reworking (Calgary and what-was-then)
Oct. 3rd, 2012 12:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silverflight8I'm feeling rather maudlin right now. I was talking on [x] about books I read as a child, and I'm starting to see a pattern. I loved the Hermit in The Horse's Boy. In the Chronicles of Prydain there's a valley where only the animals are welcome, that they eventually bring Taran to, when they flee. So much high fantasy and fantasy in general based in the wild. And I loved Heidi for not Heidi or her grumpy uncle or for the plot, but because of the Alps. I still remember the first time we visited Europe, and we drove through Switzerland and into France via a pass over the mountains. And though the realization came later, those depictions of the Alps in books -
I looked through travel pictures later and marvelled that those were real, those mountain meadows are real as anything, that there really truly were alpine meadows that looked like that. As I grow older I realize that not everywhere is like Calgary, that there are places where wildflowers bloom in fields in spring.
You see, I grew up in Calgary for the most part. And Calgary is on the foothills, as the prairie breaks into the rolling hills that precede the mountains. And the mountains themselves are young; they're not round-shouldered yet. I grew up next to stunning vistas. When I walked home from elementary school, I'd walk uphill and at the crest of that hill - in the middle of suburban Calgary, by my best friend's house - I would see the the road slope down into the general residences. But it above the houses, where there were hazy hills that melted straight into white-capped mountains, straight out of story. Those mountains don't lose their snow in the summer, but they're most dramatic in the winter. And so I saw that panorama every single day I walked home - mountains, blue sky. Thanks to geography - mountains that force the clouds to drop water as they rise (it makes the forests of B.C. look like fairytale forests) - Calgary is very dry. There's a lot of sun. The sky is bluer than I could possibly credit, some days; I used to walk home from the bus, from high school when I was older, carrying several textbooks, and laugh because the white clouds and blue sky were so quintessentially blue and fluffy, so, so blue that the sky looked fake. An idealized sky, something that you'd write off as Photoshopped if you saw it in a painting. The mountains would also create chinooks - sudden warmth in the winter, sometimes from -10 to 0 in a night. The evening before, you could see what they called a chinook arch in the west: at sunset it would be cloud cover that stopped short of the western horizon to curtain the setting sun.
There are so many beautiful things: below the treeline on the mountains - visible as a great slash where the green falls back into grey rock - lodgepole pine, spruce, tamarack, jack pine grew in profusion. In hiking, sometimes you'd get these giant stands of aspen where it was sunny. We didn't hike much in the winter because it's slippery and dangerous and cold, but on one memorable occasion we went to Johnston's Creek, slipping on the snow every once in awhile, and saw people ice-climb the waterfall that had frozen into bluish ice. Sulphur Mountain was the very first place we visited; it's a five-hour hike that switchbacks and ends with a major observatory building up top - it's a major tourist destination, with a gondola to take visitors down again. Rawson Lake took ages to climb up, and like always the hike upwards was under the tree cover so you couldn't see anything, but where the trail ended, the view opened onto a mountain lake that was backed by a mountain peak. The lake water was so still and so clear that the trees looked double their height, reflected in the water. Here's a really dreamy shot that someone took in the winter: http://www.basesproduced.com/images/Alberta/fulls/RawsonLake.jpg Moraine Lake, Lake Louise, Three Sisters, some days I wish violently that I weren't living so far away and trapped in a flat city that has no such sights.
I'm wandering. What I was going to say was that it's much too cold for some of the more vivid blooms, and the chinooks sometimes confuse flowers into coming up too early. The hardier flowers, though: every year I would know spring by the emergence of prairie crocus - the fuzzy little things would crop up everywhere you had grass growing without cutting - and there are always small flowers blooming, like the wild rose, later in the season. But under the cover of trees there's not much but moss and small plants. The mountain slopes are generally all forested, not like the Alps. (Sometimes, like on the approach to Banff, there were mountain slopes where you could see waterfalls and streams because the trees didn't grow there). Usually, between the two main languages I speak (French doesn't count, since it's basically tagging on to my English vocabulary), I can talk about anything; I should, I've read so much! But I fall down on flowers, because while I know general things - sort of - like daisies and tulips and roses and morning glories, there is a lot that I don't know. My mother, who grew up in what Wikipedia tells me is a subtropical climate, was shocked that I didn't know what plum and cherry blossoms looked like, until I reminded her that I grew up in Calgary. I would like to see a meadow of wildflowers, I think.
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Re: Almost convinced
Date: Oct. 5th, 2012 07:57 pm (UTC)Peanut butter, etc.
Re: Almost convinced
Date: Oct. 6th, 2012 05:00 am (UTC)Re: Almost convinced
Date: Oct. 10th, 2012 03:47 am (UTC)I am not truly random. I just take the conversation through a few steps without mentioning steps - the logical connection is there, I don't mention it. It's hard to be random!
Re: Almost convinced
Date: Oct. 11th, 2012 06:30 am (UTC)That date (apparently) come, I'm still confused — "Portal", wat dat? — but what the hell. I pseudo-randomly have an LJ community-related question.
Recently, some of the communities to which I post reviews have been giving me the following error: "Error updating journal: Client error: Maximum queued posts for this community+poster combination reached."
It seems pretty clear what this means, and for a couple of communities which are moribund, it seems obvious why: mods ain't modding, end of story.
But I'm also getting it from a couple of very active communities indeed.
Is this is a subtle way of telling me to bugger off, or are my posts somehow being eaten?
(Are you even still doing behind the scenes stuff for LJ?)
Re: Almost convinced
Date: Oct. 11th, 2012 02:33 pm (UTC)Hm, no, it's exactly what it says - that the moderation queue has the max posts it will hold for you (depending on the account level of the comm, you can have more or less posts in the moderation queue). I would guess that the moderators haven't approved or rejected - you can enable the option to be emailed individually every time someone submits a post, but it's possible that the mods didn't and they're missing your post. I'd PM the mods (especially if the community is very active!) and see what's going on; if it turns out there's no posts there from you and the moderation queue is empty, then there's a problem - file a ticket!
Everything is aboveboard! You could go search up alllll the answers and tickets I've ever touched (assuming you have the admin privileges :P) I'm low-volume at the moment, but I'm still working with lj_support.
Re: Almost convinced
Date: Oct. 11th, 2012 02:58 pm (UTC)Thanks again, I'll have to ponder course of action.