Wildlife Update

  • April 10, 2026

Ok I’ll be honest: I forgot about our new wildlife camera. It had been happily sitting at the edge of our back patio, snapping away for four months now and when I rediscovered it yesterday there were more than 1600 images on it!

Most were empty and probably the result of snow, rain or a rogue leaf triggering the sensor, but there were quite a few animals to be seen as well.

As usual there were a lot like the above (which was taken on Christmas Day while we were in Japan), but also this shot of a squirrel being a bit more industrious:

Is that an acorn in his mouth?

There were also many – hundreds – of rabbit photos, all of which were at night in the snow. As you see there’s two in the above shot (taken early January), but what also caught my eye are the footprints in the top right. Here’s a better photo of them from a few days earlier:

They’re fairly big which suggests a deer, but they could also simply be a rabbit hopping through the snow? Unfortunately the camera didn’t catch them being made.

Two different cats visited these past few months, one quite a bit portlier than the other. Each was only in a single photo, so they were just passing through.

Here’s the fox from the last set, also passing through. Was he looking for rabbits, or perhaps smaller prey?

Such as whatever the above is? This is too small for a chipmunk so I assume some sort of mouse, and as we can tell from the blur it was legging it past the feeder. The white streak is its eye reflecting the UV light from the camera.

Chipmunks are also speedy little guys and difficult to catch on these cameras so the above is a good photo of one. This is fairly recent, so maybe it’s gotten warm enough for them to emerge from their burrows?

Birds are also somewhat rare on these photos, but here we see a mystery bird, a cardinal and a robin. Can anyone identify the one on the left.

And lastly this skunk visited us one night! There were a half dozen or so pics of it, all at very close range so his face was never visible. The camera is right next to the house so he came very close. I wonder if Loppi (who often monitors the yard from a window perch) saw him?

And if you’re wondering, there wasn’t even a single deer photo. This is highly unusual to say the least. I wonder where they’ve been?

Happy Easter!

  • April 5, 2026

It’s Easter time again, and for the first time in a few years we (Kristin, Jessica and myself) coloured eggs:

I got two kits: the normal one and a ‘tie dye’ variant. We tried the tie-dye set first.

These are the six colours included. They come in small pellets which are dissolved in vinegar, and in real life look a bit less vibrant than in this photo.

The system to tie dye the egg involved a special frame in which to hold the cloth-wrapped egg while dye was added drop at a time via a dropper. It was fiddly and not easy (for kids?) and difficult to cover the entire egg. We quickly modified the technique to use paper towels without the frame. This was somewhat successful, and our tie-dyed eggs looked like this:

I think they look good. The interesting pattern on a few of them is from the paper towel.

Next we did the normal dyeing kit, which just involves placing the egg into the dye (a pellet dissolved in water and vinegar). In previous years we’d used crayons to put patterns on the eggs but the kit didn’t come with one this time so we had to be creative.

I tried to make one holiday specific! Can you guess who the character in the bottom right is supposed to be?

As usual it was fun and the eggs looked good The bottom right is what one looked like with the shell removed. You can see some of the dye went through the shell, and the brown colour is because she had roasted the eggs.

Here’s my little Easter snack which I am enjoying as I write this. I hope you have a good Easter 🙂

Italian Brainrot

  • March 29, 2026

When we were in Japan, I found these card packs in a UFO machine:

Even though they have Tung Tung Tung Sahur written on them, I had no idea what they were. To increase the mystery, we’d also seen some (terrible) figurines of these characters in other machines. I knew Adam would love these, so I spent a small fortune to ‘win’ a few packs. On the back of the packs, it says this:

Before I left Japan I also found stickers of these characters which I promptly put on postcards. Did you get one?

I scored three packs from the machine, one of which went to Adam, and now – months later – it was time to open mine. Here’s what I found inside:

Eight cards were in each pack, all featuring appalling AI art. It claims to be a game, and if you look closely you’ll see attack and defense values on each card and paper/rock/scissors on the top left. Here’s my strongest and weakest cards:

These are a cheap product sped to market to cash in on a craze that now seems dead. No one played this game, and I doubt anyone even attempted to collect the cards. It’s perplexing they even made their way to Japan, but at least one fool put money in a machine to get some. At best, they were good for a laugh.

Which is why I was amazed the other day when I found this at Walmart:

This is a different set of trading cards based on the same characters! I was astonished enough to buy a pack immediately, but the true surprise – not even mentioned on the outer packaging – was what I found inside:

These cards are plastic and transparent! And the print quality is extremely high:

The characters are as repulsive as ever, and weirdly enough even these cards include statistics (for a game?) in tiny type at the bottom, but the quality of the cards are sky-high. They even printed the backs of each image so they look interesting from each side:

These are as attractive as the ones I got in Japan are repulsive. I may even get another pack 🙂