Ocean freezing up

Flying out of Grise Fiord a couple of days ago, I took these photos from the plane.  The window was repeatedly frosting up, so these pictures turned out rather well considering they were taken through a layer of frost that I kept scratching at to try to clear.

Here's Grise Fiord (the actual fiord, not the town), with the open water at the mouth of it.  The light is the "golden hour" of evening, even though it's just after noon.  It's only around a week from losing the sun for 3 and a half months, so the days are very short and the sun just scoots across the southern horizon for around 3 hours.  The sunsets are also long and beautiful at this time of the year.

Thin layer of ice, with some thicker pieces that have broken off freezing into it:

I love the patterns that broken ice makes on the ocean:

I loved this pattern, and the way it meets a cloud bank at the top of the photo:

This photo is from my hotel room in Resolute, of the sun setting in early afternoon:

The roof deck

I'm still up in the progressively more-frozen north (the icebergs aren't drifting by any more, they are stuck in the forming ice), but I thought I would post these photos of my roof deck back in Los Angeles, for a little contrast.  These are from April 18, and I guess I was too busy doing not much of anything back then to post them!

I love bougainvillea, and now I have one.  It doesn't always look this good. It almost died of transplant shock when we first got it, and now waffles between looking dead, and being totally and spectacularly covered in hot pink flowers:

A couple of views from the north side of the deck, looking northeast, and then northwest.  The hills are loosely the Hollywood hills, although they have different names in different little sub-neighborhoods.  Click on the photos to get a better look, you can see the Hollywood sign in the distance in the first one:

Looking to the southeast, that is downtown off in the distance.  I forgot to take a photo looking southwest, but you can see Century City from our place.  We can't quite see the ocean, we aren't up high enough.

We don't have any pets, so we have named a lot of the plants.  That is Goliath the Giant Sequoia on the left, I'll be posting about his third birthday once I am back in LA.  That's William the Orange beside him (I never said they were terribly creative names):

The boxes of succulents, we inherited from the previous owner, we think they were staging props:

I forgot to take a photo of the lounge chair, but we have one.  It's tucked into a little alcove in the wall where it stays shady until mid-day, and I read up there sometimes.

I'm looking forward to going back ... it's nice to be able to drop back into summer, no matter what season I leave Canada in.