When Killer Vine meets Vine Killer, by J.C. Kavanagh



The Twisted Climb
WINNER, Best Young Adult Book 2016, P&E Readers' Poll





I am enthralled with nature. I marvel at its beauty, its harshness, its harmony.

 

I'm certain that my Irish heritage plays a role in my love of the land. I've mentioned before in the BWL blog that I'm a descendent of the Kings & Queens of Leinster (County Carlow, County Wexford and County Kilkenny). Sadly though, I have no crown nor royal lands. But, I digress.

 

Back to nature.

 

Here in Ontario, we're still in the grip of winter. As I look out my office window, 15cm of snow dresses my property and drapes the branches of thousands of coniferous trees. Peace reigns. Canadian weather changes week to week, heck, even day to day. Last week, the temperatures were well above 0 Celsius, melting all the snow. Today, we are back to a winter wonderland.

 

Last week, we roamed our snow-less woods, marking trees that need to be cut down and searching for Killer Vines. Have you ever seen these suckers? They resemble small, flakey-barked trees, and they live to kill - the host tree, that is. The killer vine will 'climb' the host tree (or multiple trees), growing and snaking and entwining itself until it twists and sucks the life out of the host.

 

They are the Killer Vines and I am the Vine Killer. I have no mercy.

 

The chainsaw and branch cutters become my best friends when I'm on my vine-killing mission.

 

I will save the trees.

 

And I will kill the vines.

Killer Vine is outlined in red.
Note it branched into two, and further upward, four sucker limbs.

Killer vine resembles young tree

Killer Vine succumbs to Vine Killer!
This one required the Jeep to pull it down, thus meriting
a triumphant drag-along around property.

 

In case you think I'm a wee bit cuckoo, you have to know that I'm also a bird saver. A few weeks ago, a Junco crashed into a basement window. I heard him fly not once but three times (birds really do have wee brains) into the window and when I arrived, there he was, lying on my lower terrace. The temp was about -20 Celsius. I spoke to him first, just to assure him that I was his friend (all the birds know me as 'Nana J - the bringer of bird food'). He blinked a few times, acknowledging my presence and then, with my Olympic woollen mittens, I carefully brought him inside and laid him on the warm brick beside the wood stove. After half an hour, me and my partner, Ian, brought him some water and a handful of bird food. Well, that brought him to life. He stood up, hopped a few steps and then onto the window sill. "Out," he said, or I guess, chirped. So I put on the woollen mittens and carefully scooped him back into my hands and brought him outside. I placed him on the terrace and said, "There you go, buddy. Fly!" And he did.

 

Now I have plenty of titles to my name:

Princess (!)

Mom

Nana J

Vine Killer

Bird Saver

Author

 

The sequel to The Twisted Climb - Darkness Descends will be published soon. Stay tuned!

 

Don't forget to take a moment and enjoy the wonders of nature.

 

J.C. Kavanagh

The Twisted Climb
BEST Young Adult Book 2016, P&E Readers' Poll
A novel for teens, young adults and adults young at heart
Email: author.j.c.kavanagh@gmail.com
www.facebook.com/J.C.Kavanagh
www.Amazon.com/author/jckavanagh
Twitter @JCKavanagh1 (Author J.C. Kavanagh)

Help! Limber Jim is Lost by Karla Stover

       
  
     Until the early 20^th century, the eastern portion of Indiana consisted of 13,000 acres of swamp and wetlands, and streams that flowed into the Wabash River. Parts of the swamp smelled like sulphur, prompting the name, Loblolly Marsh, based on a Miami language word. Miami-Illinois is an indigenous Algonquian language formerly common in the United States, primarily in Illinois, Missouri, Indiana and western Ohio. The wetlands’ mixed vegetation supported a rich biodiversity needed by local and migrating birds and insects, as well as other animals.

     However, when European Americans arrived, they described the area “as a “treacherous swamp and quagmire, filled with every plant, animal and human danger known — the worst of such locations in the central states . . . a vast forest and swampland legendary for its quicksand and unsavory characters.” One of those unsavory characters was Jim Corbus. Corbus went hunting one day and the spry fellow, sometimes known as Limber Jim, got lost. Friends went hunting for him with the rallying cry, “Limber’s Lost.” Reports vary as to whether Jim was ever found, but the name, “Limberlost” came to mean the swamp, which the European-Americans saw as an ideal place for farms, once the swamp was drained, of course.  For the next 80 years, the Limberlost was used as farmland. Then, in 1991, local citizen Ken Brunswick established "Limberlost Swamp Remembered," and a group organized to restore some of the wetlands.

     Meanwhile, in 1874, while the Limberlost  was being drained, twelve-year-old Geneva (Gene) Stratton moved to Wabash, Indiana with her parents and three unmarried siblings. Four months later, her mother died and from then until her marriage to Charles Porter, she lived with relatives. Gene's father and her brother, Leander, taught her to appreciate nature, and she roamed freely around the family farm, observing animals in their natural habitats and caring for various pets. Her particular interest was birds. She was also attending school on a regular basis and became an avid reader. At home, her sister Florence began teaching her banjo, violin, and piano. To complete her education, a local art instructor gave Gene private lessons. With so much going on, it's no wonder she `was unable to finish the last term of her senior year. In fact, because she was failing her classes, she decided to quit school altogether.

     In 1884, twenty-year old Gene took a trip to Sylvan Lake, Indiana, where she was attending the Island Park Assembly, a Chautauqua gathering. A Chautauqua "was an adult education movement in rural parts of the United States and included entertainment and culture by way of speakers, teachers, musicians, entertainers, preachers, and specialists of the day." There she met a thirty-four year old druggist named Charles Dorwin Porter. Two years later, they married.

     The Porters had only one child and by most accounts, Gene” took pride in her family and maintaining a home.” However, but she “opposed the restrictive, traditional marriages of her era and became bored and restless.” Since she had never lost her interest in nature, she began writing about it and selling articles to magazines as a way to earn her own income. In 1895, the Porters moved into the Limberlost cabin and Gene spent hours exploring, photographing, and sketching the swamp. In addition to her nature articles, she wrote a number of novels. The most successful was Girl of the Limberlost, published in 1909.  

     The Limberlost cabin was just one of many homes the Porters lived in, including one in Hollywood. Gene wasn’t happy with the various film adaptations of her books, so she started the Stratton-Porter Production Company and made her own movies. Eventually, various production companies turned eight of her novels into movies, the last made in 1927. 

     Gene Stratton Porter died in 1924. Among her lasting legacies was her early and outspoken advocacy for nature conservation. She supported efforts to preserve wetlands, such as the Limberlost Swamp, and saving the wild elk at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, from extinction.   

   

                   bwlauthors.blogspot.com

                              
  

Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking

In the early morning of March 14, 2018, exactly 139 years after Albert Einstein’s birth, the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking passed away peacefully at his home in Cambridge, England, at the age of 76. That he lived to such an age, and that he accomplished so much in his time, is a remarkable achievement.

In 1963, Hawking, while a graduate student at Oxford, was diagnosed with a rare early-onset slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease, which eventually robbed him of all motor functions, including the ability to use his voice. The following year, he became engaged to Jane Wilde, a friend of his sister. Hawking later said that the engagement gave him "something to live for,” since the doctors’ predictions of a very short and unproductive life induced a deep depression. The two married on the 14th July 1965, determined to face all obstacles in their way.

Hawking is most famous for his work regarding black holes, celestial objects so massive that nothing, not even light, can escape their clutches. Based on Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, Hawking, along with Robert Oppenheimer, Sir Roger Penrose and others, advanced our knowledge of the behavior of the Universe.

Their work suggested that, upon the collapse of a massive star, when it runs out of its own internal nuclear fuel, it undergoes a sudden shrinkage under the pull of its own gravity.  They predicted that the outcome of this collapse, as implied by Einstein’s theory of gravity, to be a space-time singularity: an infinitely dense and extreme physical state of matter, ordinarily not encountered in any of our usual experiences of the physical world. A massive star, millions of miles across, would collapse to the size of the dot in the letter ‘i.’

Einstein himself strongly opposed such an idea and conclusion, and for a long time, not much progress occurred in this field. It took the genius of Stephen Hawking, among others, to find that Einstein was in error, and that star collapse and singularity do happen. Thus, in the later 1960s and early 1970s, the study of quantum theory and gravity was revived.

Hawking was a regular visitor to Canada. The physicist permitted The Stephen Hawking Centre in Waterloo, Ontario, to bear his name.

“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist,” Hawking said of the meaning of life. “Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.”

Mohan Ashtakala is the author of "The Yoga Zapper," (www.yogazapper.com) published by Books we Love (www.bookswelove.com)

How to be 4 years old in a modern world

http://bwlpublishing.ca/authors/claydon-sheila-romance/

If you have read my books you will know that they often include children. Sometimes the hero and heroine are their parents, sometimes not; sometimes they are integral to the storyline, sometimes not; but whatever their role, writing about them is a joy. While I frequently have to wrestle with the main characters, children are more straightforward. Portraying their emotions is easy. It doesn't matter whether they are happy or sad, excited or curious, angry or frightened, their language is always simple and direct.  They are not introspective. They live in the present and rarely worry about what other people think.

I was thinking about this the other day as I worked on the as yet unnamed sequel to Remembering Rose, because the same children will feature in that, and while I was thinking my phone rang. It was my almost four year old granddaughter calling from Hong Kong. Why was she calling? Because she wanted a bedtime story! So I dutifully exchanged my phone for my tablet and complied, not once but twice. I read a Charlie and Lola story, and Superworm. The previous week we read Stick Man. Then we said goodnight and I returned to my writing. It was only later that I registered how very different her childhood is to mine and to that of her parents and even her older cousins.

At almost four years old she is multiracial (Chinese/English/Irish), multicultural (she has already lived in 3 countries and been totally immersed in their cultures (England, Australia and Hong Kong). She has visited mainland China, Wales in England, Paris in France and Dubai. She is also multilingual (English, Mandarin and Cantonese) and will soon attend an International School where she will also learn French. She has attended 4 different nursery schools, all of which had a rainbow mix of children  from across the globe, and the wonderful thing is, that to her, all this is normal. Far from confusing her, it has enlarged her world so that she is confident and friendly, and interested in everything around her. What she isn't, is introspective. Just like the children in my books, she lives in the present and very definitely doesn't worry what other people think. Sadly she might in ten years time because that is what teenagers do. Until then may she continue to enjoy her life as a very modern four year old who thinks asking for a bedtime story on Skype is normal, and I'm looking forward to the day when she decides to read to me across the miles instead.

Writing Companions by Joan Donaldson-Yarmey

http://bwlpublishing.ca/authors/donaldson-yarmey-joan/


My Writing Companions

I first began my writing career with a short story about an injured hawk my son and I found beside the highway. We took him home to our acreage and named him Highway. We nursed him for a few days then set him free. He decided he liked us and moved into the bushes around our acreage.

       This story lead to the publication of historical and travel articles and finally seven travel books. To research these books over the years I travelled and camped throughout British Columbia, Alberta, and the Yukon and Alaska. My travelling companion was a cockapoo dog named Chevy. He inspected attractions with me, hikes trails with me, and waited patiently in my vehicle when I had to go into a building. We would be on the road for a month or more at a time taking pictures, learning history, and meeting people.

       At the end of each trip I’d be glad to get home and begin to unload my vehicle. Chevy would jump out and check the house and yard. I thought he was happy to be home also until I would go into my vehicle and find him lying in his place on the seat. I’d tell him we were home to stay and put him on the ground. I’d gather up more stuff to carry into the house and when I came out for my next load he was once again on the seat. I guess he wasn’t taking a chance that I would leave him. That little guy lived to be seventeen and was a great companion.

       I have had as many as five cats at a time over the years—I’m now down to three. When I am writing, one’s favourite spot is on my lap, another likes to sit on the desk between me and my computer screen, and the third one sits on the floor and talks to me trying to distract my thoughts. But I don’t mind. They are a joy to have.

Cold Capitals are Cool

For more information about Susan Calder's books, or to purchase visit her Books We Love Author Page.

This winter, rather than escape for a week on a warm beach I went to Ottawa, Canada, one of the coldest national capital cities in the world.

On December 27, 2017, Ottawa, with temperatures of -29 degrees Celsius, was the world's coldest capital city.  

The draw was my son, his wife and their six-month old daughter. Fortunately, Ottawa weather co-operated for the long family weekend in February. With temperatures hovering around the freezing mark, we were able to get out and enjoy the city's annual festival, Winterlude.

Winterlude - ice carving demonstration

While the rest of us watched the action, my son skated on the Rideau Canal, the world's largest skating rink.

We continued to Parliament Hill, which features a hockey rink set up for Canada's 150th birthday.

Winter isn't cold when you're bundled-up

The next day we drove to a maple sugar farm outside of Ottawa. It was a few days early for the sap to run, but we enjoyed the taffy pull on snow and pancake brunch.

The Rideau Canal Skateway runs a distance of 7.8 km from Dow's Lake to downtown Ottawa, enabling energetic commuters to skate to work. On day three we walked from my son's house to the lake. The next day the city closed the whole Skateway for the season due to the increasingly mild temperatures.

Rain started that night and continued for two days. My husband and I escaped indoors with friends at the Museum of Science and Technology. Fun activities included steam trains, a Crazy Kitchen with a cock-eyed design that left me feeling queasy, and a computer game exhibit with holograph costumes.

The exhibit reminded me that many computer games take players through a story and developing game scripts is an up-and-coming field for writers. Perhaps my young granddaughter will one day combine math and writing skills and choose this intriguing career.  

The winter holiday made me curious about where Ottawa ranks on the list of cold national capital cities. My Internet source, Worldatlas, rates Canada's capital #7, based on average annual daily (24 hour) temperature. Ottawa lost its 3rd place status after the breakup of the Soviet Union, when Moscow ceded second place to Astana, Kazakhstan.

Moscow, Russia, the world's third coldest national capital city. 

All of the world's coldest capital cities are in the Northern hemisphere. The southern capitals don't reach far enough south. The world's southernmost capital is Wellington, New Zealand. Due to water currents, the northernmost capital, Reykjavik, Iceland, only makes #5 on the list.

Reykjavik, Iceland

And the winner (or should we say loser?) of the coldest capital city award is --

Ulaan-Baatar, Mongolia, with an average annual temperature of -1.3 degrees Celsius (29.7 F) and below zero temperatures for five months of the year.

Ulaan-Baatar, Mongolia

Here's the complete list of the world's top seven coldest capital cities.

1. Ulaan-Baatar, largest city in Mongolia. In January and February, the coldest months, temperatures range between -15 C and -40 C.

2. Astana, Kazakhstan. The climate is extreme. In summer temperatures occasionally reach 35 C (95 F) while winter temperatures fall to -35 C (-22 to -31 F) between mid-December and early March. Annual average is 3.5 C.

Astana - futuristic towers rise abruptly from the steppe

3. Moscow, Russia, 'enjoys' long, cold winters from mid-November to late March. Summer temperatures range from 10-35 C (50-95 F). Average annual daily temperature 4.1 C (39.4 F). 

4. Helsinki, Finland (4.5 C / 40.1 F). The average winter temperature in the coldest months, January and February, is -5 C. The Baltic Sea and North Atlantic Current moderate temperatures, keeping the city somewhat warmer in winter and cooler in summer.

5. Reykjavik, Iceland (4.6 C / 40.3 F) is also moderated by the North Atlantic Current, an extension of the Gulf Stream.

6. Tallinn, Estonia (4.8 C / 40.6 F), the capital and largest city of Estonia, is called 'the Silicon Valley of Europe.' Skype got its start here. Tallinn's location on the Gulf of Finland moderates its climate.

7. Ottawa, Canada, average annual temperature 5.5 C / 41.9 F. Canada's fourth largest city, with the country's most educated population and highest standard of living. Winters are snowy and cold; summers warm and humid. In July the average daily high is 26.6 C (80 F). Despite being #7 on the cold capitals list, my friends in Ottawa wouldn't live there without air conditioning.

But now it's March, the coldest days of winter are past and Ottawa looks forward to its spring tulip festival, when millions of tulips bloom through Canada's capital city. Every year The Netherlands sends tulip bulbs for the festival as thanks to Ottawa for housing the Dutch royal family during World War II.

.

  

If it Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It! By Gail Roughton

And Speaking of Broken...

Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed this thing humans do?  Something can be working just fine, and then, out of the blue--Bam!  Somebody sneaks up behind you and something you depend on as being fixed and immutable isn't fixed and immutable anymore.  It's changed.  

I guess in the back of my mind I always knew this, but this past Christmas brought that little fact forcibly to my attention.  See, we're a board game family.  Always were, and the good Lord willin' and the creek don't rise, always will be.  Certainly we go to a lot of effort to insure that the two current members of the next generation, presently 11 and 5, are very well acquainted with all the classic board games their mother and uncles grew up with.  Said classic board games having resided in the hall closet--some going on thirty and even forty years old now--a few of them had, to all intents and purposes, bitten the dust and were in dire need of replacement.  

Monopoly's gone modern and global to a large extent, producing different versions offering global properties, complete with electronic banks and debit cards, all of which I carefully avoided when ordering our original, standard Monopoly's replacement.  I have this insane theory that punching a debit card into an electronic bank that instantly computes a player's assets and deducts or adds the appropriate amounts of money to the players' balances really doesn't do much insofar as teaching grammar school students how to add and subtract and make change, go figure.  So I was very careful to buy the version that still uses paper money. The same version my children had grown up playing.  Not.

Well, not exactly, anyway.  Did y'all know the rules for initial distribution of money in Monopoly have changed?  The rules I still remember learning at age 6 or 7 specified each player received ten $1.00's, five $5.00's, five $10.00's, six $20.00's, two $50.00's, two $100.00, and two $500.00's.  And all the money came in a long, narrow cardboard compartment made like a cash register drawer, with each individual compartment actually holding all the different denominations securely in place.  So imagine my surprise when we first opened the new Monopoly Grandmama and Granddaddy had wrapped for the kids for Christmas and found out the money rules had changed?  Now the proper distribution is five $1.00's, one $5.00, two $10.00's, one $20.00, one $50.00, four $100.00's and two $500.00's.  And Grandmama's street cred as the Knower of All Rules of all board games took a nosedive.  Not only that, but the little cardboard compartments are no more, there's a plastic tray with compartments at each end to hold the deeds, Community Chest and Chance cards and little slots between them for standing each denomination up vertically, which means they fall all over themselves during actual play.  Now I ask you--what were they thinking when they figured that was an improvement?  

All that's manageable, though.  A bit of an adjustment but hey! I'm flexible.  Then we opened the new Stratego because that was the one our 5 year old granddaughter wanted to play. It's a two player game, but no way is a 5 year old playing it by herself, so she played with Granddaddy and I played the other side.  And the world rocked in its orbit.  Rocked, I tell you, rocked!  The version of Stratego my boys grew up playing assigned  the higher numbers to the lower ranks, with Scouts being 9's, Miner's being 8's, on up through Colonels being 3's, the General 2 and the Marshall 1.  The board for our original game's actually still in pretty good shape and it even says so. Plus we still have the pieces and since there's only one 1 for each color, it's a sure bet that's gotta be the Marshall dude, am I right?

But the rules for the new edition?  Oh, dear Lord.  They reversed it!!  The higher numbers are assigned to the highest ranks and the lower numbers to the lower ranks.  The Marshall's a 10! The Miners, the most valuable of all pieces regardless of how high an opinion the Marshall has of himself, the only ones who can diffuse a mine field, the ones who'd been 8's since the beginning of time--they're 3's!!!! Do you have any idea how hard it is switch-hit retired brains from an 8 to a 3?  And the Scouts are 2's, not 9's! Forget any of that for a minute when you're setting up and you're doomed, because you've put all your high ranking officers right up in the front lines and you're using them as Scouts! 

Do you know what this means? It means sometime in the last twenty years, somebody somewhere decided it was a good idea to completely reverse the rules of Stratego.  Minds. Blown. Hubby and I, despite ourselves, kept right on playing as though Miners were 8s' and then groaning, "Oh, no! That's not right, I did it again!" We haven't been the same since. Stratego wasn't broken, I can't understand why they had to fix it.  

Speaking of broken, though, did you know--legend has it there're a few "broken" spots in a stretch of ocean known as the Bermuda Triangle, a spot where things just disappear.  In reality though, maybe there's nothing "broken" about it.  Maybe there's a door or two that just pick and choose when they open and who comes through...

You ain't in Kansas anymore!

For More by Gail Roughton, Visit BWL!