It's a good day for recording today. It's been a very breezy, rainy summer so far, which makes it difficult to find a day when the elements aren't working against my microphone.

It has also meant I haven't yet been able to record a mass here - it's been rained out every Sunday so far the this Sunday calls for more.

Today is a good day to hear what the grotto sounds like without people. I hear:

• a lawnmower from a suburban yard across Rue Cantin. The grotto is surrounded by single family homes on the east and west sides, a cemetery to the north and a large high rise apartment building and parking lot on the south.
  
• the footsteps of a lone woman who is heading towards the Marian Shrine at the northwest corner of the grotto the sound of a trickling waterfall in the shrine
  
• construction workers from the apartment building across the road
  
• the sound of painters going about their work, painting benches in the area of the grotto where the congregation sits. Seems when people aren't praying here, they're working. Every time I have been here, there has been a crew hard at work.
  
• birds, of course. Quieter than in May.
  

Other signficant sounds from this soundwalk -- a biplane high overhead. Must be from the nearby Aviation Museum. Can't think of any other reason why there'd be a biplane in the sky this day in age.

A fascinating thing happened. A woman was sitting in her car with the window open. After she'd been there for five minutes or so, she turned on her car stereo. As I got closer, I could hear she was playing Schubert's Ave Maria. She sat there for a couple of minutes, then drove around to the front of the Grotto where she sat in her car, curbside, still playing Ave Maria. It was like she was creating her own private devotional space within this larger, public space.

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