Why my lights will be on

I don't usually use this space to rant about politics or religion, but this one takes the cake! Earth Hour. We are encourage to turn off our lights for one hour today to symbolize our fight to save the climate/earth/environment/electricity, whatever.

It's like having a pep rally, but there is no game! The world is not ending! We are not killing the planet. The"climate" does not have to be saved. (I actually received an email from someone that said "we have to save the climate"....how do you save climate? in a bottle? Who says the climate we have today is the one we have to have in a hundred years, anyway?)

Environmentalism is the new secular religion. They say that many people do not go to church anymore, this is their substitute. People seem to need something to believe in, so if it is not God, now it is the Earth. They worship it, they make laws about it, you cannot have dissenting views about it, they indoctrinate children in schools, make them write essays, make posters, come up with slogans.

I am happy I live in a world of electricity, I like my light bulbs, my furnace, my air conditioner, modern medicine, flush toilets, refrigerators, sewing machines, they make my life easier, I will live longer than my ancestors. I believe progress is better than the alternative. I choose light over dark. These are my slogans: I choose ideas over stagnation. Enlightment over endarkenment. Go to the Light. Do not choose the Dark side.

People often talk about light pollution, that you can't see the stars when you live in the city. That is true, but look at the satellite image of the world at night. Look where there is no light. North Korea, China, Africa. It is not because they are kinder to the environment it is because they are oppressed, they do not have freedom, they do not have progress or the environment is too harsh for humans. Turning the lights off to me symbolizes oppression and that is not what I want to emulate!

And you know what I think is sad... there will probably be more people willing to turn off their lights for 1 hour than there are who are willing to take a minute of silence for those who gave their lives for our freedoms on Remembrance Day...that is sad.

Walk to the Park

What a cold, gray day in March. Hubby and I took a walk around downtown and through Harris Park. I took my camera, but as you can see it was all grays, whites and browns. Here's hubby under the sycamore tree. I like these trees, they have neat bark, it peels off easily. There are not very many in London that I know about.


Here is some more neat bark. These trees by the river must be so very old, they are huge!

This log had no bark! It must have washed up on the shore when the river flooded and then stayed behind when the river dropped again. It was so white almost as if it had been painted!


And here is the view with the old and spent black eyed susans peeking out of the snow. The silvery brush is russian sage, I believe.


They redid the banks of the river 2 years ago with perennials, and last year it looked quite marvelous! Here is a photo from last August to remind us what colour looks like! It's almost the same view, just a little closer to the bridge.

another view in the opposite direction...sigh, green vegetation, bright sunny flowers...soon, soon...

Table Topper for CQA

Last weekend Barb from Babs 'n Jas Designs held a free table topper workshop for our guild. The CQA has asked for donations of table toppers for the up coming Quilt Canada in St. John's, Newfoundland. 2o of us spent National Quilt Day making these:



I also managed another block for my super heroes project. Instead of a symbol I tried a mask. Here is Ironman:

Woohoo! I Was Published!

This was the highlight of February for me! An article that I wrote, about how quilters' guilds can use blogs to improve their presence on the internet, was published in the Canadian Quilter a quarterly publication of the Canadian Quilters' Association!


Besides this blog and my store blog, I also edit our guild's blog. As our guild president often says, "I'm doing the happy dance!"

Round Robin: Daisy part 3

Here is what Christine gave back to me:

This is what I will send back to her:

(I have to post one photo at a time, because I am still having posting issues, I will post the last one later today, I hope)

Here are 2 postcards I created, inspired by David Mack's work:
The first one is directly inspired by the Kabuki books,with a little Moody Blues and Cat Stevens added. The second is inspired by the sunshine and a hope that spring is on its way.

Recovering from storm part 2

Aha! I figured out a way to get around my blogger photo uploading problems. I am blogging straight from Picasa. I don't usually do it this way. Picasa doesn't have as much editing choices...like how do I make this paragraph flush to the left instead of centering...? Also it doesn't want to allow me to choose different photos from different files...maybe there is a way around this, I don't know yet,

Anyway here are some of the pics. Yesterday the storm, this is a cardinal trying to feed in my parents' backyard:



My house around noon:



My house and hubby today around 2PM, a big difference!

Where to put all that snow!? Backyard is not big enough!

Recovering from the storm

I'm having problems uploading photos, so I have none to show you.

The sun is shining after 24 hours of snow! Still not as much snow as the big storm of 2006, but still we shovelled the driveway 3 times yesterday and we have to do it again today! Our property is pretty small and we have no room for the big piles of snow! Along one side of the driveway the pile of snow from the driveway is 5 feet high! We can no longer throw the snow that high! Am I ever stiff from all that work.

I received my Daisy round robin from Christine at our Quilt 'til you Wilt day and I've completed my row. I am quite pleased with it. I was very careful with the measuring and my points all match up.Yay me!

I am still on my David Mack kick. I've received more volumes in theKabuki series and just loving the way he integrates the art into storytelling. As a quilter I also love his use of shapes...liberal use of triangles, circles and squares. Kabuki is being held in a cell in isolation, but she receives messages from another prisoner scrawled on squares of toilet paper, folded into origami animals, falling from the vent above. "Every falling note...the shape of a different creature." "Piece by piece, square by square, her story unfolds." I love that, it could be a quilter's mantra! He acknowleges in the book that the idea about the toilet paper, came from the book The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom, a true story about a Dutch prisoner of war. He never forgot that they were rationed 2 pieces of toilet paper each and that one prisoner saved hers to make a deck of 52 cards out of them. I, too, have read this book and have seen the movie. Corrie Ten Boom was from Haarlem, my mother's home town.

I also received a dvd about him called The Alchemy of Art: David Mack. Oh very interesting! His mother, a grade school teacher, was a very big influence on his art. They didn't have a TV (he was born in the 70's) growing up and didn't buy his first TV until he was in his 20's. Without TV he and his brother were able to use their imagination and make up, build, draw, create their own games.

I also just read for the first time A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. Not bad, I enjoyed it, but was a little confused by so many mixed messages. In the book Meg defeats IT because of her love for her little brother...but it seemed to me that it was her individuality that defeated It, not love. They also make reference to Man shouldn't mess with things they don't understand, but if they didn't they wouldn't have been able to rescue her father in the first place, it is Man's nature, and specifically it was Meg's nature to do so. I suppose this was a reference to the atom bomb and what people felt about it at the time. Man can create so many problems but Man can create solutions too. I guess it is a book about Man's place in the world and with God and what kind of God, an all knowing and controlling God versus one that creates a"sonnet", Man just fills in what ever words it wants, as long as it doesn't break outside of the rules of a sonnet. I guess, it was a good book, if it made me ponder these questions! :) On a side note, let me mention a Simpsons moment! There is a Simpsons episode where Professor Frink is explaining the 3rd dimension to all these 2 dimensional cartoon character after Homer crosses into it. That scene is so lifted out of this book when one of the Whiches is explaining the 5th dimension to Meg!

I am going to try one more time to add photos to this post. Nope it didn't work.