Smoky Sun Reflection

     I noticed this occurrence yesterday.  It is usually difficult to get the sun and its reflection in the pond in the same photograph.  I noticed it when I was upstairs and was able to capture it because I was elevated, viewing from the balcony.   The orangish color is from all of the smoke in the air from forest fires.  

    My blog postings may be rather erratic over the next week, because my brothers and sisters will be visiting, and I will be out and about showing them the Robson Valley sights.

View my paintings at: davidmarchant2.ca

Lyle, Fort Electric's Crotchety Store Owner

             The Village of McBride is a small place, but when we first moved there, I was surprised at how many crotchety people ran businesses there.  Lyle was one of them.

    Lyle, owned Fort Electric, one of the two hardware stores in McBride; he had a public relations problem with his customers. 

         Lyle liked to watch soap operas on the small television that sat on his counter.  Woe be to any customer that came into his store looking for something when Lyle was engrossed in one of his soaps.   He became rude and agitated whenever his viewing is disturbed.  Many a locals avoided shopping at Fort Electric, unless Lexi, Lyle’s kindly wife, was at the counter.

    While I always tried to be very polite and meek while in Fort Electric, I did once have a bit of a struggle with Lyle.  One summer during fire season when I was working for the Forest Service, we were sending a small fire fighting crew out to fight a fire.  We supplied them with fire fighting equipment and food.  They needed a styrofoam cooler for the food, but we didn’t have any left in our warehouse, so I was sent into town to buy one.  

    Trying to avoid having to deal with Lyle, I checked the bigger hardware store first, but they didn’t have one, so I braced myself and headed over to Fort Electric to find one. 

           When I got to Fort Electric, I looked around on my own for one, carefully trying not to disturb Lyle who was engrossed in his TV watching.  I finally did spot a cooler on a high shelf right behind where Lyle stood. I asked if I could take a look at it and he reluctantly got it down.  It was covered with a thick blanket of dust so it must have been sitting up there on the shelf for years.  I told him I would take it, and that he could send the bill to the Forest Service.  

       “Oh, I don’t want to sell it to the Forest Service,” Lyle said,  “it takes too long to get my money.”

        I shook my head in disbelief, and replied that the cooler must have been sitting up on the shelf, unsold for years, at least now someone was going to buy it and he would eventually get some money for it.  Lyle did then reluctantly decide to sell the cooler to the Forest Service.

       Once Jim, a close friend who grew up in the US, first moved to McBride, he needed a broom, so he went to Fort Electric to buy one.  Lyle was watching TV, so Jim went wandering around the store looking for brooms.  The only brooms he found were strange-looking ones that didn’t have a price tag on them.  He picked one out and carried it to the counter to ask Lyle how much it was. 

       Lyle looked at the broom and said, “$40.00”.  Jim gulped at the price, thinking, “My god, what kind of place did we move to, if a broom costs $40?”  

       He couldn’t believe a broom could cost $40, so Jim asked Lyle why it cost so much.  Lyle said it was a curling broom (a strange northern sport where players sweep the ice in front of a sliding “rock”).

    Jim who had never heard or experienced curling, then asked Lyle if they had any regular household brooms.  He was then directed to another section of the store, and was greatly relieved once he saw the price of the regular brooms.

       Another time Jim went into Fort Electric needing a cast iron part for something.  He had first gone to the bigger hardware store, but they didn’t have the part he needed, so reluctantly Jim headed for Fort Electric to see if Lyle had the part.

    He told Lyle what he needed and Lyle walked Jim to the back section of the store (I guess there was nothing good was on TV).   Lyle pulled out a drawer with a few cast iron parts in it .  Jim found the exact piece he needed, (it was the only one like it in the drawer) and he told Lyle he would take it. 

       Lyle then looked at Jim and said, “You can’t have it;  it’s the only one I have.  What if someone needs it?” 

       Jim told him, “I, need it.”  

       Luckily, Lyle relented and let Jim buy it.

    In 1995 I needed a hook for hanging a swag lamp on the kitchen ceiling, so I went into Fort Electric to see if they had one.   When I entered the store, Lyle was engaged in reading the paper.  He didn’t look up at me, just asked me what I wanted.  When I told him, he still didn’t look up, just pointed over toward a shelf and said, “Look there.”

    I walked over to the shelf, and sure enough I found the hook that I needed.  Its price was $.17.  I took it over to the counter and reached into my pocket for money, but Lyle looked at the hook and said, “Catch you later.”

    Not understanding and confused, I replied, “What?”

    Again Lyle said, “Catch you later.”

    I told him I didn’t understand and Lyle then told me, “It isn’t enough money to open the cash register for.”

    Lyle was a strange one to be owning a store.

        That 17 cent hook is still holding our kitchen swag lamp 30 years later.

Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca

Quickly, Spend Money, Buy Things

      The Ministry of Forest’s yearly budget always lasted until the end of February.   Thirty years ago as we approached March of 1995, something happened at work that I found disgusting and always gave government agencies a bad name.  One of our Forest Service supervisors came around and told me that the “Executive” had told them that our Forest District had an excess of money left, and that it “had to be spent.”

    He was going to each employee in our office, asking everyone to find things they could spend money on.  He was looking for expensive things like computer workstation, and other such “Big Ticket” items.

    The only thing I could think of that I might useful for my mapping, was a small portable GPS unit that could be taken into the bush for surveys, then could import the resulting survey points into my computer.  Those kind of GPS units are common place now, but in 1995, they were very high tech.  Such a unit would really save me a lot of time in my map making, because at the time, I always had to take all of the compass bearings recorded by surveyors in the bush on paper, then plot them out manually, before I could use the shape of the road or logged area, into the computer onto a digital map.

    My diary didn’t tell me whether or not we actually got the GPS unit, it just told me that I was disgusted with the idea of being forced to quickly spend the money, or our district would lose it.  It seemed more logical to me that money not spent during one year, should just be added onto the next year’s budget so it be used then for things our Forest District needed.

Take a look at my paintings at davidmarchant2.ca

Doing Everything Myself: Satellite TV

         If nothing else, living in a small, isolated, rural village, has certainly forced me to become self-reliant.

        In a normal place, when you buy a satellite TV system, an expert installer comes out to your house and sets it all up for you free of charge.  Living where I do, it is something I can only dream about.  McBride is so far away from any big city (135 miles, or 217 km), that no expert will ever comes to set or repair anything for us.  There is no local set-up person, so like everything else, it fell upon my un-expert shoulders to set up my satelliteTV system.  Luckily, with a lot of trial and error, I was able to get the dish and satellite TV going.

        For many years, my satellite TV dish was on my house, but our house is located rather close to the neighbor’s wooded property, and eventually his trees grew so tall, that they began blocking out my satellite signal so I had to find another location for the dish.

        This was a lot harder than I expected.  It seemed that in every location I checked, the satellite was either blocked by trees, or was too far from our house, which would cause signal loss from a long cable.

       I finally settled on putting the dish in my barn yard, where I could get a signal, and was only 60 meters away.  I anchored the satellite dish in the ground, then began the task of aiming the dish to the exact location in the sky where it could pick up the satellite signal.  

        That meant wheeling our big TV and satellite receiver machine out to the barnyard in the wheel barrow.  I also had to get power to them, so I had to use a few of extension cords which were attached to an electrical outlet on the house for power.  I needed to attach the receiver to the dish with a cable and attach the receiver to the television with another cable.

        Luckily, since I had to deal with this sort of thing several times before, I had several left over satellite cables stored away in my shop, and I was organized enough to have all of the cables stored in one spot.  I went to that spot to grab the cables I needed.  I found one of the right length for the dish/receiver connection, but all the other cables were either too long or too short.

       I finally decided to go with a big coil of cable which was much longer than it needed, but I chose it and I took it out to the dish.  I connected the dish to the receiver with the short cable, then grabbed an end of the cable in the coil and screwed it into the receiver.  I grabbed the end sticking out of the coil, and plugged that into the TV set.

        My task then was to slowly move the satellite dish up and down and back and forth until I got the signal from the satellite.  I would know when I had the satellite, because the low drone sound coming out of the TV would suddenly become higher in pitch.  The higher the pitch the stronger the signal.

        Because I had done this several times before, I knew roughly what part of the sky the satellite was in, and figured that it should only take me about 15 minutes to find it.

        I stood behind the dish and slowly moved it up and down, then I moved the dish a little more to the south and did the up and down movement again.  I repeated this over and over, and got nothing.  I started the procedure again, repeating the movements.  Still I got nothing.  I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t find a signal.  Surely the satellite was still up there.   I checked all my connections to make sure they were all tightly screwed in.  

        Everything seemed right, so I tried slowly moving the dish again, and again.  I moved the dish back and forth first, then doing the up and down to see if that made any difference.  I rotated the dish to varying positions over and over again.  I got no signal. 

        I had spent 1 hour and 45 minutes moving the dish around, and didn’t pick up even the faintest signal.  I was starting to get extremely frustrated and wished I lived in a place where someone who knew what they were doing, could be called to come out and figure out what was wrong.

       I eventually decided to unplug all the cables and then start all over.  In doing that I discovered that the long cable coil that I had used, was actually two separate cables, coiled together.  I had screwed in the end of cable “A” into the satellite receiver, and the end of cable “B” into the TV, so there really wasn’t a connection between the receiver and the TV.  I felt like a fool.

        Once I had the two ends of the same cable screwed in, I quickly found the satellite and got a strong satellite signal.  I tightened the screws to hold the dish into that position and gathered up all my equipment.  With all my built up frustration slowly beginning to wain,  I wheeled my TV and receiver back into the house, hooked it all back up in the living room, and was finally able to sit down in my chair to enjoy my satellite TV once again. 

View my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Our Mountains Have Disappeared

     I guess I shouldn’t complain, while most of Canada has been breathing the smoke from the many forest fires all summer, our little valley had been spared, but no longer.  We had hazy skies yesterday, but today it is really bad.  Forest fire smoke has moved in from fires in the north, obscuring our mountains, veiling our trees, and making the sun an orange dot in an orangish sky.  My eyes are already tired and my energy level has been sapped.

    We are expecting a visit from family in a few days and sure hope that this thick blanket of smoke moves out so they can see some mountains during their stay.  We have our fingers crossed.

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Poor Kona; One of Those Designer Dogs With Major Problems

     For years we have been reading about dog breeders pouring out “Designer Dog” puppies for big money.  One of the current dog trends is “doodle”dogs, mixes of other breeds with poodles.  There are Labradoodles (Labrador Retriever-Poodle mix), Goldendoodles (Golden Retriever-Poodle mix), Bernedoodles (Bernese Mountain Dog-Poodle mix)...you get the idea. 

    These are all very popular because they are very adorable dogs.   However, in the attempt to make a killing breeding cute dogs, genetics is often overlooked, and that can cause severe physical problems in those cute dogs.

    Our dog Kona is one of those doodle dogs.  She is a Bordoodle, a mix of Border Collie and Poodle.  Last week we found out about the severe genetic problem causing her pain, something that she will be forced to live with for the rest of her life.

     Last week we took Kona up to the Vet in Prince George because she has been limping so badly, and some X-rays were done.  The results were devastating.

    The X-rays show that poor Kona doesn’t really have hip sockets for her leg bones.  There are small indentations, but not proper sockets.  It has been scar tissue that has been keeping her legs in place.  

    While Kona is a stoic dog and doesn’t really yelp or complain vocally, we can tell she is in pain when she tries to walk, because she now hardly walks at all, and when she does she walks awkwardly.  I now have to sometimes carry her from place to place.   Not much can be done for her except try to try to control her pain.

    We adopted Kona from a local family who were having other problems and needed to find another home for her.  They had purchased her from some dob breeder down in the States.  The previous owners told us Kona had join problems, which we accepted.  When we got her Kona was young and energetic, now that she is aging, those problems have finally started to show in an obvious way.

    Even with her pain, Kona still has a zest for life.  Yesterday morning when we first went outside, she spotted a deer in the yard, and despite her pain, went barking and running toward it, ignoring my yelling for her to stop.  She just forgets herself.  Of course then later, she suffers.

    Sadly Kona lives to eat, and now with her hip problems, we have to make her lose weight to lessen the impact on her legs.  That is a hard thing to do, because she constantly demands food, and because of her condition, we feel sorry for her and want to spoil her, but have to be hardcore about not doing it with food.

    Kona has always been a very high-maintenance dog, now that maintenance has become even higher.

                        You can view my paintings at:  davidmarchant2.ca

Beating The Bear

         I have been busy picking apples from our two trees.  The trees actually produced some apples this year, lots of them, after two years of producing none, because of drought conditions.  Preferably, it would be better to let the apples mature a bit longer on the tree, but if we do that, the chances are good that some bear would come in the night, trash the tree, and eat the apples. 

    I wouldn’t really mind if a bear ate some apples, they need lots of food before hibernation, but unfortunately, they always tear up the trees getting the apples.  They rip down big branches and leave the tree battered and torn.

    We don’t really know what we will do with the cart full of apples I have picked.  Sadly, the variety of apples we have can’t be stored for very long, and we still have some frozen apple slices from years past in the freezer, but nevertheless, I suspect we will again freeze some more for pies and cakes.

        Take a look at my paintings:  davidmarchant2.ca