First Bear

    One of the things people in the Robson Valley ask each other this time of year is, “Have you seen any bears yet?”  Yesterday, Joan when to walk Skye at the airfield and saw a bear with a cub out in the grass.  In the evening, when I was driving to our music jam, I stopped along the Fraser River, got out of the truck to take a photo of the light on the Cariboo mountains, and as I was walking back to the truck, I heard some crashing in woods on the other side of the road, and spotted my first bear of the year.  

    Now that I look at the crumby photo I took, it doesn’t even look very much like a bear, but as it took off I was sure that was what it was.  

    Yesterday, when I was out getting some firewood, I saw this hare hiding in the bushes.  While not a very exciting sighting, at least you can tell what it is. 

See my paintings:  www.davidmarchant.ca

May Snow

    Last night when I was in my bed, I could hear the rain pattering on our metal roof.  I was surprised this morning when I saw that it had changed to snow overnight.  While it did seem like a step backwards when we are supposed to be well into spring, it did create an opportunity for some nice photos.

See my photo-realistic paintings:  www.davidmarchant.ca

Aspen Roots

    As the weather warms (the last two days ignored), you can begin to see a clumps of light green creep up the mountainsides.  These clumps are aspen trees.  The reason you see clumps is because the aspen spreads itself through its roots, and so while you may see many trees, it is actually “one tree” with many trunks, all with the same genetics.  That is why they all start to leaf out at the same time and we see slumps of leafing aspen standing besides other clumps of aspen that have not yet started to leaf.

See my paintings:  www.davidmarchant.ca

Snow Line

    Spring took a step backward in the Robson Valley yesterday.  We even got light snow flurries in the afternoon.  Higher up in the mountains however it is much colder and so the snow that fell there didn’t melt, like it did on the warmer valley bottom.  In the photo you can see the snow line, above which the temperatures are freezing and below which they are not.

    Quite often in BC weather reports they will announce something like, “snow above 800m” which means in elevations above 800 m (2,600 ft) above sea level the precipitation will fall as snow.  The assumption is that below that elevation there will probably be rain showers.   My house is sitting at 24,000 ft (730 m) above sea level.

See my paintings at:  www.davidmarchant.ca

Spectacular Cloud Day

    Spring is a season when the Robson Valley gets a lot of weather systems moving through.  With this weather we often get some pretty amazing displays in the sky.  A week ago when we were walking the dog down the runway at the airfield, the sky was putting on one of its dramatic shows.  Here are a few shots I took of the event.

See my paintings:  www.davidmarchant.ca

Saved By Ingeborg

    Thanks to some international help, I am happy to report that my new computer hell is now over, my backlog of blogs has been saved, and I am able to now use my new computer to do all of those things that I did on my old one.

    Yesterday after lunch, I was laying down for my daily nap (one of the perks of retirement), all of a sudden, I started hearing the ring-tone from my iPad.  I was getting a video-call on Facetime (an Apple version of Skpe) from our good friend, Ingeborg, who lives in Belgium.  (That is her on my iPad as she was helping me out.)

    She was reading on my blog about the trouble I was having trying to retrieve all of my old blogs on iWeb, the old program I use to do my website.  She took mercy on me and wanted to help me solve my problems, and she sure did.  

    Although she hadn’t really gone through exactly what I was experiencing, she had experience with iWeb, and a lot more “techy” knowledge of Macs.  With her there, walking me through the help information on the internet (things I had tried to do, but misunderstood), she patiently got me doing what I needed to do, and after about 45 minutes, and cutting into her Belgium bedtime, she had my iWeb showing all those files I couldn’t get it to connect too.  It is sure nice to have knowledgeable friends.

    So I now have updated   www.davidmarchant.ca       

and will be able to continue there as I have done in the past, only this time using my new computer.

    Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, Ingeborg.

The Hell of a New Computer, Part 3

    I used an old Mac program called iWeb to create and update my website and blogs.  I have been using it for my blogs since January of 2011, so I have a lot of blogs out there.  Like a lot of programs I like and depended on, Apple did away with iWeb several years ago, but it still worked on my old computer and I continued to use it.

    I was overjoyed when I discovered that I had successfully moved the iWeb program over to my new computer.  I was not so overjoyed when I opened it.  It showed a virgin front page--None of my blogs or the rest of my website was with it.  It was like I had just opened the program for the first time.

    I got onto Google and discovered that for some reason, the iWeb files are “invisible”, and I tried to follow the instructions to make them appear.  I was somewhat successful in doing this and was able to come up with a folder that was 950 MBs in size.  This I assumed, was all my blogs and other website information.  Too my dismay, even though I have all this stuff presumably in a folder and moved to the correct place in my hard drive, there doesn’t seem to be any way to get it to open up in iWeb, despite trying all the things suggested in my internet searches.  

    So here I sit, iWeb works on my new computer, it just doesn’t show any of my previous 3 years of work, and if I do a new blog and send it to my website, it will get there, but all of my old stuff that sits there will be erased.  Fortunately I can use this Blogspot site to continue my blogs, and in the meantime I am slowly trying to rebuild my website using iWeb, rebuilding the whole site, and some of my favorite blogs.  

    It is a lot of time consuming work, and it threatens to overwhelm me, but I don’t know what else to do.  I don’t want to lose all of my old work, so I will try to re-do it.  

    Getting a new computer seems like it ought be fun and exciting, but so far that thrill has been overshadowed by all of the frustration and hours work that it has caused me.  Slowly over time, I hope to be back where I started from.

You can still see my paintings on my website:  www.davidmarchant.ca