The perfect mailbox

Yesterday afternoon, 23 October 2014, I finally did a drive south of the city and found an old barn that I really wanted to see, plus a few others. The photos of this barn that I had found on the Internet were obviously taken by trespassing, or possibly before the No Trespassing sign was placed there, as I could only get a view of the back of the barn from the road, lol! On this drive, or rather when looking at Google Earth the previous evening, I discovered that as well as having no sense of direction, I also have no sense of distance!

Then I went in search of two grain elevators joined together by a long, low building. The most northerly one is one of the oldest in Alberta (built in 1905 I think, certainly before 1909). I had pulled over and parked, taken a few shots right into the sun unfortunately and was just checking them back in the car. I was conscious of a man in a bright orange sweater approaching close to my car. When he stopped by my car, I opened the door – he seemed a bit puzzled as to what I was doing there, so I explained that I was photographing the elevators. Ha, ha, it was the private owner of the elevators!!! I read on the Internet just now that he has a furniture manufacturing company in the long, low building that joins the two elevators together. I asked him if there was a better place to photograph them, and he said to take the previous little road. Much better! Some nice old train cars parked near them, too. Maybe I was parked on private ground when the owner was talking with me.

After the elevators, I explored a few other roads further south and ended up not far from the Saskatoon Farm. Called in and had quiche again : )

On my way back to the highway, I thought I’d check another backroad. I sure had to laugh at myself. When I decided to turn around and retrace my “steps”, I pulled off into a tiny area of gravel. Glancing in my rear-view mirror, I gasped, as this beautiful “barn” mail box was right in view. No idea how on earth I managed to not see it when I was driving towards it. Yet another thing I couldn’t resist stopping to get a few shots of. I roughly removed the person's name from the side of the box.

Yesterday had started well, too. I found an e-mail from friend, Sandy, saying that they had just seen a Barred Owl in one of the local parks. Thanks to Sandy, I got over there just before noon and bumped into a few of my friends who had just finished a walk. Two of them said they would come with me and look for it again – and we found it!! This was the first 100% wild Barred Owl I’d ever seen. I had seen a family of them near Edmonton, when we went to see the ones that had been banded. They were wild birds, but I still hoped to one day see a completely wild one (no nesting box). Yesterday’s owl was beautiful – crummy light, with a mix of harsh sunlight and dark shadows, but I did find one to post today.

I noticed a snowflake icon on our weather forecast for Monday : (