That's great!

Always a sign of November is the Barred owl.  I heard one calling in the woodlot the other day but I couldn't see it because it was too dark.  One also flew along the open pathway alongside Highland Creek and landed nearby.  This has happened several times.  It's quite arresting when an owl completely ignores you because it is so completely dedicated to locating its next meal, which might be only a few meters away from my position and likely revealed its location by my proximity and the owl takes advantage of this.  A wise bird indeed.



 

No sir, I don't consider this to be early.  In fact, Snow bunting have consistently been reported in other locations: Sam Smith, Ashbridges, Tommy Thompson, even Cranberry Marsh (once or twice) and a couple of reports from Darlington in Oshawa.  When I was at Tommy Thompson a few weeks ago there were energetic flocks of small birds on Peninsula B, some were S. bunting, some were pipit and even included the odd larkspur.  Others have managed some very good photos of them but I guess that I didn't smell right because they would take off when I was quite a distance away.  I think that your best bet, as at Bluffer's, is to station yourself on the rocks and hunker-down for awhile and if you are lucky some might appear.  Being motionless among the rocks is not interpreted as a threat but moving around, especially in their direction WILL NOT BE TOLERATED.

On the rocks at west end ... Snow Bunting cursing the wind.  I was not close and used a short lens, so I was kind of shortsighted.  One day I hope to be nice and close.

I'm sorry to hear that your back pain has returned.  Have you tried Ketamine?  It worked for Dr. Greg House, but then there were those annoying hallucinations to deal with.  With that stuff in your system you might only imagine that you were at the Eaton's Centre.  Actually, any sedative makes pain more tolerable because it serves to change your perception of pain.  Pain is always a combination of the actual activation of the pain pathway and the brain's interpretation of the effect, which governs your long-term threshold.  It also softens the entrenchment of the pain pathway.  Once the neuronal highway is entrenched it takes more analgesia to get relief.  That's why taking an analgesic at the very commencement of pain offers more profound relief that waiting until you can't stand it anymore and then taking something to mitigate the pain.  It also reduces the likelihood of taking too much of a painkiller because you think that it's not working as well as you thought it would.

As for standing in a mini-tornado of money as a promo for OLG, it would be more appropriate to stand on the very edge of a bottomless precipice with your toes curved around the rim and pour your money into the black void never to be seen again.  Gambling is a global epidemic and can therefore only be interpreted as a foible of all humanity, akin to addiction liability, and has been appropriated by both the criminal factions and also by governments ...  it's sometimes hard to discern between the two, equally guilty of preying upon the afflicted, one doing so because it's easy money and the other doing so because they rely upon it to make ends meet.  The end justifies the means.  You know how that works!