Wild Looking Kona

     Although poor Kona is looking pretty wild in this photo, she is no longer able to be the wild dog she used to be.  Now crippled with hip dysplasia, she can no longer even move herself from room to room, and she has to depend on me to pick her up and carry her from place to place.  She is on a lot of pain-killer pills, and although I know she is often hurting, she doesn’t complain.

    Despite her drugs and pain, her instincts are still very active.  The other day when I carried her outside to pee.  When she was sitting in the yard, a deer who was not paying much attention, came meandering out of the woods heading for the bird feeder.  Although the deer didn’t see Kona sitting in the snow, Kona sure saw the deer, and began barking in a fit of outrage, hobbling in the deer’s  direction, scaring it back into the woods.

    Kona didn’t really get very far, and quickly just sat down and waited for me to pick her up and carry her into the house, but kept barking even though the deer by this time was deep in the woods. 

    Kona still has spirit and craves our affection, something we are happy to provide.

Tae  look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

The Forgotten Mannheim Water Tower

     I am so happy that for most of my adult life I had taken the time to write a diary or when I was traveling, a journal.  During that time, I would often think, “I will always remember that,” but now, in my 70’s and reading through my diary, I keep coming upon things that I had totally forgotten.  Most of those things I had forgotten were not all that important, but once I read about them, some of my dozing brain cells where jarred causing additional memories to come back. 

    While recently going through my 1996 European travel journal, I read about our travel through Germany, where we went to see the Mannheim Water Tower.  While I did remember being in Mannheim, their water tower was a complete blank to me.  Below is what I learned about being in Mannheim from my journal:

    After seeing the Dom Cathedral in Klon, we took a train to Koblenz, Germany, then traveled on to Mannheim, a city we knew nothing about, but the map in our guide book showed it to be sort of a transportation hub, a place that offered a lot of train destinations.  

              Once we arrived in Mannheim we searched around for a hotel we could afford, and finally settled on a very nice one that was only 95 DM (Deutsche Marks)( $142.50 US) which was still expensive, but cheaper than all of the other hotels we had checked out.  (It should be remembered that a dollar in 1996 bought a whole lot more than it does today, so the prices I quote might not seem all that expensive these days, but back then they were very expensive)

    Eating was also expensive in Mannheim.  I had a salad with chicken strips ($22.50 US), my wife who grew up in Germany, went for one of her childhood favorites:  Rouladen ($37.50 US).  Rouladen is a German dish made of long trips of meat slathered with mustard, rolled and filled with bacon, onions and pickles.   Our two Cokes cost us $9.00 US.  We were not very wealthy people and the mealwhile very tasty, seemed really pricy to us.

    After our expensive meal we walked down to the Mannheim Water Tower, which our guide book had mentioned as a local landmark.  It was a  massive old stone water tower was built of stone in 1889, to solve Mannheim’s water problems.  The water table in the Rhine Valley was very close to the surface, but during the summer, the quality of the water was very poor and often caused sickness.  The municipality, created a construction project to pipe cleaner and safer water from the mountains and stored it in the huge stone water tower.

    The water tower was an impressive structure that was 60m (200 ft) in height and 19m (60 ft) in diameter.  It situated close to a spraying fountain.  Unfortunately, the impressiveness of the monuments were somewhat spoiled with a lot of sprayed on graffiti, something that I had always disgusted me.  

View my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Squirrel Gymnastics

     Squirrels are not the favorite animals of people who feed birds.  They always make sure they get more of their share of the food people put out for the birds.  They are amazing in the extent they will go to, to get the bird food.

    The black vertical cylinder with the holes in it, is a bird feeder that I filled with chopped peanuts.  The determined squirrel visits it daily.  Usually it gets on the cylinder and hangs, either right side up or upside down, as he works the chunks of peanuts out of the holes.  

    On this particular day the squirrel decided to try a totally new technique.  It awkwardly positioned himself astride the two feeders, and was getting the peanuts that way.

    It seems like no matter how I hang my bird feeders to prevent the squirrels from getting to them, they always negate my attempts at prevention, and successfully manage to get to get their share of the bird food.

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

A Night Trip on the Greyhound Bus, 2013

  Here is a description of a bus trip I took from Prince George, back home to McBride:

       If I was a writer in search of interesting characters, I think I would spend nights at the bus station in some a city.  Yesterday in my trip home, the last leg of my journey was a bus ride from Prince George to McBride.  After I de-boarded the plane in Prince George, I took the airport shuttle downtown to the Greyhound Bus station.  When I got there around 7:00 PM, I found the doors locked.  There was a young unshaven guy wearing a hoody, and an older aboriginal woman with a terrible bruise covering the right side of her face, who were standing by the door who told me that it didn’t open until 8:00.  

        With an hour to kill, there was only one thing for me to do: eat.  I dragged my suitcase over to the nearby Red Robin restaurant, and had myself a barbecue turkey wrap.  Then as it approached 8:00, I meandered back to the bus station.  As I waited the 6 minutes for the doors to open, several other people joined me.  There was a young woman, who also had facial bruising, and enough bags to fill a Subaru, who told me she was heading to Calgary, and standing nearby her was a stout old man, who was keeping himself busy doing something on his smart phone.

        Finally a Greyhound employee opened the door and I followed him to the ticket booth, where shortly he opened the sliding barrier in the ticket window and I bought my ticket for the 9:15 Edmonton bus that stopped at McBride.  Then I settled down in one of the plastic chairs to watch, as the bus station slowly filled with people. 

        A bus from northern BC arrived and the lobby filled with zombie-like passengers, dragging their bundles and suitcases, already exhausted from their daylong bus journey.  Many of them sat down waiting for the same bus I was waiting for.  I overheard couple sitting next to me, say that they had just finished working the night shift, then boarded the bus up north and rode on it all day to Prince Gerge.  They were headed for the Kelowna, which meant probably another 12 hour bus ride.  They could hardly keep their eyes open.

      I noticed a woman in her late 20’s, wearing what looked like a long black evening gown made of cheap polyester, generously cut low in the front, and wearing running shoes.  Her 12 year old daughter wore a cheap lacy dress, like what used to be worn with petticoats.  The mother was carrying on a conversation with a goateed horseshoer who could hardly carry his heavy-ladened backpack, complete with a coil of 1 inch rope on the top.  They were all waiting for the doors to open so we could get on the east bound bus.

        I could hardly keep my eyes open, waiting for 9:15 to arrive.  When it finally did, nothing happened.  No announcement was made, everyone just continued to sit there.  I noticed an older man carrying a big bag of cheezies and Orange Crush for the trip.  I tried to read some more of the novel I had downloaded onto my iPad.  I was a bit surprised, seeing all of these people most of who appeared to be rather poor, but all had smart phones, and they were busy doing things on them.

        A few people wandered up to the ticket booth and came back with the information that the bus we were to take was going to be an hour late in arriving in Prince George.  There was never any announcement made over the PA system.  I thought I should give my wife a call, since she was going to pick me up in McBride.  I called, but could only tell her we would be late, but I didn’t know how late.

        Our bus finally came and we loaded at 10:00.  It’s hard to get on a night bus without thinking about the incident that happened in Canada about 5 years ago.  On a Greyhound bus traveling late at night, a man with serious mental problems, cut off the head of another passenger sleeping on the bus.  Remembering that, I chose a seat right up close to the bus driver, instead of entering the dark bowels of the back of the bus.

        I arrived in McBride at 12:25 AM, and was happy to see my wife waiting for me.  It was nice to finally be home after a long day of flying from Indiana, then finishing up with the long bus ride from Prince George.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

McBride: A Community of Salvagers

 

    Here is one of my blogs from 2013:

    I have sometimes read about isolated communities located along dangerous rocky ocean shorelines, that benefited from the ships that occasionally crashed into those rocks.  Word quickly scattered through the community, and the residents rushed to the shore to salvage the items from the ship, that were washed ashore by the waves.  I have often thought that McBride is similar to those sea coast communities.

    The Robson Valley is not located beside a dangerous seacoast, but McBride does sometimes benefit from the dangerous highway that winds through our mountainous terrain.  During the time I have lived here, I have often heard of wrecked transport trucks or freight trains that have lost their loads, and those loads were often salvaged by local people.

    Living, as we do, away from town and the quick communication network of local gossip, we rarely benefit from the accidents.  Around here those salvage events happen fast.  I do still have a couple pieces of thick watercolor-like paper that had been salvaged from some overturned truck, but it was so long ago, I have forgotten the details.  I have had it for decades now, and still haven’t figured out what I could do with it.

    When I was building my house, I was very sorry in failing to hear sooner about an overturned truck carrying building lumber.  I don’t remember if that was a legitimate “salvage” or not; quite often the spills end up scattered, down mountain slopes at the edge of the highway, and are not really worth the effort of insurance companies to collect, so they are just left for local people to pick up.

    Last night, as I was trying to get to the end of a pretty bad movie that I had recorded, my wife returned from her knitting group.  She was carrying a plastic bag, and was all excited to tell its story to me.

    Apparently, a truck carrying frozen bun dough for a Subway restaurant had an accident and overturned on Hwy. 16, and as a result of the accident, the frozen unbaked bread dough, could not be safely used by the restaurant, so it was open to salvage.  

    I don’t know, how much of this frozen bread dough ended up in McBride, but there must have been a lot.  Some friends had opened their freezer to to my wife, eager to give her some of the Subway dough. They wanted her to take more than she did.  We now have about 40 sticks of the frozen whole wheat bun dough in our freezer.

    Like everybody else, I like to receive free stuff, and I am very anxious to bake and try out some of our newly acquired subway buns.

    

You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Cartoons: Price of Gas

    Trump’s War in Iran has caused the price of a barrel of oil to double, immediately spiking the price of gasoline at the pumps.  Here are some cartoons about it.  (Note:  Alberta, Canada possesses one of the world’s largest sources of oil.)

 

Mud Man

     On the last two blogs I have been telling you about how mud plays a prominent role in our life in the Robson Valley.  Today I am showing you a couple of photos of myself when I have had to deal with the mud.  For the most part, the soil on our property is made up of a heavy clay, and it becomes very sticky when it is wet.  In that state, it is very difficult to deal with.  It sticks to the shovel, so after you get a scoop of it, you have to bang the shovel on the ground to get the scoop of clay off, making the any digging very slow, burdensome, and frustrating.

    The photo above was taken after doing some work correcting a leak on our waterline.  Below, shows me digging up my sewage line, so I can get to a clog.  That was a particularly hard day.  The job was awful because of the wet sticky clay I had to deal with, and the fact I was wet and cold, and it was snowing while I was doing it.  Making the day more memorable was the fact that hours later I got the word that my father had died.  I remember the date because it was also my birthday.

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