No Snake Worries In The Robson Valley

         Like our Primate cousins, humans seem to have an innate fear of snakes.  While I know most of them are harmless and not poisonous, whenever I happen suddenly come upon a snake, my first reaction is always shock, until reason takes over.   In the Robson Valley, we don’t have to worry about snakes.  The only type of snake that lives here is the Red-sided Garter snake.  

        The Red-sided garter snake is harmless reptile that eats things like slugs, insects, and in water, tadpoles, leeches, and minnows.  The Red-sided Garter snake is the most northern occurring snake in North America.  

        In the spring, I sometimes see one of these garter snakes slithering around in my greenhouse.  It is only about 18 inches (45cm) in length, and always looks for a hiding place when it sees me.  I think they overwinter in the crevasses in the boulders of the rock slide on the slope above our house.  In the spring they migrate down to the valley bottom for the summer.  I generally see one of two flattened snake corpses of these snakes who failed to get across our road during the spring.

       I have only ever seen one poisonous snake in the wild.  My wife and I were hiking along a over-grown jungle trail in Costa Rica, when we spotted this brown-patterned baby snake in the weeds.  It was the size of a pencil and had an arrowhead shaped head.  We discovered later that it was a baby Fer-de-lance, one of the most deadly snakes in the world.  We were a lot more observant about where we tread after that encounter.

    

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Getting On Top Of things

     I have been overwhelmed all spring, trying to get on top of everything outdoors.   Our long spell of rain showers made everything explode into growth.  The lawn became so out of control to the point that instead of mowing it, I had to use my weed whacker to cut it, before it could be mowed.  The weeds in the garden were overtaking everything I had planted.  It was all very discouraging.

    Finally we got some sunny days and I was finally able to start getting things under control.  This morning, instead of my usual morning schedule of painting and blogging, I went outside to weed in the garden,.  I am finally starting to see some results in my endeavor to control things outside.

    After I got done weeding this morning, I took this photo so at least I would have something on this blog.

\

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

June Sure Is A Musical Month

     Our Jam meets to play music every Tuesday night throughout the year.  We just play for ourselves and the few people that come to listen.  Then suddenly June arrives, and the Jam gets all these invitations to play for the public.  

    In the first weekend of June McBride celebrates Pioneer Days, and we play in the park pavilion for a couple of hours.  Then a week or so later, we drive out to Dunster to perform at the Dunster Museum opening.   That happened on Sunday.  Then two days later we had our regular get together, and now a day later, we will be playing for the Old Age Pensioner’s picnic. ( At present, I am worrying about my voice and fingers functioning today, after last night’s jam.) The photo above shows us playing at the picnic last year.

    Because it is summer and everyone has so many other things going on, I never know how many of our musicians are going to show up for these public gigs.  There are about eight musicians that make up our regular group, but at this year’s Dunster Museum opening, five of our members couldn’t make it, so only three of us were there, luckily we were augmented with two other local musicians that came to play with us.

    I am not sure how many of us will show up for this afternoon’s performance, I think maybe there will be five, but no matter, we will be happy to play our music.   It is always interesting to hear how which musicians show up, changes the dynamics of the music that we make.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Root Cellar Troubles

     We have never had much luck with root cellars.   Back in the 1970’s when we bought our place there was a root cellar on it.  It was a mostly an above ground root cellar that was shaped like a big loaf of bread.  We found it more trouble than it was worth.  In the winter, it was difficult to get into, with snow piled up in front of the door, which was often frozen shut.   Then in the spring the floor would flood, due to the high water table where we live.

    Once when I was burning the weeds that grew on the root cellar, the flames caught the cedar timbers supports that held up the root cellar, and the whole thing burned and collapsed.  That was the end of that root cellar.

    It is nice to have a cool place to store our garden produce during the winter, so when I was building an addition onto our house, I dug out and made a root cellar under our kitchen.  I thought that would be handy and easy to get to, during the winter.  We did use it a few years, but then it too started to flood during the spring.  Eventually, we just quite using it.

    When we put in our gravity feed water system, I ran the waterline into the root cellar, where I did all of the plumbing to the kitchen and bathroom.   During that period of time, the root cellar remained dry for decades.  

    For a month now, our water pressure has been going down in the house, even through the water pressure in our waterline remained high.  I figured that the water filter, which is in the root cellar, probably needed changing.  When I opened the trap door to the root cellar to change the filter, I got quite a surprise. 

    There was two feet (60cm) of water in the root cellar.   We have been getting an awful lot of rain, and I guess a lot of it seeped into the root cellar.

    The water level in the root cellar was higher than the top of my boots, and too deep for me to change the water filter. 

    I did have a sump pump, so I thought I would use it to pump out the water.   Luckily, the water level was not as high as the motor of the sump pump.  I was able to rigged up the pump so that I could do everything from the kitchen, and not have to get down into the pool of water.   

    I discovered that the sump pump hose was too short to run out of the front door, as I had planned, so I had to run the hose out of the kitchen window.   The hose was too short to get to the lawn, so I found an old plastic drain pipe to stick onto the end of the hose, allowing the pumped water to run all the way out onto the lawn.   I had to rig up a chair and bench to support the hose and pipe to make it all work.

    Although everything looked very jerry-rigged and ridiculous, it all functioned as I had hoped and I was able to pump out 20 inches of water from the root cellar.  

    Rural living can often be challenging.  

        You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Porcupines

 Here is an old post from a 2013 blog:

        What you are looking at is the business end of a porcupine.  I have only seen a few porcupines during the 40 years I have lived in Canada.  They are generally nocturnal, but do sometimes roam around during the day.

        I saw this one last Sunday along the logging road leading to the Goat River Trail.  By the time I got my camera out, it was already heading for the bush, so I was not able to get a shot of his face, but then again, its all these 30,000 spiny quills that make the porcupine interesting.

        I have heard lots of stories about porcupines and dogs.  The unfortunate canines that try to attack a porky, will soon have a face that looks like a pincushion and dog will have to unfortunately have all those quills pulled of his face, one by one, by someone using a pair of pliers.

        The other porcupine stories you hear are about what they eat. They crave sodium, which is found in salt and as a result, things like plywood ( the glue), sweat soaked handles of wooden tools, and tires seasoned with road salt become some of their favorite meals.  They chew big holes in plywood, and things like outhouses built in the bush have to have to be lined with metal around the base, to prevent the porcupines from eating the plywood.  

        Often, people camping or hiking and have left their vehicles parked overnight in the wilderness, have returned to their trucks to find that a porky has eaten it’s tires and brake lines, leaving them stranded and a long way from home.  People in the know often wrap their vehicles with wire fencing to keep the porcupines from doing damage.

        I have also heard that in places it is unlawful to kill porcupines.  Because they are slow moving, they are considered a good emergency food source for people lost in the bush.  I don’t know if this is true or not.  At any rate, the porcupine is another interesting critter that lives up here in the Robson Valley.

    

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Lucifer Is No More

     Sadly, Lucifer our longtime cat, died yesterday.  She had gotten extremely thin and weak.  Over the last couple of days her walking had gotten wobbly, then yesterday it got to the point where she could no longer stand up.  She had been spending the bulk of her last days laying outside in the grass, and not moving, although she always found the strength to bring herself back inside the house for the night.  Yesterday, I had to carry her in.  She died peacefully in her cozy bed.

    Lucifer was a rescue cat.  When she was young, I spotted her criss-crossing across Main Street in McBride.  She was one of several unowned cats living rough in an old structure behind the hardware store, until it was torn down.

    I brought her home to be a barn cat.  However, like the other “barn” cats we had had, once the cold of winter began, she ended up living in the house.

    Lucifer had a crotchety and unpredictable personality.  In those early days she couldn’t always be trusted to act civil.  I gave her the name Lucifer after trying to put her in a pet carrying case to take to the vet.   She shredded my hand with her claws and bit me to express her objection to the action.  Several times she attacked friends who had come over to visit us.

    However over the last few years, Lucifer mellowed to the point that she sought to sit on our laps so she could be petted.  

    Lucifer became a big part of our lives, and we will certainly miss her antics and having her around. 

You can view my paintings at: davidmarchant2.ca

A Baby Squirrel

 This is a blog posting from 2013:

        Yesterday at 5:30 in the morning, I got out of bed and walked down stairs to go to the bathroom.  As I was sitting there looking out of the open window, heard some “scritching” sounds coming from the cedar siding outside of the house.  I figured that it must be a mouse crawling up the wall.  I wondered if it would make it to the window, and I could see it.  Suddenly, I saw a shape move in the cornor of the window, but it wasn’t a mouse.

            It was a baby squirrel.  I hitched up my pants and grabbed my camera and went outside to investigate.  I don’t know where the baby squirrel had come from.  I couldn’t see the mother anywhere.  I took some photos, and even picked it up and put it over on the birch tree.

            Later in the morning when I was painting, my wife called to me and said the baby squirrel was in our house.  We had the screen door slightly cracked open, and the inquisitive baby squirrel had slipped passed the screen door and was in our mud room.  I grabbed it again, and this time it bit me on the thumb as I held it.  I took it outside, again put it on the birch tree.

            There are always so many mysteries that happen around here that never seemed to get solved.  I am still wondering what the back story of the baby squirrel was.  Hopefully, the poor little critter got its problems satisfactorily resolved.

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca