A reminder of the Viking visit

Some of our friends and blog readers will remember these. We wore them on the visit to the Viking exhibit. Afterward I thought it would be fun to get some good photos of them.

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Jeff de Boer made this torque many years ago, for Linda to give to me as a present. It got worn to every SCA event we went to for many years. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. Then we dropped out and there haven't been so many occasions to wear it which is sort of a pity.

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There's a story about the two chunks of amber. I once had a large chunk. It was carefully wrapped up in a cloth, put into a mug, which was wrapped up and put into a sturdy wooden box, which was put into a suitcase with clothes wrapped around it, and the suitcase put onto an airplane. Remember the song United Breaks Guitars? When I opened the suitcase I got a cracked mug out and the amber was in two pieces and some bits. Sigh.

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Brenda Roy made this necklace for me to give to Linda as a gift. Again, it was worn to many SCA events and had many admirers.

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I unfortunately forget the name of the man who made this. It would seriously mess with an archeologist's head if they were to find it in my modern belongings. Why? It's silver mined in Europe and it was worked over charcoal fire using tools and techniques known to Vikings. Find it in a hoard and it would be accepted as period jewelry.

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Driftwood of the Day

Lynx of the Day

Sad flowers in the snow

Yes, it's been snowing. So far nothing unusual, maybe 10 cm here at most. But a few days ago it was nice, and the roses were still hard at it. Next week will be nice again, but I don't think many of the flowers will make it. They'll shut it down for the winter and do whatever they do. I hope all the bees made it back and are tucked into their hive doing whatever they do for the winter.

These were taken yesterday during one of the lulls. Most of them have disappeared now.

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Driftwood of the Day

Lynx of the Day

First day of winter blahs

Here we are. The snow had some brief flurries while I was running errands yesterday, then started in semi-earnest last night. More of the same today. At the moment it's snowing quite hard, but a few minutes ago it wasn't. There is essentially no accumulation, and probably won't be for a while unless this so-called snow-pocalypse gets into gear.

In the mean time I've been considering photos. Image of the month is going to be brutal. I'm at nearly 10,000 photos for September, and right now I've got 23 with at least 4 stars, and that's without a review of the 3 star shots to see if any need to be bumped up. See below for a sneak preview.

I've been considering if the blog is the best place to display photos, and what my alternatives are. I'm a little worried that Google will shut down Blogger just like they did with Google+. They say not, but who really believes them?

There have been any number of times my readers have contacted me to ask if I had seen a comment they left, or thought they left. Many times that's a surprise to me because Blogger ate it, and I'm disappointed all over again. I love it when my readers comment.

Instagram has never been a favourite of mine, mainly because of the brutal posting process, and how poorly they are displayed. Don't even say Twitter to me.

Facebook. (Yack, he said to himself.) Not a fan of Facebook, though I recognize the reach. One of the problems is that it doesn't really display the photos all that well either, even though I know I have the settings optimized for Facebook. Minus, personally, my rule about Facebook was that I had to have met the person, or had someone I know vouch for them. This doesn't make it easy to expand the numbers of people who see my photos there.

Up till recently I typically only put a link to my blog on Facebook. I've no real idea how many click through to the blog, and of those, how many click on the photo to embiggen it and go through them. It's been suggested to me that I put the photos on Facebook directly, together with whatever commentary I think appropriate, but I'm not sure what I think of that.

As for displaying the photos, I follow a blog put up by Mike Drew on Adobe Spark. His photos look terrific there. He's a great photographer, which is more than half the battle. But unless I'm not understanding something correctly, the photos and text are saved on Adobe's platform and cannot be saved or viewed offline. The idea seems to be that the creator sends a link to the content to platforms of your choice. Which is essentially the same as what I have now, albeit with better photo display. If people won't click on a link to a Blogger site and scroll, they won't click on a link to a Spark site. Minus, there doesn't appear any commenting ability at all.

Maybe a zillion people do click through to Mike's site just because he's a great and famous photographer, and don't click through to mine because I'm not a great and famous photographer. Maybe they've stopped reading my blog because the photos and text I put up no longer interest them, or never really did and now none of their buddies read and comment so there's even less incentive for them. Such is life. Everybody is busy. More news as I noodle on through.

The only photo is a sneak preview of the current 4 star shots. Not all of which have been blogged.

Driftwood of the Day

Lynx of the Day
I'm not sure what this Lynx is thinking. I suspect it's calmly waiting for lunch, but quietly considering the alternatives if lunch doesn't show up soon.

Flowery Friday 8

Wherein the flowery parade resumes from August 11. Whoops! I'd planned to hit the publish button this morning, but all the extra stuff added to the day and creating the lists sort of had me a bit frazzled. All went well, though some people in the parking lot freaked about the brief snow flurry. Honestly people, it's just winter, it happens every year about this time. Deal with it.

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Driftwood of the Day

Lynx of the Day

The Viking visit

No, they didn't row their longship up Fish Creek to pillage and loot. We drove up to Edmonton to visit them at the Royal Alberta Museum. This exhibit was the first time some of these items have left Norway. I can't imagine how they safely transported a ship about 35 m or 100 feet long.

I got conflicting responses about photography, so I took the camera anyway. The admissions people said no problem, and the security guards didn't freak out. All these are done hand held in ambient light. I haven't made any notations of what this is, I figure if you're reading much beyond this, you know what you're looking at. Some of these items have been featured in reference books. If you live in Alberta and are interested in the Vikings, it's well worth a visit.

 I could rest the camera on some of the displays, but the LED lights flickered. I needed a longer exposure, but I didn't bring was a remote release. Sigh. Neither did I line up the multiple exposures for the panoramas properly.

Fancy a big image of a sword that's been in the ground a thousand years? This would print out about 10 feet wide by 2 feet high. Much larger than life.

Part of a bridge pillar.

Some of the jewellery. They decorated everything.

Some of the details of the Roskilde 6 ship. Amazing anything survived after 1000 years.

A replica.

This will amuse a couple of my readers.