About drawing and painting. Today I did a picture using water-color pencils, and then water. It was on a regular piece of paper, which I glued to a piece of cardboard from a cereal box. I used rubber cement. The rubber cement did not make the paper stretch, buckle, or crinkle, and even later when I used water for paitning, it remained flat and the glue held. The cardboard also seemed unaffected, since I probably used enough rubber cement to seal it from water coming through to it.

There was a picture of a two headed turtle in the news. Other turtle stuff. Tortioses are omnivorous when young, but as they mature they become strictly vegetarian. Captain Cook gave a gift of a tortiose to a chief on an island (maybe in the 1770s). The turtle was still alive as of a couple of years ago, and we really don’ know how old it was when it was given. How can tortioses catch crickets and other prey that are too agile for humans to catch? Although they walk slowly, the tortiose has a very fast neck motion. The neck comes out of the shell and down in a flash, and the tortiose snaps up its prey.

Tomorrow is Victoria Day, the day we in Canada remember the “Great White Mother”. It is an hour before midnight, but I can hear fireworks everywhere. Around 10 pm there was a very loud fireworks display at the waterfalls (the Falls, as we call it), about 4 miles or 6 kilometres away. And yes, although this is a city with highways and other noise, on many nights we can hear the roar of the falling water from here.

A saying: “Man is the only animal with an opposable tongue.”