Stanley Park Treasure

This year, I think for the first time ever, my birthday fell on Easter Sunday and that was as good a reason as anything for getting out of cooking Easter dinner.  I've been putting out Easter feasts for more years than I can count and the rewards for all the work involved don't seem to be there as much these days.  So we opted for a walk in Stanley Park followed by a nice brunch out instead. 

The day was drizzly and the walkway along the Seawall was whipped by gusts of wind that tore at our umbrellas and blew my hood off constantly and that got old very quickly.  Not wanting to arrive at the restaurant looking like wild bush people, we chose the shelter of the park itself and walked around Lost Lagoon. 

The path was, pardon the cliche, a riot of countless shades and nuances of green, everything bursting into new life, and the shrubs and lagoon were full of birds: red-winged black birds, coots, ducks (of course), spotted towhees.  I tried to take pictures but the birds, too intent on breakfast, weren't cooperating.  Only the swans, nesting and duty-bound to stay with their nests, kept still long enough for me to fiddle with the camera and take a picture:

Bird science neophyte that I am, I was absolutely blown away by the size of their nests. Not that I gave it much thought before, but I'd never guess a swan's nest is such an impressive and massive throne. It just goes to show it's still possible to find a new sense of wonder even in familiar places.  Plus, while we didn't consciously set out on an Easter egg hunt when we left the house, we even found an Easter egg:

 

And what an egg!  Huge! Yet oddly very vulnerable somehow, seeing as there's just the one.  Marvelous really.

Anyway.    

I printed the next colours for both prints yesterday.  A bit of a fiasco actually.  I didn't have as much time as I normally do, we had an appointment to go to,  and I had to rush through the printing a bit.  So first, rushing and not thinking, I married up the wrong block with the wrong print and printed the next colour for the garden scene onto the nursery rhyme print.  Duh! I knew there was a reason for not working on two prints at the same time!

I'll cut myself a bit of slack (though I did call myself a lot of colourful names first) because both colours I printed last time were similar (yellow) so it was, sort of, an easy mistake for a distracted mind to make.  And I only pulled a proof before I realized what I'd done so minimal damage.  But then I had to rush through and not fiddle as much with mixing colours and both prints, though mainly the nursery rhyme one, turned out darker than I want.  And, a further annoyance, the yellow still looks like mustard. 

Like I said, a bit of a fiasco. Obviously, there are lessons to be learned here and I guess I can be grateful for any knew knowledge but even so, I'm now in a somewhat foul mood, debating what to do, and whether I can still make it work or not, and if this is one of those "accidents" that actually end up being a good thing instead of bad.