Normally when you look across the valley to the Cariboo Mountains, you can see a bit of their features, but you don’t really notice the irregularities of their slopes. However, the other day their forests had been covered with snow which really showed off all of the subtle depressions and curves of the mountains. I always like the fuzzy appearance of the mountains after a snowfall.
You can view my paintings at: davidmarchant2.ca
My paintings consist of squares. I paint a two inch (5cm) square every morning. Before I begin, I zoom in on the image of the day’s square on the computer. On my canvas, I draw in some guide lines, then sketch what I see displayed on the computer. Once I finish sketching, I begin to paint, while looking at what I see on my computer monitor. Sometimes the squares are simple without much detail going on and sometimes they get pretty complex.
The easy squares take about 30 minutes to paint and the more detailed squares can take a lot longer. Today’s square was complicated and it took me one and a half hours to finish. There were a lot of colors I had to mix. When I got done painting the square I glanced down at all of the tubes of paint I had used and was surprised that I had needed so many for just a two inch square.
This painting is another image of my old rusty farm truck. Below is the square I painted today. You can see what the whole painting looks like in the “Current Work” link on my website:
Sometime in the early 1980's, I came upon my high school “Letter Sweater”, unworn, and still in its original box. It was a heavy duty green sweater with a big white “N” (similar to the photo above) which was given to members of the varsity sport teams at my high school. I had been given my letter sweater for being on the track team where I was a hurdler.
This once honored item had lost its importance and had become something that just took up space after we had immigrated to Canada. I figured I might as well wear it for warmth, so I did. An urban hippy couple from Toronto had moved to an isolated settlement near McBride. (McBride is pretty isolated itself). They were a strange couple and they called each other "Y" and "R". When I first met them, they instantly took a liking to me, because I was wearing my letter sweater and they called me "N".
One day, while I was working for forestry, I was part of a "beetle probe". We were flown out by helicopter to a remote area of North Star Creek, (one of the tributaries of the Goat River) and dropped off. We split up then began to snowshoe through the bush all day looking for signs of bark beetle in the spruce trees.
On this particular day, I was wearing my letter sweater, and as the day warmed up, I heated up from the exertion of the snowshoeing along the mountain slopes. I took the sweater off and tied it around my waist and trudged on.
Sometime later, probably when I sat down to eat my lunch which was in my backpack, I started to cool down and so I grabbed for my sweater only to discover it was gone. It must have become untied from around my waist and fallen as I snowshoed. I realized that I didn’t really have time to retrace my steps to find it because we had to meet the helicopter at a spot ahead of us, so sadly, my letter sweater became part of the ecology of North Star Creek, which I guess is appropriate, since the “N’ on the sweater stood for ‘North’ High School.
I often wonder what the reaction would be if someone in the future came upon the remnants of the green sweater with a white “N” on it, out there in the middle of the wilderness. I am sure they would be puzzled.
View my paintings at: davidmarchant2.ca
In 1969 after graduating from university I joined the Peace Corp and the group of us volunteers were flown to the Big Island of Hawaii for our training. We were located in a rambling old school building in a tiny hamlet named Pepeekeo. The biggest urban center close to us was Hilo. On one of our rare “free time” periods, some of us went into Hilo to check it out.
After spending some time exploring Hilo, some of us “mainlanders” ended up in a grassy park on the edge of the ocean and decided to go for a swim. It was not a sandy beach, but a rocky shoreline. We got into the water and swam around for a while. When everyone had had enough, I started swimming toward the shore and got a shock. It seemed that even though I was doing my normal swimming, I really wasn’t getting any closer to the shore.
A bit of panic shot through my brain, I had heard of “undertows” that pulled swimmers out to sea, and wondered if that was what I was experiencing. I didn’t yell out or anything, but began swimming with all of my might toward the shore and luckily the undertow wasn’t that strong, so I made it. With exhaustion and a great deal of relief, I climbed back onto the rocks that lined the shoreline.
The experience was one of the first times of my life that I had come across the real power of nature, and it was sobering. I was very lucky.
What I had thought was an “undertow” is more accurately termed as a “Rip Current”.
During the 1990’s while working for the BC Forest Service, I encountered a guy in Valemount through my work. I didn’t know him well, but I was shocked one day upon receiving the local weekly paper to read that he had been killed while vacationing in the South Pacific. He had gone for a swim in the ocean and had encountered a rip current that pulled him out to sea. Reading of his death, caused by a rip current, certainly reinforced my respect for the phenomenon.
I have since come across an article about how to deal with a rip current if you find yourself in one. The current will pull you out to sea and if it is strong, you will not be able to swim to shore no matter how hard you try. What you should do instead of trying to swim to shore is to swim at a right angle to the current, in a direction that parallels the shoreline. That should get you out of the area where the rip current is occurring and allow you to then swim to shore.
See my paintings at: davidmarchant2.ca
I am always surprised at how quickly the scraps we put on our compost pile disappear in the winter. Everyday I take a small bucketful of things to compost out to our compost pile, but sometimes an hour later everything I had dumped there has disappeared, except for the egg shells. The photo above shows a deer eating an delectable banana peel.
Yesterday my wife decided to make a lemon-flavored trifle. The recipe called for using Lady Finger cookies instead of cake, and we had a large package of Lady Fingers she had been saving in the old freezer cabinet that we use for mouse-squirrel proof storage in the shop. The Lady Fingers had been out there for about a year.
When my wife taste-tested one, she found they had “gone off”, so I took the 400 gram (almost a pound) of Lady Fingers out and dumped them on the compost pile. After dumping them there I forgot about them.
Yesterday evening we were walking Kona on the snow-packed path around the pond. When she stopped and began nuzzling in the snow. I didn’t know what she was up to, but figured it was not anything good, so I urged her on to continue our walk. It was then I noticed that she had something in her mouth, so I forced her to drop it, and she did. To my surprise it was a Lady Finger.
The pond path is not very close to the compost pile, so I figured on of the deer picked up the Lady Finger and then walked away munching it, and dropping it when the deer got to the pond path.
When we got back to the house, I walked over to the compost pile to see how many Lady Fingers remained. There was not a one. Only a coffee filter and some egg shells remained. Every last one Lady Finger had disappeared. (Photo below)
The night before last we got about 4 inches (10 cm) of fresh snow. Yesterday morning after I got my painting and blogging done, I went out to clear the driveway. Clearing the drive has gotten a lot easier since I got my new snowblower. I went out to the workshop to start it up. I opened the garage door, pushed it outside, then pulled the crank. It started right up.
I put it into gear, pushed down on the forward lever and it started to advance into the drive. I then pushed down on the auger lever that throws the snow, and nothing happened except the motor started to labor. I tried it again several and got the same result. I started to smell something like burnt rubber. This wasn’t a good sign and I started to get worried.
My snowblower is a new machine and I have only used it about 5 times. It didn’t take long for my worry to turn into a mild depression. When my old snowblower quit working a last year, I took it to a local repair shop and it is still sitting there; they can’t get the needed parts. My new snowblower was beginning to seem like deja vu “all over again.”
It seemed like something serious was going on inside the snowblower. The auger drive shaft seemed to be locked or frozen in place. That was something I wasn’t really prepared to mess with at that moment. My driveway cleaning took priority, so I walked down to the carport and grabbed my snow shovel and began clearing it by hand.
Hand-shoveling my drive and turn-around spot is a big job. I added up the length and width and came up with a total of 3,180 sq. ft (300 sq. m). Luckily it was a light fluffy snow, so at least it wasn’t the really horrible job it would have been if the snow was wet and heavy. I got the driveway all done then went in for lunch, and more worry about my snow blower.
Over lunch I began to think about my old snowblower and how moisture used to get into places and then froze. When that happened I used to just run the motor for a while and the heat from the motor would eventually thaw out the frozen places. I thought I would give that a try on my new snowblower, so after lunch (and a nap) I started the snowblower again, and just let it sit and run while I hand shoveled our turn around spot and the sidewalks.
Once I got everything all shoveled I went back up to my running snowblower and with fingers crossed, pressed the lever to start the auger turning, and to my great relief, saw snow shooting from the chute. I was so relieved.
Even though I had just spent hours shoveling the drive, I was happy that the snowblower was working again. Before I use the snowblower next time, I will turn on an electric heater close to the snowblower in my unheated shop, so that it doesn’t freeze up again.
Take a look at my paintings: davidmarchant2.ca
