Feeling A Fool, After A Misdiagnosis

     Two weekends ago, McBride held its Pioneer Days celebration.  Our Jam was set to play for a couple of hours.  In preparation for the performance, I loaded up my pickup truck with the music stands, mic stands, PA system, and instruments, to haul down to the park to set up.  

    Once I got everything loaded in the back of the truck and it was time for me to go, I climbed into the cab, and turned the ignition key to start the truck---NOTHING.  

    In a panic, I tried again, and again, and each time the results were the same: NOTHING.  The engine wouldn’t start or even turn over.

    I scrambled to get the car and took everything out of the truck and stuffed it all into the car, then drove down to McBride to set up.

    About a week before my failed attempt to start the truck, a friend had been telling me about a carpenter she had employed to do some work on her house.  When it was time for him to leave, his truck wouldn’t start, and it was the truck’s starter that had failed and had to be fixed.

      I hadn’t thought about broken starters for many decades.  Back when I was in university, I owned a MG that had a starter that was always unpredictable and problematic.

    After Pioneer Days was over, I tried several times to start the truck, but it failed each time.  The lights on the dashboard always came on, so I knew it wasn’t the truck battery, and then remembered Ingrid’s story about her carpenter, and decided that it must be my truck’s starter that was causing the problem.

    Yesterday, I decided to do something about getting my truck fixed.  I called a towing company to make arrangements to get my pickup towed down to a local garage to get a new starter.  I called the garage to make sure everything was set at their end.

    As I waited to hear that the tow truck was on its way,  I had a thought:   Maybe it was the sloppy transmission shift lever in my truck that was causing the problem.  It always seems pretty loose about getting into the right spot when I shift the gears.

    I got into the truck, which seemed to indicate that that the truck was in was in PARK, I tried to move the shift lever a bit more to the left, and sure enough, it moved a bit more to the left, where it clicked more solidly in place for PARK.  I then turned the ignition key, and sure enough, the truck engine immediately started.

    I felt a fool.  I quickly called the towing company and the garage to cancel all the appointments I had made.

    Looking back at the incident, I realized that it could have been  a lot worse.  I could have had my truck towed in to the garage, and then had the mechanic discover that the starter was fine, so I guess in the long run, while I was embarrassed, I was fortunate to discover the problem when I did.

View my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Seeing Bob's Drums

 Here is a blog I wrote back in 2013:

           Even with its small and sparse population, the Robson Valley always surprises me.  It is so isolated, rural, and low in residents, that you don’t really expect to come upon too many extraordinary things, but the people that do choose to live here are a pretty rare breed, who bring with them a lot of hidden talents.  This was reconfirmed to me yesterday when I drove out to the hamlet of Dunster for another music jam.

            At the end of our previous jam, Bob, the guy who was playing the dobr, most of the time, mentioned that what he really liked to do was play drums.  That sounded great to me because, I really wanted to play electric guitar.  So we decided to have the next jam at his place.  

            Yesterday, when I walked into his living room ready to do some music, I noticed a red drum kit, all set up at one side of the room.  It looked like the typical drum set that you would see at any garage-type band, so I just assumed that it was the set that Bob would play.  When the four of us started playing I was a bit surprised that Bob didn’t go over and play the drums, but instead he played dobro and mandolin. 

            Later in the session, some one mentioned the red drum set, and he said he was hoping to sell it.  He then added that the drum kit he liked to play was in a room upstairs, and offered to show it to us.   I wasn’t overly excited about looking at a drum set, because, not being a drummer, all drum sets looked pretty much the same to me, but I climbed the stairs following Bob and the other guys, to the far room.

            When I walked through the doorway, I was gobsmacked.

            I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.  Sometimes, on one of those big giant auditorium concerts, I have seen the drummers literally surrounded with drums, cymbals, tom toms, and such, and that is what I saw filling this room, the whole room, that Bob had led us to.  There was only space for us to squeeze around the edges.  Bob somehow got behind the drums, sat down, and began to hammer away on the drums.  He looked like a pilot in some enormous airplane, surrounded by the massive control panel of the cockpit.

            My camera, which is a high definition video camera, shoots a wider than normal photo, but, I could not get Bob’s whole drum set into a shot, so some of his kit can not be seen in the photo above.   Even now, as I write this, I am smiling as I think of all those drums in a little room in an isolated house, situated below a mountain.

            When we went back downstairs, and resumed our jam session, Bob once again began playing the mandolin.  It seemed somehow sacrilegious, for him to be playing a mandolin, when he had all that tremendous drum equipment upstairs.  We did have a good afternoon of playing music, and we are planning to do it again in a couple of days. 

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Kona In The Dandelions

     My grandfather, and later my uncle, owned a large commercial greenhouse where they grew tomatoes.  I spent many an hour working in that greenhouse picking tomatoes in the early morning, before the Indiana heat and humidity got too unbearable.

    I guess it is only natural that when I grew up, that I wanted to have my own tomato-producing greenhouse (made using some of the same panes of glass, I got when my relative’s greenhouses were torn down)  I naturally used the same tomato-growing techniques, I had seen my grandfather use in his greenhouses.

    Once my seedling tomatoes have grown big enough (and the cold British Columbia weather is no longer a threat) I plant the young tomato plants in the greenhouse.  I spread a mulch all over the ground around the plants to prevent weeds, and hold moisture in the soil.  My grandfather mulched with straw, but I use the dried “hay” I cut from tall weeds growing in my unused pastures.  

    When the plants get tall enough, I string them up with twine tied to wire that is strung high across the greenhouse.  This holds the tomato plants up as they grow taller, and keeps the tomatoes off of the ground.

    Today, I changed my morning routine of painting, because I have fallen so far behind in all of those  many “need to do” jobs, and I used my usual painting time to string up my more than fifty tomato plants I have in the greenhouse.  

    I am happy to report that I can now cross that task off of my “To Do” list.   To use an old Forestry term that was used to describe logging cut-blocks that were successfully replanted, my tomato plants are now “Ready to Grow.”

View my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Greenhouse Tomatoes, Grown Like My Grandfather's

     My grandfather, and later my uncle, owned a large commercial greenhouse where they grew tomatoes.  I spent many an hour working in that greenhouse picking tomatoes in the early morning, before the Indiana heat and humidity got too unbearable.

    I guess it is only natural that when I grew up, that I wanted to have my own tomato-producing greenhouse (made using some of the same panes of glass, I got when my relative’s greenhouses were torn down)  I naturally used the same tomato-growing techniques, I had seen my grandfather use in his greenhouses.

    Once my seedling tomatoes have grown big enough (and the cold British Columbia weather is no longer a threat) I plant the young tomato plants in the greenhouse.  I spread a mulch all over the ground around the plants to prevent weeds, and hold moisture in the soil.  My grandfather mulched with straw, but I use the dried “hay” I cut from tall weeds growing in my unused pastures.  

    When the plants get tall enough, I string them up with twine tied to wire that is strung high across the greenhouse.  This holds the tomato plants up as they grow taller, and keeps the tomatoes off of the ground.

    Today, I changed my morning routine of painting, because I have fallen so far behind in all of those  many “need to do” jobs, and I used my usual painting time to string up my more than fifty tomato plants I have in the greenhouse.  

    I am happy to report that I can now cross that task off of my “To Do” list.   To use an old Forestry term that was used to describe logging cut-blocks that were successfully replanted, my tomato plants are now “Ready to Grow.”

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Captured Martins: #2 & # 3

     I know, I know, you probably thought I was done blogging about martins, and I did too, but I had forgotten about two other martins that I had live-trapped in 2013.  Here are the two blogs I had written about them:

    I am pretty convinced that my theory that there was a marten family in the neighborhood is correct.  On Monday I blogged that I had caught an adolescent in the live trap, and this morning there was another skinny, long-legged one in the egg baited live trap that I had placed in the dog house.  This one was thinner than the previous one.  And as you can see, it didn’t even bother to eat the egg.

    I put the trap with the captured marten in the back of the truck and drove it out to a thickly wooded area even farther away from where I had dropped off marten # 1.  When I opened the trap it scampered off into the woods.  I hope it finds lots of things to eat out there because it needs to put on some weight.  They eat a lot of mice, and there are so many free ranging neighbor’s cats around our house I suspect the competition for mice is pretty great.

    I hope this is the end of our marten invasion, but I will continue to set the live trap.  Why not, I still have the egg.

    It’s deja vu all over again.  Yesterday, when I went out to check the live trap I had put in the dog house, I discovered I had caught my third marten.  I have been catching one every week for 3 weeks now.  After I catch them, I drive them way out the road and let them loose in the woods.  I am having to drive farther and farther away with each successive capture.  I drove this one out 12 km (7.5 miles) down the road.  

    This martin looked healthier than the last one and it wasn’t so snarly.  I can’t imagine that there are anymore around here, but I will set the trap out again, just in case I am wrong.  It is sure strange that I had never seen a marten around here before this year and suddenly, there seems to be an explosion of them.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

A Rapid Change In The Weather

 

    There are highway signs in the mountains that warn drivers that the weather conditions in the mountains can change rapidly.  I thought about those signs yesterday evening.

    I was sitting in the living room and happened to look out of the window.  I noticed some dark clouds building over the Cariboo Mountains which I thought looked interesting with the very green trees, accented by the purplish-pink flowers of the lilac tree in the foreground, so I shot the photo at the top.

    It was only seven minutes later when a sudden rain storm hit, ushered in by furious gusts of wind.  That storm must have come from the opposite side of the Valley.  

    Everything out the window had changed.  It was darker, all of the colors in the scene became muted, and the Cariboo Mountains disappeared.

    There is an old saying that I have often heard:   “If you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes.”

    That certainly was the case last evening.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Relocating A Martin

 This is a repeat of yet another blog I posted in 2013 concerning my encounters with Martins:

       Anyone who has been following this blog will know that I have had several encounters with martens.  Most famously, the one where a marten came into my bedroom. 

        For a couple of weeks now,  we have been noticing that we haven’t been getting any eggs from our free ranging chickens.  There for a while they were laying their eggs in the dog house, but then the eggs started disappearing.

        I thought the thief might be the marten, which suddenly started hanging around our house.  I had a live trap that I borrowed from a friend, and so two weeks ago, I put it into the dog house with an egg in it for bait.  The next morning the egg was gone, the trap was open, and overturned.  I had caught something over night, but because the door mechanism was a bit wonky, the animal had struggled and managed to escape.

        I worked on the trap making it more secure, re-baited, and reset it.  A week and a half passed with no results, then yesterday, my wife noticed that the trap’s door had been sprung, and when I investigated I found a not too happy marten inside the trap.  It snarled and hissed at me.

        We drove it out to a nicely forested area down the road, and the marten didn’t even wait for me to fully open the trap’s door before it rocketed out, escaping into the bush.  Hopefully, that will be the end of our marten problem, but I am not so sure.

        I was immediately struck at the trapped marten’s appearance when I first discovered it in the trap.  It seemed like an adolescent.  It was thin and long legged.  The other marten I had seen appeared more bulky.  Maybe the fact that it was running around in my bedroom made it appear larger.  I do have a suspicion that this might be a young one recently kicked out of a family, and the other was the mother.  I will just have to wait and see.

        I guess I will reset the trap with another egg and see if any more of these critters come in for a meal.

My paintings can be seen at:  davidmarchant2.ca