Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I pushed timing Thursday, and got to rysmiel and papersky's home about 11 pm (I'd guessed it would be closer to ten when I booked the tickets). Fortunately, once I'm through immigration and customs at Dorval, I can do this on automatic.

Friday we went to the Jardin Botanique with some of rysmiel's team and their children, for the butterfly exhibit in the conservatory. It was delightful, even before a butterfly perched on my sleeve for a moment, gently fluttering its wings. Also, as usual at that time of year, lots of cacti are in bloom, and there's a fine orchid exhibit. I am now a member of the Jardin Botanique, because a one-year adult membership is $35, and one admission would have been $11.50 if I'd been able to remember a Quebec postcode, $13.50 for anyone outside the province, so it seemed like a good deal. (It'll also save queueing if I come back on a busy day.) Butterflies, and a nice lunch after, and grocery shopping, and we were all pretty wiped out by the time we got back.

The exhibit runs until the end of April; if anyone reading this is in or near Montreal and hasn't been, I highly recommend it, both for the butterflies themselves and for the intensity of the flower color, especially the orchids, after the long winter.

This morning, Papersky and I talked a bit, then went out for breakfast, and came back via a bakery, a grocer (for Darjeeling tea), and the Chinese Belgian chocolate place. I'm happy: conversation and assorted good food. It looks to be a quiet afternoon, which I think we all need.

I'm going to go and find my book now.

papersky kindly sent me a link to a gallery of butterfly photos from the Jardin Botanique "Butterflies are Free/Papillons en Liberté" exhibit. There are some really good images of morphos showing their wing spots against the roof, and emerging from their cocoons. A flowering cactus from above is beautiful, and would make a fine textbook illustration of the Fibonacci sequence. Here's a morpho from above, iridescent blue.