Grey Roots Museum

We went to the spring lecture series at Grey Roots a week ago, and it was so good we went back yesterday for the final of the series.  Both lectures, as well as the museum itself, inspired me to think of where I can make contributions and keep myself busy, and how that will support the future of my blog.

  A large sculpture of the museum's logo, taken from inside - see below for an explanation.

They even have their own waterfall in the lobby.  Owen Sound has 4 well-known waterfalls, and there are 5 more in the region, including here in the valley.

The talk we went to last week was on the rocks and rock formations of the Niagara Escarpment, by Bob Knapp who I know well as a Bruce Trail volunteer like myself (until last year).

Bob is not a geologist, but he has spent a lot of time out exploring, just like myself.  And I found that I was familiar with a lot of the features he talked about.

The cliffs of the Niagara Escarpment really do provide some spectacular scenery as you make you way up the peninsula. 

The second talk, yesterday, given by Audrey Armstrong, was on the Monarch butterfly.  It was an excellent, well-organized talk on what we know about this iconic species.  I guess I'll have to write a post just on this; I learned a lot!

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I've been wondering just what direction my blog will go now that I face serious limitations doing photography.  Most of the past 6 months pictures have been taken from the front car seat.  Even if we get the chair out of our car, I can't easily position myself for anything other than a straight forward shot, and even then I can't easily hold my favourite but heavy Nikon, so I've been using my phone.

For all this I depend on Mrs. F.G. as my driver of course, and both blog posts and the actual photography are becoming more of a joint enterprise.  Slowly, we're finding daytime events like these and our visit to the Art Gallery 3 weeks ago, that we both enjoy.  There are a surprising number of them around here and I expect they'll keep us quite busy over the summer replacing part of the effort I used to put into solitary hiking and photography expeditions.  I need to thank Mrs. F.G. for the effort of getting me out and about.

You'll probably notice a shift from natural history to local history too, and posts that take a bit of research for me (as Patsy said in a comment on my last post, 'once a professor, always a professor').  Given the time it takes to be paralyzed and still be up and about every day, I'm not going to try and post every day either.  If I don't have something ready, you're just going to have to wait!

But I'm finally feeling satisfied with how this is evolving; hope you enjoy it.

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If you're wondering about the logo and the name of the museum, this is Grey county, which accounts for a lot of the name.  In the logo, seen from outside, green represents the forests, a big part of the first 100 years in the county.  Grey are the rocks of the Niagara Escarpment, yellow is agriculture, wheat being a major crop, blue is water, and red stands for celebration.  The museum was established to celebrate the people of Grey County.