the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River , in...

One of the things that I plan to do, this year, is to go back to the old neighbourhoods that I lived in, in Montreal, before my family moved to Ottawa. I haven't seen them since we left, though one of them, I've passed countless times as I've driven to Montreal, for family visits and vacations. I was three when we left for the nation's capital, for our townhouse in Parkwood Hills, in Nepean. Before then, we lived in an apartment building, in Dorval, across Highway 20 from the airport. At the end of our street, where it ended at the highway, a giant held a muffler. In the summer of 1968, I remember playing on the lawn outside our building, with my older sister, Holly, and her friends. One day, my folks set up an inflatable pool on that lawn, and Holly and I spread out our towels and lounged the afternoon away. In the fall, she would be starting school for the first time, in our new city. The school was new, too. Until then, there was the summer. I wonder wha...

It looked so much bigger, then. It was only a couple of years old when I first attended, first lined up on the far end, where the roof lines sloped, where the kindergarten section, with its one floor but high ceilings were separate from the mainstream classrooms. I remember the door being so much bigger, the entrance wider, able to allow se veral people to enter at once. Little people, perhaps. We lined up along this wall on my first day. Through the door, turn to your right, and you were in kindergarten. Opened for Canada's centennial, the hallways and gymnasium floor still showed fresh paint when I first walked its halls, in the fall of 1970. Can you recognize me in this kindergarten photo? I remember the classrooms, the gym, the library, the different doors that you went through, depending on your grade. I remember all of my teachers: Miss Ash, Mrs. Sainthill, Madame Archambault, Miss Summers and Miss Ryan, Mr. Meredith, Mr. Fulcher, Mr. Townsend. I remembe...

One of the people from my childhood days and I still keep in touch. She's one of my oldest friends, and every time I say that I feel as though I'm insulting her. She's younger than me, by more than three months. My oldest friend, who I've known for more than 20 years, is in his 60s. Yeah, he's old. I saw my younger, oldest friend, last night, and even though we don't see her nearly as often as I'd like, we do still keep in touch and make an effort to get together whenever we can. She and her husband don't live in Ottawa, and so I only see her when she comes to visit her mother and sisters, who are still here, or my family and I make the rare trip to Guelph, when we can. It's funny that my friend was in town this weekend. It was only a couple of weeks ago that she was on my mind, in a dream. Not one of those types of dreams: she's my friend, one of my oldest friends. Despite it being winter in Ottawa, my dream took place in the summer, ...

I always think that historic buildings should be lit up at night. Sadly, not all of them are. I pass this old school on Slack Road from time to time, and I often think that if I ever won millions of dollars, I might buy this building and turn it into a brewery. I'd call it Old School Brew House. I'd ask my good friend and brewer extraordinaire, Perry, to let his imagination soar. Assuming he would be interested in working with me. (Oh, the arse jokes would fly!) I have no idea who is using this building now, but I do feel it should be lit at night. Until then, if I want to capture it, I'll have to rely on my car headlights. On a snowy night, they'll do in a pinch. Happy Friday!

It's been a while since Where In Ottaw a has been solved in such a short period of time. The record of six minutes still stands but there are few who can say that they've solved it in less than one hour. DaniGee is one of those few. Booth House is a building that she used to walk by regularly, when she worked downtown, and she would often wonder about what it might have been like when it was used as an actual house, rather than its current state. Located at 252 Metcalfe Street, where it meets MacLaren Street, this Queen Anne Revival house, built in 1909, was the residence of Ottawa's lumber baron, John Booth. Today, it's the Laurentian Leadership Centre Of Trinity Western University . If you're looking for a career in politics, this is the place to be, in the heart of Centretown. DaniGee solved the photo challenge in only 39 minutes from the time that the contest opened. She must have studied the ornate stone gables closely. And, with the street nu...

I am by no means a prude. There is very little that makes me uncomfortable as a topic discussion. I can think of two issues that make me uneasy: children and women being abused. But even then, I can talk about them—though my opinion is simple: hang the abusers. And while I do think we should be able to talk about anything, I do believe that there is a time and place for that discussion. No one can dispute I'm a CBC junkie. I've talked about it on occasion, on this blog. I follow most of the CBC Ottawa folks on Twitter, and I've met more than a few. I've been on CBC Radio twice and my photos regularly appear during the evening weather reports. And my Bate Island Project video was featured on a segment of the dinner-hour news broadcast and was also shared on their Web site.  I love CBC. But I wasn't thrilled with a particular article on a favourite Saturday-morning program, Day 6 . It wasn't the subject of this 18-minute segment that bothered me. And in...

I'm a master of procrastination. Last weekend, on the day before I was planning to prepare the latest Where In Ottawa photo challenge, I was feeling under the weather, and so, instead of going out to take a photo of a new location for the contest, I delved into my library of photos that I had shot in the past but had not yet used. I have backups for this contest, just in case. But as I was about to create the blog post, the wire that leads into my house and connects to my Internet and TV router failed, and I was unable to use my computer. If only I had prepared in advance. Nevertheless, I vowed to have a photo challenge in February, but only a week later. Being a master of procrastination, I held off taking fresh photos until yesterday, and set out just as the snow storm started. I suppose I could have used the same photo that I was going to use last weekend, but I was feeling that I needed to get out of the house, and I wanted to save the other photo for a time when I...

I really don't know what this place is. It doesn't line up with the airport. I've never seen any activity at the place, any time I've cycled past it, on my rides to and from North Gower. Six sheds. Six antennae. Out in the middle of nowhere. Are they listening stations? What are they listening to? Who is listening? I like to think that they're reaching out for signals, far beyond our planet, beyond our solar system. I think they'd need bigger antennae. Happy Friday!

"Oh, it's so busy." The voice was soft, almost reflexive, but I had a feeling that the words were directed at me. The gentle hand, grasping my forearm, confirmed that the voice was talking to me. "I guess that means it's good." It was hard to pinpoint her age. Anywhere from her mid 20s to early 30s. A pretty-enough face: it was all I could see. Her parka done up tightly, the hood enclosing her head, the fur trim masking all but a few strands of sandy-blonde hair. Her deep, blue eyes were far away, as though she were looking at another world. She wasn't all there. I smiled. "Yeah, it's good. At this time, it's always busy. There are three schools across the street." The Subway was the only fast-food restaurant on Boulevard de la Cité des Jeunes, close to the high school, Cégep de l'Outaouais, and Heritage College. It became busiest, I found, between 11:30 and 12:30. Closer to 1:00, it thinned out but there were...

I do a lot of things that waste time. I surf the Internet. I watch mindless hours of shows on Netflix, often series I watched when they first aired on network television. I write this blog. I'm also taking a night class, once a week, for no other reason than it makes me laugh and it lets people laugh at me. The laughing kind, where they're not pointing fingers at me while they do it. I'm taking a stand-up comedy class. Almost a year-and-a-half ago, I signed up for a sketch comedy class, and I had a great time, bouncing ideas off my classmates, listening to their ideas. We came up with about 10 sketches, which we worked on over the eight weeks of class and wrapped up the course by performing these sketches in front of students from another acting class, family, and friends. It was a lot of fun, and even though we had to read our scripts because we hadn't taken enough time to rehearse and memorize lines, our performance was well-received. I video-recorded the ...

Yesterday, my Internet/TV modem stopped working. Luckily, I wasn't hosting a Super B owl party, or we'd have been looking at a blank screen. It did give the family to spend some time off our devices, and we actually played a family game, read books, and got some much-needed rest for our eyes. Unfortunately, it also meant that I couldn't write a blog post. Today was supposed to be a Where In Ottawa photo challenge. I'll be postponing that contest until next Monday. Until then, enjoy this non-blog. Enjoy, I think, is demanding too much.

It's called a Sun Dog. It's a type of halo phenomenon that occurs when ice crystals and light that is produced from the sun interact. It can sometimes look like a rainbow that circles the sun or it can just be a partial fragment. They are especially visible when the sun is close to the horizon. As I drove to work, on Tuesday, with the temperature plummeting to the minus 20s with the wind, a thick fog was shrouding the Rideau River. As I drove along Prince of Wales Drive, the sun was just starting its morning climb, and was burning through that river mist. I saw the optical apparition, and left the road, moving far off the shoulder to be well out of the way of my fellow commuters. I ran to the back of my car and pulled my camera out of the trunk, and then moved to the front of my car, creating a barrier between me and the traffic. They call it a Sun Dog, but when I saw the images played back on my little screen, they reminded me of cat's eyes. Or, possibly, of a sn...

It's enough to make me want to drop my landline. We get them all the time, nearly every day: telemarketers. And while those that are set up in Canada comply with the CRTC rules regarding do-not-disturb policies, remove us from their calling lists, and we never hear from them again (until they change their name and start the process all over again), there are the overseas telemarketers who constantly call, trying to ply whatever scam it is their employer has concocted. Like the duct-cleaning services caller. From the get-go, they are dishonest: "Hello, my name is Jason..."—seriously, he sounds like a Jason about as much as I sound like a Choi Tae-ha. You would seem more sincere if he introduced himself as Pavan. Or Sandeep. I realize that I sound a bit racist when I say this, and maybe the caller's name really is Jason, just as the other voices with an Indian or Pakistani accent, who have called me, are really named Peter, Michael, Colin, and Mark. By now, I...