tree - bur oak

oak trees are lovely.  at my folks place we have one in the front yard that we planted when i was young, it's pretty tall now, but i suppose it's still pretty small.  every summer these bluejays come to eat all the acorns from it, they are relentless!  they chase away the squirrels, the magpies, anything!!! those are their acorns!!!

some oak trees in a park downtown, in the fall they turn a brownish colour

oak are fairly simple to identify cause they have super duper uniquely shaped leaves.  most of the oak trees in the city here are bur oak, a type of white oak with rounded leaves (as opposed to red oak, which have pointy leaves, or at least that's how i understand it..)

i couldnt find any acorns on the trees, it's fairly late in the season and animals must have got to them..  but there were a whole bunch of the little tops left on the ground

oak is a really good dye plant.  the leaves produce nice shades of browns and even blacks with iron mordant.  another weird thing with oaks that has dye potential is oak galls..  i have seen pictures of big huge ones, but maybe those are on other types of trees?  but here i have only seen little ones..  i took a picture but it's blurry (i thought it was in focus or i woulda taken another, oops!)

oak galls are a weird sorta thing where wasps (or other insects?) have laid eggs and the tree produces something (the gall i guess) around it as a reaction of sorts.. afterwards the insect breaks out, see the little hole!
oak (or other) galls are used as a mordant in dyeing, but i have some ethical questions about it and have not been able to find a lot of information.  what i wonder is is when they are collected, do they just collect them off the tree at random with the insect inside?  or are they collected at a time in the year when it is certain that there are no insects inside?  personally, i wouldnt want to be willfully killing anything for the things i make, so i just dont know?

petite nuit

so last year there was nuit blanche, and they were gonna skip a year and have it again next year, but this year they had a little thing, a petite nuit!~

what this whole thing is is a late night contemporary art thing!  so that's kinda neat.  this one was indeed little, it only had 5 things.. instillations or whatever and i will tell you about them.
so..  the one i liked the best of course was this little lantern store type thing!  it was this little store that had all these items that were actually little lantern things and you got to go in and pick one!
it looked like this:

you had to line up and they let about 10 people in at a time and you had "exactly 1 min!" is what they told me when i first went in, to look around and pick something.

i took pictures as i looked...

my dad likes these..  cherry blossom things..

and a kitty puzzle!~

1min actually goes by pretty quickly, but i ended up picking a pack of thrills!
i also took some pictures of the stuff from outside..

ok..  so the other stuff..  the other stuff wasnt quite so neat..
there was this screen set up that was playing these films...

i am not sure if they were all by the same person or not?  cause this was the sign.. but i saw at least 3 different ones playing while i was there.  the first one was this guy playing a cello i think?  he was in this um..  like a viewing station where they watch for forest fires i think?  and it was him playing the music and these views from this tower.  the second one was this one here in the picture, it was this lady ironing.  she took clothes from the pile on the right and ironed them and then went behind the screen in the back and put them on and then put the clothes she took off on the pile in the left.  and the last one, well, i only watched a few seconds of it really and it was in a living room or something?  there was a rug, so that's why i say that, and there was a cockatoo walking on the floor and there was a dog that came into the frame and i think there was a cat in there and maybe some other animals?  who knows!!!

the third thing was a series of these boards i guess.. set up that had pictures of them of far away locations, travel destinations.. and they were set up so that you were supposed to be able to stand in front of them and take a picture and it would look like you were in that location..

 

it's a swell enough idea, but doing it at a night festival is perhaps not the best idea, cause there was all sorts of weird shadows and glares and stuff. i tried to take a picture of some of them and ugh..

see... what's that weird glare?  and no.. i didnt use a flash or anything like that.
but this one worked better.

then the 4th thing was this parachute thing with these colour changing lights on it!
that was pretty neat & i thought i might be able to get some neat pictures with it, but ugh.  if i actually participated in it i'd have to be holding onto the thing and not my camera right..  and i didnt really feel like running around and being in such close confined contact with a bunch of strangers.  i'm sure it would have been really pretty though!

i did stand by that little fence for a moment and try to take pictures of the lights from underneath, but it didnt really work too well.  i also took pictures of it just laying on the ground..

& the last one, well this one had some more potential, but i dont know..  it wasnt working too good i think.  what it was was these images of space stuff! projected onto the side of a building, and then you were supposed to
make these hand shadow thingies on them.

the problem i guess was that the light was out of focus or something like that?  maybe it wasnt strong enough..  whatever it was, it seemed like when people tried to do the hand stuff the shadows didnt really show up very good.  Also, on the website, i looked before, and it showed the hand things over top of the pictures and any time i saw people doing stuff it was on this vague light that goes over top of the whole thing..  so i dont know..   but i like the space stuff!

so that's it.
but before i went home, i went and stood in line to go back into that little store thing to get a little something for my dear joe!  
i could have got ya some sardines!

but i found something funnier!
i didnt get a picture of it in that little store, so i had to take a picture when i was waiting for the bus..

hee hee.