We can’t get enough of these ridiculous little girls.

Okay, I’ll stop.  There are more in the kitten gallery of course, should you desire more.  Expect videos over the next little while as well - we’re capturing lots of footage, but since kittens have a tendency to just fall down and sleep in the middle of playing, they’ll need to be edited before we release them into the wild.

There’s a new photo album in the gallery - regular readers will be have predicted that the recent acquisition of two darling little fluffballs  will inevitably result in a massive and speedy accumulation of kitten photos.  Some samples:

Actual Hallowe’en shots will be in a separate post, since I forgot my camera and have to wait on photos to be emailed to me.  Until then, here is a sampling of silly and pretty things from the past week:

First, a happy papadum, courtesy of my sillier half,

who also likes to send me private messages over Twitter.

Some things found in my apartment building,

My bike, sporting a brand-new shiny sticker from Watching The World Wake Up,

(it’s the eyeball with the rays shooting out around it)

A couple of pretty things that would have been prettier if only I’d brought my proper camera

And finally, on the off chance that anyone actually comes here looking for truth and meaning:

Joker’s Hill is a chunk of land north of the city on the Oak Ridges moraine.  A moraine, of course, is the thing that happens to the land when it’s right at the tail end of a glacier for a few centuries or so.  The ice flowing forward from underneath grinds down all the rocks and shovels stuff forward into a big heap, and the stuff on top pushes forward and recedes each year with the seasons, so basically you end up with great heaps of sandy, rocky soil.  Now this moraine is kind of important, because it does all the water filtration for our lovely city.  This is not my image, but it does a damned fine job of explaining things:

Complete with explanation.  Sweet.

Right, so the moraine is kind of a big deal.  It’s also under a lot of pressure from the suburbanites.  Think of it - a lovely bit of woodland, an hour from the city, and right by some of the best farmland in Canada, so you know the farmer’s markets are fantastic.  Who wouldn’t want to live there?  Thankfully, a sizable plot of land was given to the University of Toronto a number of years ago, so it’s well protected.  They use it for research and education, primarily.

Did I mention I’m taking a forestry class this year?

We had a little day trip out to Joker’s Hill to learn all about estimating basal area, measuring biodiversity, and other really essential life skills.  Okay, it wasn’t exactly survival stuff, but it was interesting.  I brought my camera in the hopes of seeing some interesting critters of the many-legged variety, but the day was chilly and wet, so everything but we stupid humans were tucked away snug in little leafy beds.  Hence I present to you some pretty fungi.

And as an added bonus, some bored students: