After we sheared our Angora goats in the Spring, the weather was often cold, so we would sometimes put sweaters on them until their mohair grew back. I used one of my photos of the goats for this April Fools prank that was used in the Robson Valley Courier in 1984.
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In 1984, I submitted some photos with captions to the Robson Valley Courier, the McBride weekly paper. The four photos were published and a lot of people were puzzled, until they realized they were April Fool pranks. You saw one of the photos on my “Root Cellar” blog. Here is another one. (The name has been changed to protect the innocent.)
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When Kona slept alone in the living room, we didn’t have many restful nights. Kona would hear a deer or something outside in the middle of the night and erupt into a fit of very loud barking. She would also make a point of getting up before 6:00 in the morning then insist that we do the same. To try and solve the problem, I started making her sleep upstairs in my room. That solved the deer problem, but she still woke up way too early in the morning.
Then one night while she was sleeping upstairs, the electricity went off, then came back on, Kona freaked out and couldn’t be calmed down, so I put her in my bed to try to comfort her. She finally calmed down and went to sleep in my bed. I just let her be, and amazingly, she slept quietly all night, her butt against my back. I had been relegated to sleeping on my side on the small space on the edge of the bed, but I made it through and so did Kona, who slept until just before 7:00.
Being able to sleep through the night without being awoken by her barking and to wake up later in the morning, was worth the small space left for me to sleep in, so Kona now sleeps with me every night.
One night for some reason she jumped off of the bed, went down stairs and slept there. When I woke up the next morning, I had a really sore lower back, which plagued me all day. I guess I slept in all kinds of strange positions all night, taking advantage of all that extra space.
The following night, Kona was back in sleeping with me and I was back to sleeping on my side on the edge of the bed. Miraculously, the next day when I got out of bed, my backache had been cured and no longer hurt. I guess having Kona’s butt against my back all night, keeping me sleeping on my side, has health benefits.
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I hate wasting things. When I look at all of the things I hoard, I fear I might be a bit too extreme in my saving, but I always think I might use them again, and we do have a lot of storage space.
During the winter we have to deal with a lot of ice on our sidewalk and driveway. I buy lava grit to spread on the icy sidewalk to prevent slipping on the ice. When the ice melts away in the spring, the grit is still there, and so I sweep it up and save it to reuse next winter. I think I am probably the only one in the world that saves grit. I bet everyone else just sweeps it away, but I can’t help but save it, because I know it can be used again.
My parents taught us kids not to waste, and that was one lesson I learned very well, maybe a bit too well.
I met Bob Matchett at the first jam we had and I immediately liked him. He played the guitar and dobro at the jams, and I was extremely surprised once when we had a jam at his small house in Dunster. During a break, he invited everyone upstairs to “see his drum set”. I was not overly excited about seeing a drum set but I followed the others upstairs and walked through a room and was suddenly gobsmacked. Bob had a drum set worthy of playing in a giant stadium rock show. It completely filled the room, leaving but just a narrow space for us to walk around. Unbeknownst to me, drumming was Bob’s real passion.
To you it might seem rather unexceptional for me to get an email from Bob Matchett, until I tell you that Bob Matchett sadly died years ago. The emails from “Bob Matchett” are a scam. Before he died, some hacker must have wormed his way into Bob’s computer and stole the names of all of his contacts. I guess we are all getting the scammy emails now.
I of course ignore them, but in a way I do periodically enjoy seeing Bob Matchett’s name in my “Inbox”, it makes it seem that he is still around, and it reminds me of a friend I enjoyed playing music with and still miss. Drum away, Bob.
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When we bought our place house back in 1977, the previous owner’s resident cat was included in the sale. We called the cat “Bigfoot” because it had six toes on each foot, instead of the normal five. One winter’s day, Judy a neighbor and friend, came by for a visit. She was wearing a duffle coat, which she draped across one of the chairs in the living room.
We had a nice long visit with Judy, paying no attention to Bigfoot, and when Judy was ready to leave, she picked up her duffle coat to put it on, and all of the buttons fell off--it was the work of Bigfoot.
Bigfoot did have a habit of eating string, but we were extremely upset when we saw that she had been busy chewing away at the cords which held the buttons on Judy’s duffle coat.
Judy was very understanding and gracious about the incident, but I know she must have been upset, I sure would have been. After that incident with Bigfoot, we made sure that whenever we had guests, their coats were kept somewhere inaccessible from Bigfoot.
Back in 1977 when we bought our place, we were looking to live closer to the land. The property we bought was a five acre hobby farm, with a big garden, a greenhouse, and a root cellar, for keeping the vegetables we grew edible throughout the winter. While I was happy to have a root cellar, it was an ugly thing, that jutted out of the ground like a loaf of bread on a table. Adding to its ugliness was the fact that it was difficult to keep neat, it’s steep outside slopes were covered with weeds and couldn’t be mowed.
The root cellar’s function was not all that great either. Water would seep in and often cover the dirt floor. In the winter, snow would drift all around it, making the door difficult to open, so I put off getting the food we stored in there as long as possible, because it was such a pain to get them.
Anyway, after the winter of 1984 we had an early spring. The snow was gone by the beginning of March and so my outside jobs had started. Looking at the root cellar, I decided that one thing I wanted to do was get rid of all of the unsightly weeds that grew on it. The weeds were all dry, and I made up my mind to burn them off.
I lit some of the weeds along the bottom, and they took off, burning really well, too well in fact. The burning weeds caught the cedar log walls of the root cellar on fire, and suddenly the whole structure was burning to fiercely for me to put out. After the conflagration was over, there was just a big smoking hole where the root cellar used to be.
Loosing the root cellar wasn’t that big of a loss to me, like I said, there were a lot of things I didn’t like about it, but still, it was a bit of a loss.
Before April began, I decided to write an April Fools story for our weekly paper. I took a photo of a friend, standing by what was left of the root cellar, and wrote a fake news, April Fools caption for the photo which did appear in the Robson Valley Courier. See it below:
One of my biggest worries throughout the winter is that our waterline might freeze. There have been a few winters in the past, when our line did freeze, and left us scrambling for other water sources for months.
In fact, during the winter of 1994, the waterline froze and didn’t start running again until April 24th. That is one of the favorite bits of trivia that people remember on the calendar I make annually.
We get our water from a waterfall. Our line is 4,100 feet long. There are four families on the line. Our house is the third on line. The water is gathered at Sunbeam Creek Falls, runs down the pipe, to the four houses, then empties out, both at my pond and at our neighbors’s creek.
One winter, suddenly, we had no water. Frantic phone calls took place, and Glen, who is has the first house on the waterline, and I, went up to the falls to see what could be done. After several attempts to get it going, we resigned ourselves to our fate.
Glen was able to switch over to his old well, Kjell who lived at the end of the line was able to do the same. We had an old well also, but our pump no longer worked, so we had to carry water, and take showers at the old Forestry office
After a week without water, looking for a miracle, I turned on our tap, and discovered in fact, that a miracle had taken place, because water began to dribble out of the faucet. This was unbelievable. There wasn’t much pressure, but there was water. Suddenly, our lives were made a whole lot more pleasant. I couldn’t explain why there was water, it didn’t make any sense, but it was there and I was happy.
We continued on using the water for weeks. It wasn’t until later that I found out the reason for the flowing water. It was because of Kjell’s old water system. He had forgotten to put on a check valve on the waterline to his house, so when he turned on his pump to get water from his well to his house, the poor little pump was not only pumping water to the house, but was also working away pumping water into our waterline. Eventually, it filled the 2 inch line all the 750 feet back to our house, and we had water coming out of our tap.
I was always very appreciative of Kjell for this convenience, but alas, the next time he did work on his water system, he closed off this oversight.
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This novel begins in 1750 in a small African village, located in what is now Gambia. A boy child is born to Omoro Kinte and his wife, Binta. It is a Muslim community, with strong African and Muslim traditions. The women live separately from the men, with strict rules about how women and men act and work.
Kunte, the young child grows up being trained for the roles he must fulfill as a man. He gets an education from the Muslim priest of the village so he can read Arabic. He strongly adheres to the Muslim beliefs and the cultural practices of the Village. He finally reaches the stage of life where he has his own house and is expected to take a wife, but then, at age 17, he is kidnapped by slavers, and his life takes a severe turn.
He is stripped and branded, then shackled into the hold of a slave ship, shoulder to shoulder with other kidnapped Africans. It is hell; lying in the stench of bodily wastes and vomit, unable to change positions in the tightly packed hold of the ship for over a month as the ship crosses the Atlantic to America. He can’t communicate with the other slaves, who speak different tribal languages.
Finally, having survived the voyage, the ship lands in Maryland, where he is sold at a slave auction. During all of this time, everything from Kunte’s previous life disappears, he is totally confused and has no understanding of what is happening to him.
Once Kunte was purchased and carted off to a farm, his one goal was to escape and make his way back to his village. This of course was impossible. His three attempts at escape failed, due to the bloodhounds and trackers that found him. After being caught a fourth time, the trackers cut off half of his foot, to put an end to his escape attempts.
Mercifully, Kunte then ends up in a farm run by a more humane master. Kunte, who still had trouble communicating, felt contempt toward his fellow slaves. He hated them for being so passive and accepting of their abuse. He tried to adhere to his Muslim beliefs, keeping to himself, but slowly, he accepted that he could never return to his family, and succumbed to his new reality, integrating himself with the other slaves on the farm.
Kunta became the driver for his master and married Bell, a slave who was the master’s cook. Bell had learned to read at a previous plantation, something that was prohibited in slaves. Reading enabled her to keep her fellow slaves informed about what she had secretly read in the master’s newspapers and what she overheard during their dinners. This eavesdropping on their master’s private conversations and newspapers about the historical events that were happening, was an effective way for the author to show the passage of time in the lives of his characters. I would assume that otherwise, the constant mundane work of the slaves would give no indication of historical time.
Kunte and Bell had a daughter, Kizzi. Kunte told Kizzi about his life in Africa, teaching her words from his language. This information about his origin was remembered and further passed down to each generation of the family. As Kizzi grew up, she learned how to read, while being the “student”, playing “school” with the master’s young niece.
As a teen, she fell in love with a field slave who was set on escaping. He talked her in to writing out a “road pass”, but he was caught in his escape attempt and confessed that Kizzi had written the pass. As a result, Kizzi was sold, never to see her family again. This was a shock to me, having been so throughly immersed in Kunte’s struggles, but the complete disappearance of family members was a common occurrence to slaves.
Kizzi’s new owner, immediately raped her, giving her a son, George, who plays a prominent part in the book. Their master had been a “cracker,” a poor, white trash farmer, who had risen in status after winning a very good fighting rooster in gambling bet at a cock fight. Cock-fighting then enabled him to greatly improve his economic situation allowing him to buy land, a nice house, and slaves.
Young George was assigned to work with the aging, black man who trained the fighting roosters. George immediately took to the job, gaining expertise, and also became besotted with cock-fighting. He slowly established a good working relationship with his master, who was also his father. He was given a small percentage of the winnings. The goal of the whole family was to raise enough money to buy their freedom, but they were never able to achieve their freedom until after the Civil War, but even then, their opportunities were restricted by racism.
The storyline of Roots continues on through four more generations of the family, each being taught about Kunte, his African story, and his African words. In one of the last chapters, a boy child was born to the family and his name was Alex Haley, the author of Roots, who, after much research, wrote the book about his family’s saga.
Using Kunte’s African words, Haley was eventually able to pinpoint which tribe Kunte, his ancestor, belonged too, and after traveling to Africa, he found Kunte’s small village where, with translators, he listened to an old generation-keeper, whose task was to remember the generations of local families, give the ancient line of the Kinte family. In the old man’s oral history, he confirmed Kunte’s existence, which inspired Haley to write Roots.
Roots was a Pulitzer Prize winner, which was made into a popular mini-series. I was aware of the book and mini-series, but didn’t know the story until now. It is a compelling story, based on the struggles of a real family. It is certainly a story that needed to be told.
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Because I wanted to continue the walk, but couldn’t convince Kona to move, I walked over to the the wood and sat down on one of the rounds. Finally, when Kona saw me peacefully sitting on the scary wood, she slowly and cautiously made her way over to where I was sitting, and sniffed at the wood. Seeing the wood was harmless, we were then able to continue our walk around the pond.
We have had about a week of really beautiful clear sunny weather, with temperatures getting above freezing during the day. Below is a shot of the endless blue sky as we began our morning walk around the pond.
Winter is such a dominant season in Canada that I spent yesterday, the first day of spring, preparing firewood for next winter. It is always one of my major tasks in the spring, so that the wood can dry out over the summer, and ready to burn in the winter.
I am always on the lookout for trees that I can use for firewood. I spotted this dead Spruce snag in the grove of trees beside my pond. Although dead, it hadn’t really started to rot yet and it was leaning in a good direction for falling. It fell beside a pool which was frozen, so I thought I’d better fall it now, so I could buck up the pieces before the ice on which it fell, turned into water.
This firewood is going to be a lot of work, because of its location. I will have to carry the heavy chunks of wood through about 40 yards (36 meters) of bush to the path beside the pond to stack it. Then I will need to use the wheelbarrow to wheel it to my pasture, where, once the snow all melts, I can put it in the truck to haul up to my shop.
Once I get it there, I can split it using the electric splitter. Once split, I can wheel the pieces of firewood down closer to the house, where it will be stacked. Whew, I’m worn out just thinking about all of that work.
Luckily, I still have quite a bit of birch firewood left over from last year, so I will only have to get find about two more trees to complete what I need for next winter.
Some of the fields in the Robson Valley are bare, but we still have at least a foot of snow covering our yard. Nevertheless, today is the Spring Equinox, so officially we are now into spring. I have even seen two Robins and a Junco, which does help to make the seasonal change feel real. Now if we can only get rid of this snow on the ground, it would complete the feeling that spring has finally arrived.
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When we toured there eighteen years ago, the valley was already bumper to bumper with tourists, so I expect it is much worse now. To bad, Nature needs solitude to really give the observer the peace and wonder that it can provide.
Springtime Zion was full of spectacular waterfalls, as the snow on top melts and the water plummets to the valley below. Here are two shots of one of the waterfalls that we saw.
Prince George is our closest urban center. It is 135 miles (220 kms) away, but we have to periodically drive up there in the winter for appointments and shopping. Once we get up there, I am usually surprised at how much snow they get. McBride is located smack-dab in the mountains and so everyone figures that we get a lot of snow, and we do, but surprisingly, not as much as Prince George, which is located on a plateau, not in the mountains;
During the winter all of the store parking lots start to shrink as the parking lots are plowed and the snow is stacked in high piles at the edges of the parking lots, and those snow piles start taking up more and more parking lot space as the winter progresses. The parking lot in the photo has probably shrunk to half its size, due to the snow piles. The piles are 10 feet (3 meters) high and like mountain ranges stretch out, along the edges of the parking lots.
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There has been a lot of media coverage of AI (Artificial Intelligence) lately, largely because of an amazing program called “ChatGPT”. It is an internet site that anyone can use. You go there, tell it to write about some topic, and almost instantly it gives you an essay, an description, a poem, or whatever you asked it to write. It scans the internet for information then writes out what your ask. It is scary because it is the future, and many a job will be lost as AI takes over.
A week ago, a nephew of mine went to the ChatGPT site and typed in: “Write a rap song about the queen of Brioche knitting.”
(My sister, Nancy is a very talented and well known knitter, who has creatively expanded and taken Brioche knitting to new heights and has been called, “The Queen of Brioche”.)
Although her name wasn’t mentioned in my nephew’s request, ChatGPT figured it all out and in twenty seconds, produced the requested rap lyrics. I won’t write out the whole rap, but here is the chorus it produced:
“She’s the queen of brioche knitting, nobody can deny
Her designs are straight fire. they’ll make your needles fly
She’s got style, she’s got grace, she’s got technique for days,
Nancy Marchant, the queen of brioche knitting, always slays.”
While it not the greatest lyrics in the world and could certainly be tweaked and improved, it is amazing that it was created in 20 seconds, and provided information that was not input with the command.
I was inspired to try ChatGPT out myself, and so went to the site and typed in: “Write lyrics about the Village of McBride in the style of country music.”
Within seconds, ChatGPT gave me the lyrics you see at the top of the blog. Again, they are not the greatest lyrics ever produced and certainly need tweaking, but I was amazed at how quickly it gathered information from the internet and created lyrics.
Like I said at the start, AI is going to be the future, like it or not. It is a brave new world we are entering.
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Even though official Spring is just four days away, all of the snow we have accumulated over the winter, is not showing any indications that it intends to disappear any time soon. Of course, this being the north, things can happen fast, either more snow, or disappearing snow. I haven’t measured the snow depth lately, but I imagine its average around our place is around 16 inched (40 cm).
Below is a view of my garden. Attending the Seedy Saturday gathering, made me all keen to get started on growing things, but as you can see, it will be at least a month before I can do anything at all outside, and it will only happen that quickly, if we get some serious warming.
There have been many proposals to do this, however politics always seem to get in the way of actually doing it. A couple of years ago the BC Government passed a law to do it, but to do it when the US did it, because we wanted to stay on the same time as Washington, Oregon, and California, although they would like to do it also, they can’t until the Federal Government passes a law, and thus far they haven’t.
It disturbs me that they all want to stay on year-round Daylight Saving Time. I would rather stay year round on Standard Time. Up here we get more than enough daylight in the summer evenings (and also mornings). I read once that it was the Golfing Industry that keeps lobbying for year round Daylight Savings Time, so that people can play golf in all that daylight after work.
The yearly time changes are especially hard on pets. They just can’t figure out why suddenly their schedules have changed and they have to wait an extra hour to eat or go on walks, or have suddenly have to wake up and hour earlier and have everything else that they do happen an hour earlier.
Supposedly the switch to Daylight Savings Time “saves energy”. I think that is BS. I have never seen any proof that it does. Let’s get rid of it.
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While all of our forestry staff were still reeling after been given their pink slips, we still had to deal with the big job of emptying out our office. In our office, all of the government files, desks, and equipment had to be packed up and shipped up to the Regional Office in Prince George, either to be refiled and used there or to be auctioned off. Beside the office equipment, we had a big warehouse full of fire fighting equipment and supplies, as well as other items that were used for the field work we used to to. The photo below shows one-sixth of our warehouse.
I was several times tasked with driving a large truck full of office and warehouse items up to the government auction building in Prince George. It was not an enjoyable experience seeing the vast amount of tools we used to work with disappear.
McBride is a very small and isolated village, and I wished some of Forestry’s fire fighting equipment could have stayed in the community in case of an emergency, rather than being stationed 135 miles (220 kms) away. It was quite a blow; not only did forestry jobs disappear, but also many jobs at our Provincial Highways Office when the government made severe cuts in McBride. The terrible loss of good paying government jobs led to a very difficult economic situation for our community, as employees and their families had to move away.
With still 20 inches of snow on the ground, 150 local gardeners in the Robson Valley showed up for the Seedy Saturday event in Dunster. As in previous years they sat through presentations and a panel discussion of best practices for growing garden plants, pollinators, and other related topics. The gathering is always interesting, and I always learn lot, as well of seeing friends and acquaintances that I haven’t seen for maybe a year.
Two presentations were the most memorable for me. One dealt with pollinators and the growing threat to their existence, due to the increasing use of Neonicotinoid pesticides that are wiping out bee populations, as well as other pollinating insects. Bedding plants found at big box stores are often grown using seeds coated with that nerve agent. The growing plant absorbs the deadly chemical and spreads it into the flowers. The bees pick it up in the pollen and carry it back to their hives. It is deadly, and has a half-life of 1,000 days, so if the plant is a perennial, it can kill not for just one summer, but half of the poison is still killing in the next couple of years.
The other interesting presentation was about your gut bacteria, something that scientists are discovering has many important effects on your health. We were given advice on what foods and herbs do positive things to your gut bacteria, and thus improve various problems in your body.
Again this year, Seedy Saturday was very helpful and informative gathering.
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We woke up yesterday morning with failing water pressure, an hour later, we had no water. Glen, the neighbor who usually helps me fix the water when there is a problem was away visiting on Vancouver Island and Nick, my other neighbor was at work, so we had to spend the morning and afternoon without water. I am so thankful that many years ago I built an outhouse for just such emergencies.
I figured there were three possible reasons for our lack of water:
1. Our filter at the falls was covered with debris, but that seemed unlikely since there was still so much snow on the ground, and I couldn’t see that much debris would make it into Sunbeam Cr.
2. Somehow the water flowing under the ice on the falls got diverted and took another channel, bypassing our culvert and the water level got below our intake and didn’t flow into our waterline.
3. Our waterline froze up during our cold nights. This was the worse scenario. Last time our waterline froze, we were well into April before it thawed and we got our water back.
After Nick got off work, we hiked up to the culvert to see if we could figure out why we had no water. Generally a big thick ice dome forms over our culvert, this time we found that it was iced over, but the ice dome was not so tall and there was a bit of a hole above our culvert. We could see the wooden watergate. (Photo above shows Nick standing on the ice over our culvert. The brownish spot below his front leg is the wooden watergate for our culvert.)
Luckily Nick had brought a pickaxe along and was able to chop through the 8-10 inches of ice over the culvert making the hole bigger.
After some more chipping away at the ice, we were able to access and lift the wooden watergate which allowed the water to flow out of the bottom of the culvert, with the lowered water level it gave us access to our filtered intake. We saw that it was covered and clogged with debris, so with the filter exposed, I figured we might as well change it.
Glen always keeps a clean filter in his shop, so I told Nick I would hike back down to the truck, drive over to Glen’s, get the filter, and bring it back. By the time I returned, Nick had cleaned a lot more of the ice away from the culvert and opened the watergate more, lowering the water level and he had removed the dirty filter.
We put the new filter on, lowered the watergate back into place, and the culvert once again started filling with water.
We hung around a few minutes until the culvert was full, then hiked back down to the truck and home.
At home, I was greeted by a happy wife, because water was once again flowing out of the taps. I was pretty happy too.
My iPhone tracks my activity and I was surprised how much exercise I got after the two climbs up to the culvert. It was the equivalent to climbing 24 flights of stairs.
