The Brown Knowser

When DW returned from her recent camping trip, she showed me some of the photos that she had captured over those five days. In particular, there were some photos of a bird feeding its babies, often with much of its head inside the wide-open mouths of the wee ones. "What do you think?" she asked me. Though I'm not a professional photographer, DW thinks that my opinion holds value. "Cool shots," I said. "These would have been fantastic if the mom and baby were in focus." "But this baby is in focus," she said, pointing to another youngling, its mouth also wide open in anticipation of a meal. "Yes," I said, "but my attention is drawn to the mother and sibling. That's where the action is happening." Indeed, both DW and I know how difficult it is to get sharp images of birds, especially when they are moving. I can't count how many times we've looked at each other's bird photos and lamented how we wished the actio...

Pouring them, side-by-side, I could have sworn that I was pouring the same beer. It wouldn't surprise me if Farm Boy had struck a deal with Collective Arts. And I would have even said that they were a good fit for one another: a small but growing Ontario grocery chain and a small but growing Ontario craft brewery. Looking at both glasses, I saw the same, unfiltered yellow ale with a foamy, white head that settled to a solid lace. It was as though I had poured two glasses of carbonated lemonade. But the nose differed, as did the flavour profile. And one read that it was produced in Ottawa, while the other came from Hamilton. They were not the same IPA. But which one is better? Last week, I looked at Farm Boy's own brand of non-alcoholic IPA . I picked it up toward the end of my Dry July challenge, along with another non-alcoholic IPA from one of my favourite Ontario breweries, which was on the shelf next to the house brand. Let's look at that brew now. Non-Alcoholic IPA (0....

There are no photos for this post. Which is ironic, considering this story takes place during a photo shoot. I usually sign up for two or three photo meetups with my club each year, and last Thursday was the third one, right behind the fair shoot I attended, two days before. This meetup was part photo shoot, part social event, and was held at a bar on Elgin Street. Photographers were told to pack light, meaning no tripods or big lighting setups. I arrived with just one D-SLR and a speedlight (flash). Simple. Models were told to dress up for a night on the town. The women were gorgeous; the men, looking sharp. I showed up wearing a dark grey shirt and black pants, so that I wouldn't stand out, should a photographer find be far in the background of a shot. I arrived about 10 minutes late, as parking in the Elgin Street area can be a challenge on a Thursday night. When I arrived at the venue, which was on the second floor of the building, photographers and models seemed to alrea...

I haven't been to a town fair in a long time. The last time I went was in 2011 (geez, this is the third post, this week, related to 2011). DW was out of the country, on business, and I had charge of our kids, who were 10 and eight at the time. I thought it was a good idea to take them to the Carp Fair , and so we headed out for the afternoon. We wandered the various attractions and I let them try their luck at some of the kids games, like the ring and bean-bag tosses. They each one a prize, and so they were in good spirits. I let them share a giant cotton-candy cone and we also had lunch. When it came to the rides, I let them each choose one. Kid 1 wanted to try the UFO ride, where you go inside a centrifuge and lay on a plank that raised you up. I lay on either side of them, and when the ride started, they both wanted to hold my hand, especially when the plank started moving out toward the walls and their feet were off the ground. Kid 1 couldn't wait for the ride to stop. Next...

Just because I'm no longer taking a dry month doesn't mean that I have to stop drinking non-alcoholic beer. After I finished my Dry July challenge, I noticed how some of my tummy fat had gone away, despite the fact that I wasn't exercising as much as I should. And I started thinking that maybe, I was on to something. Trust me, this doesn't mean that I'm giving up alcohol. But I have decided that, for the remainder of the year—perhaps longer—I'm going to seriously reduce my alcohol intake. Not that I drink a lot under normal circumstances. I've decided that I will allow myself a drink (or two) on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. The remainder of a week will be dry, the only exceptions will be if I'm on vacation (I'll be at an all-inclusive resort, in Mexico, for a week in December, and there's no way that I could stick to this rule!). If I want something that resembles a cocktail or beer from Sunday through Wednesday, it has to be non-alcoholic....

I'm still underestimating how long it takes to make a video. On Monday evening, I started editing and compiling 13-year-old video clips that I stumbled upon while looking for a random photo to share on my social-media sites. I figured that it would take me a couple of days to complete—a couple of hours each night until it was done. When I finished work, on Monday, I thought I would start by creating an intro and an outro to this video and placing all of the clips into a new project. That was my plan for day one. But I made the intro and outro in one take, and it only took me about a half hour, including the setup (lights and video camera) and moving this video into the project folder that contained the older clips. It took about 15 to 20 minutes to search through royalty-free songs and find a suitable soundtrack, and by the end of the first hour, I had my project files uploaded to a library in my video-editing software, Final Cut Pro X. So, I kept going. When Kid 1 returned ho...

Anybody who follows me on my two main social-media platforms, Mastodon and Threads , knows that I often post what I call a random photo of the day. I started doing so almost immediately after starting up on Mastodon and took it up a few months after I opened a Threads account. What I do is that I go to various places where I've stored photos, depending on the device I'm on at the time: my Google photo albums, Flickr, or, if I'm using my home laptop, from my photo database. I would basically grab a random album and close my eyes as I clicked inside the album or folder, or, if I was using my smartphone, I'd swipe an album quickly, making the photos fly by, before tapping on the screen to make them stop and selecting a photo. If I randomly selected a photo of family members, a picture of food, or of one or more of my cats, I'd usually choose again, unless the photo was well-composed and well-exposed. I've wanted to always put a good photo forward. On a couple of o...

There's something really unusual that happens when I watch an episode of Professor of Rock on YouTube: I get whatever song he's covering stuck in my head. Okay, that's not the unusual bit. What's unusual is that the song doesn't enter my head until several days after I watch the show. A few minutes after watching the show, I become preoccupied with the next thing that fills my head and not soon after, I completely forget which artist or band was the topic of that nearly daily show. " The Monkees " by Mark Sardella is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 . The song just pops in my head two or three days later and plays on a continual loop for the remainder of that day. So it was no surprise that, three days after watching an episode of the popular 1960s show, The Monkees , on Professor of Rock , the theme song became an ear worm that occupied much of my Sunday. As a kid, I would race home after school to catch an episode. Though, by then, the show was in sy...

At least, nine percent of me does. For years, I've talked about the family members that I do know, and of a family member with whom I've recently reunited. But I know very little of either side of my family: neither mother's side nor father's side. So, during the last Amazon Prime Days, DW talked me into purchasing a DNA kit from Ancestry. She had purchased one for herself several years ago and learned much about her roots. Before the DNA test, I had been told that I had mostly English and French blood in me, with a bit of Welsh and a wee dram of Scots blood, as well. Turns out that I don't even have a drop of Scottish blood in me. No matter: I still love Scotland. My DNA has broken my genes into a few categories, as follows: 72 percent England and Northwestern Europe 10 percent Ireland (I have more Irish blood in me than DW!) 7 percent Sweden and Denmark 5 percent France 4 percent Wales 2 percent Norway I was saddened to learn that I have no genetic ties to Scotlan...

Beaumaris Castle, 1991. It hasn't changed much. Even before I went onto Google Maps street view in The Conqueror app , I knew what the road would look like. Though it was a major thoroughfare, I imagined that they hadn't widened Beaumaris Road, that it was still a two-lane roadway with stone walls on either side. I finished my spin bike ride and entered the results into my Garmin watch app, which automatically sent the relevant data to the virtual travel app. Though I wanted to reach the town of Beaumaris by the end of my day, the stationary bike ride didn't do it. I'd have to rely on my daily steps to get me the rest of the way. But I did look at where I was on the route before adding up my steps, and Beaumaris Road hadn't changed a bit. I was still about five kilometres away from my ultimate destination, and I had completed more than four through the day, already. The last time that I was in Wales, in real life, was in 1991, with DW. We had started in London , ma...

I might have missed this view, had the York Steps not been temporarily closed. Usually those wide stairs would have been the fastest and most convenient way to get from the ByWard Market to Major's Hill Park, which had been my original destination last week, where I had initially planned to capture photos of the Grands Feux du Casino fireworks . But with them temporarily closed for construction, I had to take another flight of stairs that I had almost forgotten had existed. Between the Connaught Building (Canada Revenue Agency) and a condominium building lies a narrow set of stairs that lead from Sussex Drive to Mackenzie Avenue. For those with mobility issues, there's even an elevator that can take you up and down his small slope. As I approached the base of the stairs, I was met with a view of one of the castle-like towers of the Chateau Laurier hotel. With golden hour upon me, the light struck me in such a way that I had to stop and take a photo. Ottawa has great surprises a...

"What are you doing with your face?" DW asked me about a week ago. "Quite literally, nothing." About a month ago, I decided to stop shaving. Or, rather, I simply stopped shaving. I don't think that there was any thought process to it. My electric razor needed a recharge, which I promptly fulfilled by plugging it in for a day. When it was fully recharged, I returned it to its drawer in the bathroom and essentially didn't touch it for almost a week. When my neck was getting scraggly and itchy, I pulled out the shaver and trimmed only the areas beyond my jawline. And that's it. There was no conscious decision: I had merely removed the whiskers that were bothering me. It wasn't until nearly three weeks had gone by without clearing the fuzz from my face that DW spoke up. She doesn't like beards. Never has. After another week went by, she broached the subject again. "Are you hiding your face?" "What do you mean?" I countered. "...

The first time that DW and I put our kayaks on the Ottawa River , it was 2021 and I planned to make a video that showed our exploits. It was a beautiful July day and there was surprisingly little traffic on the water. We put our kayaks in at the Port de plaisance Jacques-Cartier – Marina de Hull, on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River, near the Alexandra Bridge. We planned to paddle around the Museum of Civilization and work our way as far upstream as the current would allow us, toward the Chaudière Falls, and we actually got pretty far, paddling under the Zibi Interzip lines, between the Portage Bridge and the Chaudière Bridge, before the current of the falls stopped us in our tracks and turned us around. We then paddled around Victoria Island, coming very close to the base of the Mill Street Brew Pub, before making our way toward Parliament Hill, the Rideau Locks, and finally, the Rideau Falls before turning back to the put-in spot. I managed to capture some good video, includ...

It was worth a shot. I overestimated how big Wednesday night's fireworks display would be. I ended up missing half of them, because Spain's entrance into the Grands Feux du Casino show was by obstructed by the buildings that I wanted to have in the foreground. I never like to capture fireworks from the same spot, and so every year, I come up with ideas about where I want to stand to capture the annual summer event. Last year, I went to the point at Richmond Landing , along with dozens of other photographers. It's a good place to capture clear views of the light show but there aren't many landmarks to complement the shots. I could get the twin spires of Notre Dame Basilica Cathedral and the National Gallery of Canada, in Lowertown, but they're so far away in the shot. The reflective lights of these buildings on the water, though, were nice and added a bit more to the fireworks photos. I thought it might be nice to stand near the Colonel John By statue in Major's...

This is not the beer I've had before. Raspberries are my favourite fruit. I start almost every morning with a frozen smoothie that contains frozen chunks of pineapple, frozen organic blueberries, and frozen raspberries. Lots of raspberries. A few years ago, when I spied a few beers that featured raspberries, I had to give them a try. One of my favourite of these ales was a raspberry Berliner weisse by Nickel Brook. You can read my review of that beer on my old Beer O'Clock blog . Because I can sometimes be a love 'em and then leave 'em kind of guy when it comes to beer—I mean, come on, I like to spread the love around—I haven't had that beer in many years. But last month, while I was challenging myself to a Dry July, another Ottawa beer guy, who I have befriended on Threads, shared a post about a raspberry wheat ale from Nickel Brook. He posted a photo and while I didn't recognize the can in which it came (the brew I had came in a bottle), the contents of his g...

Perhaps last week's news was a bit of a wake-up call. Sure, my cholesterol is high but what really made me think was how badly I let myself get out of shape. My gut has increased and a lot of my muscle mass has turned to flab because I've slowed down my exercise: first, because of the reduced capacity of my lungs and second, because of the injury to my right foot. After I left the doctor's office, I started thinking seriously about my recent habits. I work at a desk all day, and when I finish work, I move to our family room, where I usually sit in my favourite chair and turn on the TV. I'll sometimes help prepare dinner and I'm the one who usually cleans the kitchen afterwards. But then I return to my chair and watch more television until it's time to work on my blog, which involves more sitting at a desk. When my blog is done, I may tinker some more on the computer but I usually head upstairs, get into my pajamas, and crawl into bed. The next day, I start that...

When Kid 2 adopted a kitten , she gave it the name 'Little Pumpernickel,' partly because of its colouring. She shortened the name to 'Lil Pump' but shortened the name, even further, to Lily. When Kid 2 learned that there was an American rapper who went by the name ' Lil Pump ,' she was fuming. "I came up with that name first," she screamed. (Actually, he beat Lily by three years.) But this naming issue is not what this post is about. Not really. DW, the kids, and I first passed by an abandoned boat when we canoed from Kingston to Ottawa, along the Rideau Lakes system, in 2013. We had been paddling from Rideau River Provincial Park, on this leg of our journey, and we wanted to get to the lockstation at Long Island, in Manotick, before dinner, so we didn't stop to investigate the tug-shaped ship, anchored among reeds on the east bank of the Rideau River. It wasn't until the summer of 2021 that I returned to the Rideau River and revisited the boat...