Green Lake

At the end of July we finally made it up to the lake for the first time since February. And, for the first time in a really long time, my sister and parents made it up too. Although the weather wasn't amazing, it didn't rain and I suppose the less-than-30 degree weather made doing the renos that we were working on a bit easier to get done.

 A cool tree on the drive from Kamloops..

 A spotted sandpiper on the rocks, where the dock normally is.

 Yep, I should basically just live in the country, where I can pick flowers and put them in glasses around my house.

 Nothing like an interior sunset over the lake.

Hopefully when we head back up there next weekend the weather will be a bit nicer.. but not nice enough that we don't finish the reno!

Kamloops

While at home (home home; Kamloops) this past weekend, R and I went for a walk in Peterson creek. Although Kamloops isn't my favourite place, I was able to take some cool shots.

I love grass (although not identifying grass..) - long stems, cool flowers and seed heads.. I really love the contrast of the stem and the seeds in this particular variety.

At first glace, everything in this photo looks dead. In reality, there is a very alive plant on the right-hand side. One of the reasons why you always have to look harder at everything. It also shows why Kamloops looks the same for most of the summer - the plants have evolved to blend in.

I really like the grass at this time of the year.

One of my favourite things to take photos of is lines.. lines in flowers, fences.. anything, really. I was playing with different settings in these two photos (although I don't really remember what..)

Dried Lavender

After going to the Lavender farm, I hung up the stalks in my closet - somewhere cool and dark where they could dry out.

Now they smell wonderful, and I will hopefully be putting them in drawers and in my closet to make everything smell nice.

I took these photos in the morning, the only time of the day the light really comes into my house directly.

The checkered table cloth makes me feel like I belong in the country. I had a bit of trouble adjusting to the light at first - it seemed to be fairly light, but I ended up having a really low shutter speed in order to get the colours to be more realistic. I guess that's one thing that I need to work on: figuring out what 'enough' light really is.

Wind Farm

Way back at the beginning of June, while up in Fort St John, I was lucky enough to get to do some aerial surveys by helicopter. One on of these surveys, our pilot in an effort to show off (or something) took us a bit further than we needed to go, just so that we could see the wind farm. There's plenty of these up in the Peace region, with tons more environmental assessments and such going on for more.

I've heard both good and bad things about wind farms: they are more green, they aren't the ugliest things in the world, but they do actually kill a huge number of bats. The change in pressure near the fan blades is enough to pop their lungs.. or something like that. Not good, either way.

To be up close to one of these massive towers is incredible: they're huge, something like 200 feet tall!

I think there was 60 turbines on this particular wind farm.

It's hard not to love the contrast of the mountains with the sky.

 

Lavender Farm

On August long weekend, my family (minus my brother, plus a few significant others) went camping near Nanaimo. Normally, we'd be up at the lake, enjoying the best weekend of the year, but this year my cousin was getting married. In true fashion, she was a bit late and we were a bit early, so we ended up with almost an hour to kill before the ceremony.

On our drive up to Nanaimo from Victoria, we had seen a sign for a lavender farm. It wasn't far from the church where the wedding was to be held, so we headed over there.

Beautiful sky with the amazing colours of the lavender.

We probably spend 20 minutes at the farm, but that was long enough to wander about, and cut some lavender for ourselves. I'm sure we must have looked goofy, two of us with huge cameras, and all of us dressed up for a wedding..

Needless to say, my closet now has a bunch of lavender drying in it.