A journaling experiment for March 26-30th, 2018
I am live-blogging my entire process and thought patterns around work this week. Follow along!
Posts:
- Sat at 10:46 - Fixing Bushwhich
- Fri at 14:03 - Searching files and filenames with ag
- Fri at 08:57 - Carbon Zerow
- Wed at 15:51 - Thesis and Open Source Cities
- Wed at 14:08 - After lunch
- Wed at 12:26 - Social Networks
- Wed at 11:39 - Roadtrip to Pittsburgh
- Wed at 11:21 - Monteregian hills, larks, and Mohawk
- Tue at 11:52 - Tuesday morning
All content CC-BY-NC © 2018 Richard Littauer.
Yesterday, after my friend couldn’t get off work at 3:00, Heather and I decided to stop working slightly before noon and go to see the Oka National Park sooner rather than later in the day. After looking at this presentation, it became clear that there was an outcropping near St. Andrew East that could also be considered a Monteregian hill. So, that was the first destination.
On the way, we passed Mirabel Airport, once the world’s largest airport and now largely abandoned. That was interesting to see, if only in passing. It is massive. Then, on the side of the highway, I saw my first two Horned Larks flying next to the roadside. I thought they were Snow Buntings at first, but it was clear that they were slightly bigger and had a more curved wing. Later in the day, I added American Robins, European Starlings, Mourning Doves, Common Grackles, White-Breasted Nuthatches, and Red-winged Blackbirds to my list of birds I’ve seen in Canada - around a fifth of what I’ve sen in the States in my past year or two of birding.
The St. Andre hill was a slight rise, wooded and threaded through with maple syrup tubes. There was no public access to the top. As we drove down towards Oka, we passed through the Mohawk Nation of Kanehsatà:ke, which I didn’t know existed here. There were many signs in Kanien’kéha, which was great to see. Mohawk (the exonym for the language) is endangered, with roughly 3500 speakers. It is characterised as 6b Threatened on Ethnologue, and 80% endangered on ELP, and definitely endangered by UNESCO. As I was writing about these measurements yesterday morning in my thesis, it’s fitting that even on an excursion I couldn’t escape it.
Thirty minutes down the road, the National Parc d’Oka was open for the off-season, and there were kite-surfers on the lake. Heather and I walked up the hill there, around 200 meters, for two hours - not much birdlife, at all, and the sky was a dull grey to match the snow. It looked almost exactly like Mont Royal (for which Montréal is named), except with far fewer people and Catholic shrines on top. Then, another drive home. Got in at around 5, decamped, cleaned the house, made dinner, watched most of Avatar (mostly because I find it exceedingly relaxing, not because of the ideological links to seeing a First Nations group - reading into this would not be productive), and went to bed.
That was yesterday. Increasingly, my hobbies - birdwatching, geological sightseeing, and linguistics - seem to drag me to far-out places.