Pets Are Not The Only "Watchers"

 

    About a week ago I blogged about how Kona and Lucifer, our pets are always watching us.  Tuesday night I was reminded that they were not the only watchers.  Every Tuesday night I go to our music jam.  Last Tuesday I happened to look at the map on my iPhone and guess what, when I got to the map, it was already showing the route I should take to the jam.  My phone must have “watching” me over the months and knew where I would be headed on Tuesday night, so it was showing me how to get there.

    Of course, if it knew where I was going, it should have figured out that I already knew the route.  McBride its not that big a place and the route is not very complicated.  The map told me it would only take me 9 minutes to get to the Canadian Legion Hall where we have our jam.

    This is not the only case of my phone anticipating my travels, months ago on Saturdays, I  realized that the map always showed me the route to our friend’s house, where we visit every Saturday evening.  I already knew how to get to their house also.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

    

Shooting Trees

    Going through my 1982 diary, I was reminded of one of the more unusual jobs I got while working for the BC Forest Service:

One of the things I always enjoyed about working for the Forest Service was that there were always days when I would be asked to join other co-workers to help them with their jobs.  In the middle of February, the weather was rather mild and I was diverted from my timber cruising  and the typing out of History Records (of cutblocks) jobs and was asked to help the Silviculture Section collect fir and spruce cones that were then send to the Research Branch in Victoria.

This assignment was certainly unexpected surprise because it involved the shooting off of branches laden with cones from high in the tree with a 22 rifle.  I had seen the rifles before in the Forestry warehouse and always wondered why they were there.   I had always hated and avoided guns, and had no experience with firearms.  Luckily, my friend John Bird was my co-worker in the job and he had firearm experience and did most of the shooting.  

It didn’t seem like a very efficient way to get cones, because a lot of shots had to be fired before a branch came down.  I guessed shooting a gun at branches was better than cutting the whole tree down just to collect a small bagful of cones.  

Once the shot-off branch had fallen to the ground, we collected them and stuffed them into bags and filled out tags that told where they were collected.  Beside shooting off branches, we also collected cones from branches left on the ground from areas that had been recently logged.

When we arrived at one cutblock in our Forestry truck, we came across a Mennonite boy collecting firewood and throwing the pieces into the back of a pickup.  Officially, that was illegal, but I always thought it was better to use the abandoned wood rather than just let it rot.  

We stopped to talk to him and to break the ice and to show him we didn’t mind him taking firewood, I joked to him that if his load got too heavy, he could drop some of the firewood off at my house.  I smiled at my cleverness and thought no more about it, but when I got home from work, there were some pieces of firewood beside my driveway.  I then felt bad, thinking that maybe the boy thought I was pressuring him. 

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

Not Very Well Camouflaged

     I saw this Ruffed Grouse slowly walking across our driveway yesterday.  It looked so vulnerable out there in the open.  During the summer if you are out in the bush, grouse are really difficult to see because they blend in so well with their surroundings and stand very still, but it is sure a different story in the winter if they are out in the open.  

    Winter or summer, if grouse are on the road, they also stand really still, thinking they can’t be seen, but that strategy sure doesn’t work well on a roadway.  

    I hope this grouse survives the winter, because it looks so vulnerable out there in the snow.

See my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Side Effects

    Generally I think I am fairly healthy (and as the doctors always add:  “For your age.”   That being said,  my blood pressure is somewhat elevated.  For the high blood pressure I have for years been taking medicine; Chlorthalidone and Ramipril to lower my blood pressure.  They seemed to work well.

    Years ago I got gout and painfully limped around for a couple of weeks because of my throbbing big toe.  I was very confused as to why I suddenly got gout.  I always thought of gout as being caused by a diet of red meat and alcohol, neither of which I consume.  The gout eventually went away, but reoccured a couple of years later.

    As readers of this blog might remember, I recently found myself in the hospital with a case of Pancreatitis.  Again I was mystified as to what caused it.  The doctors really couldn’t give me a reason.  It seemed like alcohol is one of Pancreatitis’s main causes, which I don’t use.  

    The other day I was doing a bit of research on those two drugs I took for my blood pressure and came across some probable reasons for my episodes of gout and pancreatitis.  It seems that Chlorthalidone can cause gout, and Ramipril, in some cases can cause pancreatitis.

    I was happy to finally find some reason for those ailments happening.  I have yet to ask my doctor about these findings, and see if there are some other medicines that will serve me better.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

There's a Valley, with a Village...

 

    The McBride Museum is currently having a show about local music.  The museum has a lot of old musical instruments and its walls are full of old photos showing people from the past playing music.  When I first heard about the show, I wondered if there was anything I could contribute, and I remembered an old 45 RPM record I had bought in the 1980’s that featured a song called “McBride”.  The old record had been in the attic of my shop for decades and amazingly, I found it and took it to the museum.

    The song “McBride” celebrated the 50th Anniversary of McBride being officially recognized at a Village.  It was written by a woman whose last name was Kavari, who was a neighbor.  She asked me if she could use a picture I had drawn of McBride’s train station, for the back of the record envelope.  I don’t know the singer, but his name was Lawrence Joseph.  

    The record was in excellent shape (I guess I never played it very much) and I was able to convert the song to a .mp3 file and with the help of some of our jam members, we were able to figure out the lyrics and now can play the song at our jam.

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

 

The Watcher

     Pets watch and monitor their owners constantly.  That enables them to anticipate what their owners are about to do.  Kona especially likes to keep an eye on us when we are doing something in the kitchen.  That is what she is doing in the photo, watching us and calculating whether what she is seeing will result in any food or snacks for her.

See my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

What are the Chances?

 

    As I age, my fingers have gotten a lot less agile than they once were.  Now I often have difficulties buttoning some of my clothes.  That makes what happened to me yesterday seem particularly remarkable.

    I was wearing the greenish-blue pullover you can see in the photo above.  As I started to take it off, it unexpectedly got all tangled and stuck, and I couldn’t figure out why, but I couldn’t get it off no matter how I struggled.  I calmed myself down and slowly investigated why I couldn’t get the pullover, pulled over my head.  Then finally I discovered the problem.

    Remarkably, when I started to raise it over my head, one of the buttons on the pullover, buttoned itself to one of the button holes on the shirt I was wearing.  I couldn’t believe it.  I bet I could take off the pullover 20 millions times and not once have it button itself to my shirt.  It was unbelievable.

    Below is a photo I took when the two garments were still buttoned together.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca