An Unexpected Frost

     This year I decided to start my corn inside the house to give them a head start instead of planting the kernels outside in the garden like I usually did.  I figured that would increase my chances of actually getting some ears of corn this summer.  I must have started the corn too soon, because they grew too quickly in the house, and I felt pressured to plant them in the ground before they got too big.  

    Transplanting the corn in the ground didn’t really work out very well for me.  The spring weather remained cooler than the corn preferred and then on Wednesday night we got a frost.  I saw that the nighttime  temperature was due to dip below freezing, so I did cover my corn plants with a plastic sheet to protect them from the cold, but they still suffered.  Above you can see how forlorn my corn plants now look.

    On the positive side, that cold temperature did give me some the nice photos of mist on the pond that I showed you yesterday, and below is a shot of a frosted Lupine that I also took.  It got so cold that the drops of water that were nestled in the center of the Lupine foliage even froze.

    

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Mist on the Pond

     While I take my camera with me just about every time I take my morning walk around the pond, usually I don’t find anything to take a photo of.  However on Wednesday morning there had been a frost overnight and the warmer water in the pond created a mist that I found very photogenic.  Here are a couple of pictures that I took of the mist hanging over the pond.

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A Walk Home From Town

     I like normal days when I can just stick to my regular routine, but yesterday wasn’t one of them.  I had made an appointment in McBride to get the winter tires taken off of the car and my summer tires put on.  Usually my wife will drive in with the car and I will follow with the pickup truck, we drop off the car, and we drive home in the truck, but yesterday, my wife could hardly walk because of a fall, so I decided I would just drive the car into town, drop it off, and then walk the five miles back to our house.

    It had been a beautiful morning with the sun shining, some fluffy clouds, and what looked like a good day for my walk, however by the time I got the car dropped off at the garage, the clouds had pretty much taken over the sky, and their was an unpleasant strong cold wind blowing.  Nevertheless, I was committed (or should have been) and I set off for home.

    I had biked the trip many many times, but I don’t remember ever walking it.  I had my camera along to take some photos along the way, and was disappointed at having a gray sky, but it was, what it was.      

    Here are some of the photos I took on my walk home.  Above you see Hwy. 16 east of McBride.  Below that is the old Koeneman log house at Koeneman Park, surrounded by dandelions.   The photo at the very bottom shows the white teepee on the opposite side of the Fraser River.

 I didn’t really have to walk all the way home, fortunately just as I got the the bottom of the steep Mennonite Hill, my neighbor Nick came along in his car, offering me a ride the rest of the way home, which I was happy to accept.n Park, surrounded by dandelions.  The photo at the bottom is a view across the Fraser River showing the white teepee.  I actually saw a few white caps on the river, proving that the wind was blowing pretty strong.

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Forget Me Nots

     This time of year, whenever I look out onto our yard I think of our long ago neighbor Mrs. Nail.  Back in 1977 when we moved to McBride, Virginia McKibben Nail was a tall, lanky, elderly woman, who had worked at the Harvard College Observatory for twenty years, and had written many published many papers on astronomy, but that was not why I think of her every spring.

    Mrs. Nail had been a member of the Alpine Club of Canada, and had gotten some Forget Me Not seeds from them which she planted in her yard.  Those Forget Me Nots have spread to our yard and because I always mow around them, instead of mowing them down, they proliferate.  I now have big patches of them growing in various places in my lawn, which I really enjoy seeing.  They give a flowery-meadow look to the yard.  That is them growing on the beside of our sidewalk in the photo below.

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A Vegas Back Story

      Two weeks after going to the Prince George chiropractor, we began our Spring Break by driving to Edmonton, then flying to Los Vegas.  I was still half crippled because of my painful back.  The pain continued in Los Vegas, and I even went to a Vegas chiropractor to try to get some relief.  The chiropractor made some “adjustments” on my back and remarked at how tight my back muscles were.  The relief I felt was temporary and a few hours later, I was in pain again.

    One night during our visit the family played Trivial Pursuit, (we had bought the game for $2.50 at a Vegas secondhand store).  I sat too long during the game which caused my back to really begin hurting again.  I couldn’t help but laugh at some of the questions in the game, and each time I did, streaks of pain shot through my back, but I couldn’t help myself.  At one point during the game, I leaned forward and laughed and the pain nearly knocked me out.  That night I opted to sleep on the floor instead of a bed, because of my back pain.

    That next morning I made the mistake of going back to the chiropractor again.  He tried to adjust my back but the muscles were too tight and he made it worse.  He hooked me up to an electric muscle stimulator on my buttocks.  Later he had me lay on my stomach and he pushed down hard on the small of my back, which was one of the most painful things I have experienced in my life.  After that chiropractor visit, I could hardly walk.  I spent the remainder of the day on my brother Rob’s couch.  

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

1994: Throwing Out My Back

     If I was smart, I would never touch a shovel, however living a rural lifestyle has always prevented me from being smart; there are just too many jobs that I needed to do using a shovel.  Quite often when I had to do those shoveling jobs, I threw out my back, and then had to live for days, or weeks, with a very painful back.  Sometimes if I was lucky, we could make the two and a half hour drive up to Prince George so the chiropractor would “adjust” my back, and I would be miraculously cured of pain, but that didn’t always work.

    Today I will start telling you about the throwing-out-my-back episode in 1994, when I had to deal with excruciating pain during our Spring Break after we flew to Las Vegas to visit some of my family.  The cartoon shows me shoveling snow, which was often the trigger to my back pain, but in 1994, it wasn’t shoveling snow that was the cause, it was shoveling a winter’s worth of goat manure and bedding out of my barn. 

    If you remember when I blogged about our 1992 trip to Costa Rica; before we left on the trip, I also shoveled out the barn, threw out my back, then suffered back pain, during most of our exploration of Costa Rica.  In 1994, two week before we started on our trip to Vegas, I again spent a day shoveling manure out of the barn, and again, I threw threw my back out.  Five days later, as my back pain intensified, I took a day off of work, and we drove up to the chiropractor in Prince George, seeking  relief.  

    Here is the re-write account from my diary:

    I had to shovel the massive amounts of the winter’s accumulation of manure out of the barn, and as was usually the case when I did that job, I threw out my back.  The pain wasn’t too bad, so I just made myself live with it.  But then days later, when I bent down in front of the VCR to insert a movie video, my back really went out.  It was very painful, so my wife had to drive me up to Prince George to the chiropractor.  

        He restored me, and while we were up in the “Big City” we walked around and did some shopping before we headed home.  But after the long hours of driving back to McBride, all the sitting in the car and bumping around on the highway, my chiropractic “cure” was totally erased, and my back was just as bad as it was when we left McBride that morning.

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A Couple of Stories About Mom

     Today being Mother’s Day, I will relate a couple of memories I have of my mother.

      My mom was a real trooper; no matter what the ordeal, she accepted it, and faced it without grumbling.  Both she, and my father sacrificed and dedicated their lives to me, and my sisters and brothers.  

    Mom loved to quilt and knit.  I remember once when the family was about to head off for a camping vacation, we found Mom in the living room, unraveling the sweater she had been knitting.  When asked if she had made a mistake, she replied, “No, I was going to take it along, and I just wanted to have some knitting that I could work on while we were on our vacation.’

    I don’t remember exactly how old she was when this next incident happened, but she must have been in her mid-eighties or so, but she was still mowing the lawn on my sister’s riding lawn mower.  I was surprised to hear she was still doing that. 

    The edge of Mom’s lawn dropped off in a steep four foot slope down to a lane.  When she was mowing, she got too close to the edge, and the mower tipped, threw Mom off, and both she and the mower, rolled down the short slope to the lane.

    Mom lay there dazed for a while, then hoped that someone would come driving down the lane, see her, and help her get up.  She waited and waited, but no one came, eventually she gave up waiting, managed to get herself upright, and then she walked slowly back to the house to recuperate from the accident.   Mom was always very self-reliant.

    Mom lived to the ripe old age of 102.

    I am thinking of you today, Mom.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca