My Latest Painting: "Hosta Flower"

     After buying a very rectangular canvas (15”  x  30”) I looked around through my photos to find an image that might fit the canvas, to paint.  I came upon a colorful photo showing the leaves and flower of a Hosta plant that I really liked and surprisingly, fit the canvas shape nicely.

    I started the painting at the beginning of February, and finished it this morning.  It took me 81 hours to complete.

    As anyone who has looked through my paintings knows, I really like Hostas with their dramatically textured leaves and their delicately beautiful blooms.  

You can view my  other paintings at: davidmarchant2.ca

A Delayed, But Sweet Revenge

     The night before last I woke up about 3:00 AM.  When I tried to go back to sleep, I was continually hampered by a mosquito in my room.  Every time slumber was just about to come, I would start to hear the mosquito starting to buzz around my head.  Numerous times I swatted it away with my hand, which of course, woke me up more.  This irritating situation continued throughout the night for hours and hours.  

    I hated that mosquito.  I considered turning on the light, and swatting it with my mosquito zapping racket, but I knew if I got up, turned on the light, and started walking around the bedroom looking for it, I would just wake up more, and never go back to sleep, so I just continued snuggling up in my bed, and of course, the persistent mosquito continued to buzz around and land on my head.  Eventually, sometime before dawn, I did fall asleep for a short while.  I did not feel very rested when I awoke.

    The next day after lunch, I went up to the bedroom to take a nap, and when I got in bed, who should appear but that pesky mosquito, looking for another blood feast from me.  As it buzzed around, I slowly reached for my mosquito zapper, and after several attempts:  ZAP, I fried that mosquito, enjoying the crackling spark that it made.

    The revenge I took on that irritating mosquito was sweet indeed.  

    Last night there were several new mosquitos in the bedroom, but I was able to despatch them before I turned out the lights.

    

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Get Those Potatoes in the Ground!

     Gardeners who grow potatoes have to store them in a cool place over the winter.  The best place to do so is a cold, well-built, root cellar.   Unfortunately most of us don’t have one, so we do the best we can.  I usually store my potatoes under the house in the crawlspace.   It stays pretty cool during the winter, so it does a pretty fair job of keeping the potatoes from sprouting.

    However, once spring starts warming the outside temperatures, our crawlspace also starts to warm up and the potatoes start to throw out sprouts.   Don’t jump to conclusions now, those outrageously sprouted potatoes in the photos aren’t mine.  The photo was taken in 2013, and the potatoes belonged to a friend, let’s just call him “David”.

    Unlike me, my friend “David” is one of those fastidious gardeners, who does everything correctly in his garden.  Whenever I see his garden, I am embarrassed, thinking of my untidy, weedy, garden.  Well, in 2013, I did feel a bit superior, when I saw the potatoes he had stored in his basement.  By the time I saw them, I had already had my spuds in the ground for weeks.  I had never seen such long sprouts on potatoes.

    If I remember correctly, that year David had been spending most of his efforts foolishly trying to eliminate the dandelions from his lawn.  That is just a useless and impossible job.  Instead of putting so much of his energy to that endeavor, he should have been planting his potatoes.  

    I am not sure what happened to the potatoes in the photo.  I don’t know if he ended up planting them with those incredibly long sprouts, of whether he just gave up on those sprouted potatoes, and just bought some new seed potatoes.

    In the spring, I usually have some sprouts on my saved potatoes, but certainly, nothing as sprouted as in the photo.  I do plant them, sprouts and all, and they always produce for me.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Man Against The WIlderness

     Because we live in the interior of BC, we often hear people who don’t live in Canada say, “I could never stand living up there with those winters.”   While I admit that our winters last too long, they do offer some advantages.  One of them is that because of the snow and cold, nothing is growing outside, leaving me with a lot of free time to myself to pursue other things.

    Once Spring arrives, everything changes and everything becomes a rush.  Outside, plants grow quickly, like in a jungle.  There are so many jobs have to be done quickly, especially yard maintenance and getting things planted in the garden.  I am currently running far behind in both those endeavors.  

    I do have the greenhouse planted (although the I haven’t been able to deal with the weeds that are coming up) and I have been able to get the garden half planted.  However, I am becoming overwhelmed with the lawn.       

    We have had so many rain showers of late which are causing the grass to grow very rapidly, and at the same time, because of the grass being wet, I can’t mow it.  I think in places, I will have to cut the grass down with a lawn trimmer, then rake up the pieces, before I can use the lawn mower on it.

    Hopefully with time, I will slowly be able to get on top of things, but at present, I am sure feeling discouraged and frustrated.  

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Sun Rising Over the Mountains

     In order to be healthy, I have been making myself do four laps walking/jogging around the pond.  If the weather is clear, I do it early in the morning.  If if is raining, I put it off until later in the day.

    The other day it was very clear, but there was a lot of dew on the plants, so instead of my running shoes, I wore my gum boots (rubber boots, “Wellingtons”).   They were not the most comfortable foot wear for jogging, but they did keep my socks dry.

    As I was rounding the pond, heading in the direction of our house, the sun was just starting to peer  above the mountain range behind our house, back-lighting all of the dew on the plants.  The horsetails looked nice coated with backlit dew and the star-shaped leaves of the lupine made for an interesting scene.   I had my phone in my pocket, so stopped my exercise long enough to snap this picture.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Epilogue: My Fainting Experiences

      I can find no rational explanation for why I suddenly “pull the plug” and pass out in those kind of situations when I fainted.  When I was a baby, one of my front baby teeth started to turn black.  The dentist said it should be pulled, and so the appointment was made.

            I was too young to remember any of this, but my parents told me that when the dentist began to pull the tooth, he had a really difficult time getting it out.  It turned out that that tooth was joined at the root to the tooth that was beside it.  I think it was a very traumatic experience for my very young self.  I often wonder if that bad experience in a medical setting when I was a baby had some kind of lingering effect on my subconscious.  

            In more recent times, I did have one experience that should have brought on a fainting spell, but didn’t.  It happened in 2021 when I was up on our waterline intake on Sunbeam Falls.  The creek running over the falls was running hard after a hard rain, and as I worked with a neighbor to clear debris off of our culvert, a rock came shooting down from the falls above, hitting and mangling the ring finger of my left hand.

            I had to lay on the ground for a long period of time, while my neighbor hiked down the slope to call an ambulance.  As I waited, I did remember to position myself so that my legs were above my head.  Maybe being in that position kept me from fainting.  

            I did loose my finger as the result of that accident, but I spent most of the time in those hours before the operation on my back on a hospital gurney or in the ambulance taking me up to Prince George for the amputation.  At any rate, I didn’t pass out during that whole ordeal.

    All this fainting really hasn’t done me any lasting harm.  The worst part of those reoccurring ordeals is the blow it does to my ego.  It’s so embarrassing for a seemingly big strong healthy masculine guy like myself, to be floored by an event as non-threatening as a chest X-ray.  Of course, the sight of a glowing paperclip sizzling through your toenail maybe more understandable.  At any rate, it’s a flaw that is lurking somewhere deep inside of me and I have come to accept the fact and try to warn doctors and dentists when I find myself in a situation where it might show itself.

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

My Fourth Memorable Fainting Episode

         In the photo above you can see bundles of fence posts and rails produced by the mill where I was working.  I was standing on top of one of those kind of bundles when my accident occurred.

    The mill where I had borrowed the jack in yesterday’s blog, also played a part in my next fainting episode, which happened about half a year later.

            One of my jobs at this cedar mill, which made split rail cedar fences and posts, was to bundle and strap the posts into bundles.  To do this I had to climb up on top of the posts which where laying in a crib.  From this vantage point about 4 feet above the floor, I would insert the metal strapping that was strung around the bundle, into a manual cinching machine, crank the strapping up tight, and then clamp the straps, to secure the bundle of posts.

    I did this thousands of times, but on this one particular day, we had run out of the regular steel strapping we normally used, and I was told by the boss to use another type of strapping which was noticeably narrower. 
    “Go ahead and cinch it up tight,” I was told,  “This strapping is real strong,”

    I stood up on the bundle, my legs apart, bent over and put the strapping into the machine and started cranking the machine to tighten the strapping around the bundle.  The posts were being gathered together as the strapping squeezed around them.  I was bent over a pulling against the crank  on the machine when suddenly there was a snap, and the steel strapping broke.  The ends flew in opposite directions and suddenly the force that I was pulling against vanished, and I was flying through the air to the concrete floor waiting below.  

    My hard hat saved my head, when it bounced against the floor, but when I picked myself up, I noticed that I had broken my right arm at the wrist.  I remained  calm and a co-worker came over to help me.  I told him I thought I had broken my arm and I had to go to the office for some help.  Alone, I walked across the packed snow in the mill yard  (Photo below) to the trailer that served as the mill office. 

    “Bob, I need to go to the hospital,  I think I broke my arm.”  Bob asked me some questions about how it happened, then told me to get into the company pickup, and he would drive me over to the hospital, which was only a short distance away.  

            I remained calm, and in control, sitting in the truck.

    When we got to the hospital, Bob got out of the pickup and came over to open the door for me.  There was about six inches of powdery snow on the parking lot.  Bob was supporting me as we headed across the parking lot toward the hospital door, when suddenly, I fainted.   As he told me later; suddenly I was just “dead weight,” and he couldn’t hold me up, so I dropped to the snow below. 

    When I regained consciousness, I was being lifted out of the snow and unto a wheelchair. by a couple of nurses.   I was then wheeled through the snow in the parking lot, into the hospital.  My right arm was broken at the wrist, and I was patched up and spent the next month and a half with another chunk of plaster on my arm.  

You can take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca