These Marrette connectors have been my best friend lately. It seems that the electrician who wired my house has some funny ideas about how to wire things. How else does one explain a light switch with 8 wires inside the box and none of them white. So, I’ll wire up one light switch and find out something across the house has stopped working. A favourite trick the electrician used was to loop a wire around a light switch and use that to join two switches, like a light and fan.

I’ve been working on a quick bathroom reno for the last week or so and part of it was a nice new light and some updated switches. But first, I had to sort out the nightmare that hides in the wall….. So I keep a fair number of these on hand, as the last guy who wired my house must have been running out of them.

This image is one of those quick’n'dirty end of the day is coming photos. It’s fun sometimes to randomly point the camera at something and make it into something else. While the image looks like a simple life form in reality it’s a top down shot of my cat’s self grooming toy. It’s post shaped with little rubber “spikes” for the cat’s fur.

A cedar stump juts out of the ice and snow at Terra Cotta Conservation Area, on a typical winter day. I didn’t dare get any closer with the temperatures we’ve had lately. Note, I haven’t made any edits except the 8×10 crop, levels and I desaturated it in Lightroom.

A tree stands in a park in Bolton, Ontario as clouds race by in the sky. Judging by the stumps, this would be the last chapter in a trilogy. Once there were three trees here, and now there is one.

Well, I guess she’s been watching Maru too much lately. Before I could really visualize today’s photo, here she is hopping inside the green insulated shopping back and getting all cute and expressive. Closest camera was my iPhone 4, so that’s what I took the photo with.

I loved the sky tonight, and found myself geocaching near Brampton’s “Peel Safety Village”, a mock townsite setup to teach children how to be safe with things like riding a bike for example. For this photo, I have the wide angle on and a the tripod leaned up against the fence.

All red, I might add. I’m a big fan of fog and rain and inclement weather when I have a camera handy. I stopped by the Mount Pleasant GO station in Brampton for a quick geocache amid a heavy downpour. After putting the geocache back in it’s hiding spot, the rain stopped – more or less. I wasn’t going to point a lens up and keep it dry but at least I could wander around in the remaining fog. I got lazy-ish on this photo and skipped the tripod, it’s handheld. I also got tired of arguing with the camera meter so I dialed it full manual adjusting the ISO instead of the aperture or shutter speed. I locked it to 30sec at f/4 after a couple test shots gave me the results I wanted – namely those rays of red light with a darkish background.

This is an image of the Credit River in Mississauga. It’s a secondary channel that has this ice with a crystal structure to it – very fragile. What I did for the photo is, well I dropped my flashlight on the ice and that lit it from underneath. Yes, I checked that there was something for the flashlight to stop at before it plunged into water – there wasn’t any here. Full colour image by the way, just looks black and white.

A smaller structure at Scotsdale Farm near Ballinafad, Ontario. This building backs onto the farm’s mill pond. Footprints from the farm’s other visitors can be seen in the snow. Scotsdale Farm is open to the public and hosts a conference centre along with the hiking trails, including the Bruce Trail.

A smaller structure at Scotsdale Farm near Ballinafad, Ontario. This building backs onto the farm’s mill pond. Footprints from the farm’s other visitors can be seen in the snow. Scotsdale Farm is open to the public and hosts a conference centre along with the hiking trails, including the Bruce Trail.