Kona Still Has An Eagle Eye

     Even though Kona is now all crippled up and can no longer walk, she still possesses a very keen eye.   I am constantly amazed when she suddenly erupts into loud barking, and I look around trying to find out why, then finally I see some animal obscured in the woods across the road, or some dog way in the distance when we are in town,

    A couple of weeks ago, when I had set Kona outside in the front yard, she suddenly began barking.  I looked around to see what she had noticed, and it was a deer on the wooded slope way across the road.  The sight of the deer kicked in Kona’s instincts, and although she can no longer walk, she began scooting like a seal across the yard, all the time barking like a demented fool.

    Kona loves to ride in the car.  Whenever the car is moving, she lies down in the back seat, but when we stop, she sits up and looks around.  

    Yesterday, I drove into town and parked in front of the library.  When I was just getting out of the car, Kona, who was sitting up in the back seat, suddenly went into one of her loud barking fits.  I tried to calm her down, but she wasn’t having any of it.  I looked around, wondering what had caused her sudden agitation.  I couldn’t see anything obvious.

    Then looking closer at the surroundings, saw four deer silhouetted in the shade of the house across Main Street.  They were all standing still, and I would never have spotted them, but Kona sure did.  

    Even though I have lived around here for just about 50 years, I am always surprised when I see deer wandering around in downtown McBride.  

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Our Old Picket Fence

     It is quite common to hear in old movies that people dream about eventually living in a cute little house with a white picket fence around it.  Well, I guess I can say that I achieved part of that dream, because our house did have a picket fence around it, actually most of our property was surrounded by a picket fence, but it wasn’t white, it was an unpainted cedar picket fence.

    The fence was built by the retired guy that built our house back in the early 1960’s, and it is impressive how much work he must he must have put into splitting all the cedar pickets and constructing the fence.  From the length of the fence I estimate that about 1,800 pickets were used.  The guy probably went out into the bush, found the cedar logs, cut them to about 4 ft. (1.2m) lengths, then using a froe, split the logs into pickets about 3 to 5 inches (7 to 12 cm) in width.  He also had to split all of the cedar fence posts, dig the holes and set them into the ground before he could nail all those pickets onto the rails.  It seems like it must have been a tremendous project, all the while he was building the original house.

    What is now left of the fence is now about 60 years old.  With its aging, it has taken on a very rustic patina.  It is now covered with lichen and moss as you can see in the photos.  I do love the natural look of those old lichen-covered pickets, posts, and rails.

    I have had to tear down huge sections of the fence as it deteriorated, because the fence was no longer needed since we no longer have any goats (I used to have a herd of Angora goats).  Another reason I have taken parts of the fence down was because of the danger it presented with in increased number of forest fires these days.   If a fire did start on a section of cedar pickets and rails, it could easily spread, burning its way down the fence to our out buildings and house. 

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Oh No; Is That A Forest Fire?

     Like most people who live in forested areas, these last few years have made us very paranoid about forest fires.  A few years ago, we were forced to evacuate our home after a forest fire, started by someone doing spring burning, escaped and began ripping across the mountain slope above our house.  

    It was a very blustery day yesterday when we drove into McBride.  When we got to the top of Mennonite Hill, and overlooked the Valley, I was suddenly filled with fear, when I saw a white plumb rising, and spreading across the tree tops. 

    “Oh no,” I thought, “Don’t tell me someone is trying to do burning when it is so windy.”  I feared a fire  had already escaped and was burning through the trees.

    When we got at the bottom of the hill and alongside of the Fraser River, I was much relieved to discover that what I had seen was not smoke, but dust, blowing off of the large sandy beach beside the Fraser.  It was pretty amazing just how much fine dust was being picked up and blown by the gusts of wind.  It created a very thick cloud of the stuff.

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Earth Day

     I participated in that first Earth Day back in 1970.  Our small conservative university had a short  ceremony out in the lawn with some speakers from the Biology Department.  It was not well attended. Like I said, it was a conservative university, and concerns over our planetary home were not high on most of the student body’s agenda.   Of course, like in most groups, there was a small fringe of people who cared passionately about the Earth, and sought to stop the existential degradation that was threatening it.

    Those were days of hope and had restrictions only been put in place back then, our planet’s climate would not be in such a dire and threatening state today.

    For me, hope for the Earth is pretty much gone.  Big oil money controls the White House, and now all those corporations that used to give lip service to the environment, no longer have to “Green Wash” themselves, in fact, with Trump and the sycophant Republicans in power, it is dangerous for them do so.

    All I can do is urge everyone to do what you can to protect the natural environment we still have, and try to limit your use of fossil fuels as much as you can.

    

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Timex, One Crappy Clock Radio

     In December, I blogged about getting a new clock radio, something I really depend on, but was having trouble finding in a store.  I was overjoyed when at last I found a Timex clock radio in a store in Prince George, after striking out multiple times.  It didn’t take me long to discover that my happiness at getting the new clock radio was ill deserved, the Timex turned out to be a piece of junk.

    See all of the titles by the buttons on the top?  Well, it turned out most of them were just suggestions, not something that would actually happen, if you pressed them.

    There are two buttons for setting the alarm, so you can set two different times to wake up.   Supposedly, you can press the buttons and set the time you want to wake up.  After trying to set the first alarm time, I finally just gave up.  While trying to set the alarm time, at one point, just stopped moving the clock.  It stopped at 2:30 in the afternoon, something I didn’t want, but I couldn’t change.  I couldn’t even turn the alarm time off, so every day at 2:30 in the afternoon, the radio came on. 

    I then tried to set 7:00 AM, the time I wanted to wake up, on the other alarm.  I was able to successfully set it correctly, but I was unable to get the clock to unset the alarm for those days I didn’t want to wake up at 7:00, so the alarm went off whether I wanted it or not.  

    I always liked to  use the “Sleep” function on clock radios.  Often, if I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t go back to sleep, I turn on Sleep mode, then set how many minutes I want it to play, before it turns itself off.  Unfortunately, sometimes when I hit the Sleep button, instead of showing the time to stay on, it changes the radio station, giving me static.  That is not something I want to have to deal with in the darkness of the middle of the night.

    Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night and turn on the Sleep button, I hear a program I don’t really want to listen to, so I slide my finger over to the radio ON-Off button to turn it off, and for some reason, instead of turning off the radio, it increases the volume, something else I don’t want to hear in the middle of the night.  The electronic wiring for the function buttons seem to be all random, intertwined, and messed up.  The forty dollars I spent on the Timex clock radio, was money wasted.

    Yesterday, we did another shopping day in Prince George.  I remembered that the store where I got the Timex clock radio, also had Sony clock radios, and so I forked out $50, for one of them.  I sure hope I have better luck with that one, than I had with the Timex.

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

The Bumble Bees Are Out

     While it seems that Spring is taking its time getting here (last week we had several mornings when we woke up to a dusting of snow on the ground), Spring’s tardiness has not stopped Nature from getting out.  I was surprised yesterday, to see some Bumble Bees checking the few small blooms that have sprouted in the yard.

    There are no big flowers in bloom yet, but there are a few very small flowering plants that are in bloom.  The bees don’t seem to mind how small the blooms are, as long as they provide them with some nectar, and I guess the flowers are accommodating, because the bees are spending a lot of time crawling around the flowers.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

An Aurora

     Settling in to go to sleep was a bit chaotic last night.  I was in my bed and almost to slumberland, when my wife told me that Kona wanted to go outside, so I went downstairs, slipped on my gum boots, and carried Kona out into the cold darkness.  Kona did what she had to do and so I carried her back inside the house, climbed the stairs, and tried to retrace the road to sleep.

    Again I was just about there when I heard crickets from my iPhone.  I had chosen the cricket sound as my alert that I was getting a text message.  I figured that since it was just after 11:00, it must have been a scam text, so I decided to just ignore it.  Then thinking about it, I realized that instead of the usual must one cricket alert, I got three in quick succession, which was unusual.  

    Still thinking about it, two thoughts came to me:   I had read there had been a prediction of auroras on Friday night, and it was Friday night.  The second thought was of Ingrid, who lives just up the road.  We had often talked about auroras, and she had seen a spectacular one that I had missed, so I wondered if she was texting me about watching one.  

    I reached over and looked at my phone.  Sure enough, Ingrid had sent me two photos of an aurora she was seeing at her house.  I grabbed my phone and went out into the dark, bracing, night air to see if I could see and aurora.  There was a slight greenish hue in the sky, but when I set my phone’s camera  to “Night Mode” I could see the bright green of the aurora quite clearly.  I walked around the property and took a slew of photos.  

    Here are three of them.

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca