My act of protest against the G20 today was to choose to wander my own city as freely as possible while watching gangs of cops on every street corner stopping and searching people.  It doesn't amount to a hill of beans as an act of protest, but today, it's what I got.  It showed me that I need to step up the level of police presence in T'aint, my novel-in-progress.  And I need to give them bulletproof vests, and I need to have the sound and sight of helicopters ceaselessly circling above, and the distressing Blue Meanie howl of cop car sirens as they pull over yet another car.  And I absolutely need to include the sight upon which I stumbled; an empty Canine Unit vehicle parked outside a doughnut shop full of cops.  I laughed as reality synched with stereotype, but I turned my face away from their view as I did so.  These guys have been given the right to seize and detain pretty much without having to justify themselves, and they've been doing so with a will.

Now, on to the pretties; I wandered the shore of Lake Ontario for an hour or so, taking pictures of flowers (an activity that netted me suspicious looks from a couple of security folks; anyone with a camera is suspect in G20 Toronto).

Okay, so I had one more snark in me.

Anyway: When I go down to the lake in summer, I often see poor little guys like this one:

He was quite dead.  Had been so for some time.  I find ladybugs like that, too.  I don't know how they end up there.

And of course I looked for beach glass.  My best finds of the day:

The dark bue colours are relatively rare, especially in a piece that measures, as this one does, 7/8ths inch long and 1/4 inch thick.  As I understand, the amount of pitting and weathering indicates that this piece is pretty old.  It's also bonfire glass, which means that sometime before it hit the water, it was subjected to heat high enough to melt it.  Look at it held up to the light; those dark spots you see are inside it, not specks on the outside.  They're inclusions of dirt that got trapped inside the molten glass.

Best of all, it's difficult to see, but one end of the piece is actually green, so it was two pieces that melted together.  Very rare all round.

But even rarer than cobalt, even rarer than the perfect red piece I found last time -- the first time I'd ever found that colour in perfectly rounded and weathered condition -- is orange.  This is the second piece I've ever found in the three or four years I've been beachcombing for driftglass.

Usually when I see something orange or red in the sand by the shore, it turns out to be a piece of packaging, or a nasty squooshy glop of well-chewed bubble gum, or a fast-melting lump of candle wax.  I poked this piece with a stick, and it was hard.  Even after I picked it up and looked at it, I wasn't sure it was human-made.  But it is.  It seems to be opaque orange glass.  It has slightly darker orange swirls in it, as well as bits of white.  It's about 3/4 inch long by 1/4 inch thick.  It's going in the small box of beautiful pieces I hope to someday make myself jewellery with.

Wandering the shore looking at pebbles is a pretty mindless activity.  It doesn't take much more than "Ooh, pretty!" and a willingness to stoop down to pick the piece up.  So my mind went on walkabout, and came up with an answer to a significant plot problem I've been having with Donkey, the novel I'll be working on either after T'aint, or after the novel after T'aint.