What Temperature Is It?

    Our wise friend Swany once made a profound statement about thermometers.  He said, “If you have one thermometer, you know what the temperature is.  If you have more than one, you don’t.”

    That was my experience yesterday afternoon.  After weeks of temperatures that never rose above freezing, yesterday I could tell that the outside temperature had finally warmed above the freezing point, and I went to the thermometers spread around the house, to confirm the fact.  

    Yes, it was confirmed that it was above freezing, but exactly what the temperature was I can’t tell you.  Above is a photo showing the reading I saw on all of the thermometers I checked.

How'd They Ever Make A Movie Out Of That?

    My brain doesn’t always fire on all four cylinders.  

    Today is the McBride Library’s Book Club gathering.  This month we were to read a book that was used as the basis for a 2018 movie.  I perused the list of 2018 films then went to the library’s Overdrive site to see if I could find any of the relevant books there that I could download.  I found “The Measure of a Man” by JJ Lee.  That I thought was the novel that a movie called “One Fat Summer” was based on.

    I downloaded the book and started reading.  After a while, I began to wonder to myself, “How in the world did they make a movie out of this,?” 

    The film producer must have used an incredible amount of artistic license in order to create a movie long enough and interesting enough to keep an audience in the theater seats for film based on this book.  The book just didn’t seem to me to be movie material.

      The book is a light-weight hodge-podge of family history, clothing history, and information about dress suit construction and style; not exactly my first choice in reading material. 

     JJ Lee is a Chinese Canadian who ends up with one of his dead father’s suits, which hangs in his closet. The suit becomes an obsession with JJ.   Although JJ has a degree in architecture, he instead dedicates his time to become an apprentice tailor working in a rather obscure Chinese tailor shop in Vancouver.  

      Thinking he has gained enough basic knowledge in tailoring, he begins to take his father’s old suit apart with the aim of re-designing and re-making it for himself.  This task of remaking his father’s suit, brings up memories of is drunken abusive father, who destroyed the family. 

    When I finally finished the book, I still wondered why anyone would make a movie out of it.  My curiosity led me to do more research about the whole book/movie thing.  

    I discovered that the movie, “One Fat Summer” was based not on the book “The Measure of A Man,” but on a novel called, “The Measure of Man.”

    I had spent weeks reading the wrong book.

Blue, Blue, Blue

    Our weather seems to be stuck.  We have been having day after day of clear, sunny, blue skies, and cold (-20C, -4F) nights.  The days are beautiful, feel mild, and even spring-like, as long as there is no wind.  It makes me want to be outside, but there isn’t much I can do out there because there is still about 2 feet (60 cm) of snow on the ground.  

    I can’t help but notice how blue everything is.  The sky is an intense hue of blue, the mountains are blue, and all the shadows on the snow are blue.     

The Two Amelia's

    I recently blogged about the summer job I had mowing Evansville’s Oak Ridge Cemetery, while in elementary school.  As I pushed the lawn mower around the cemetery, I would entertain myself by reading the tombstones and thinking about what the people buried there were like.  One of the most thought provoking graves stones was that of Amelia C. Erhardt.  I didn’t know anything about her, but when my young brain first became aware of Amelia Earhart, the famous female aviator who mysteriously disappeared in the Pacific, I immediately flashed back to that tombstone I used to mow around, and wondered if I had solved the mystery.  The next time I mowed I discovered the difference in the spelling of the two names.

    Of course they were two different people, but the way their names were pronounced was the same, and they were contemporaries.  The aviator was born just 4 years later the one buried in the cemetery.  I wonder what is was like for the “cemetery Amelia” when all the publicity about the aviators exploded on the media.  I suspect a lot of her friends and acquaintances made jokes to her.

    All the time I was growing up I assumed I was the only person in the world with my name since  “Marchant” is not a real common name.  I didn’t even know of anyone else with that last name except for my grandparents.  All through my schooling and university, I never ran into anyone with the last name.  Of course the internet changed that and I now know there are lots of David Marchants out there.  I was further surprised when 20 or so years ago, a woman whose last name was Marchant moved to our Village of McBride.  What are the chances of that happening in an isolated little place with just 600 people. 

Big Jade

    The photo above shows our friends Dave and Luyba proudly standing beside their enormous Jade plant (tree?).   It is the biggest  Jade plant I have ever seen.  The other day Dave went into the room to find it laying on the floor.  One side had grown so much it tipped the whole plant over. 

    Dave's thumb is exceptionally green, and he really knows how to make plants grow.  If you look closely you might be able to see some of the blooms on the Jade.

    Below is a shot of the trunks of the plant.  Some of the bigger ones are about 3.5 inches (9 cm) in diameter.  It’s getting so heavy Dave says if it ever falls over again, he will have to find some help to set it right again.

Seedy Saturday, 2019

    I spent the day yesterday inside the old Dunster School house, immersed in talk and discussions of soil, germination, planting, pruning, composting, and other garden related topics.  As always it was a very interesting, educational, and beneficial experience.

    What a shock it was after the gathering was over, to walk outside to the white wintery world that is still our reality.  There has still no visible signs of spring around here.  It has been weeks since the temperatures have risen above the freezing levels, and there is no sign it is supposed to in the seven day forecast.  This morning we woke up this morning to -26C (-15 F).

Tracks in the Ice

    The other day when we were doing our walk down an icy windblown road, we came across these animal tracks frozen in the ice.  In an earlier blog I had declared that I was not an expert in identifying animal tracks and I repeat that statement now.  I looked in my animal tracks reference book to help me out and I am concluding that maybe they are wolf tracks.  

    The toe pads are spread like a cougar, but the claws are visible like a wolf, so I am going for that.  The keys I put down to help scale the track.  The black key is 3.5 inches (9 cm), so the track would be about 4.5 inches (11 cm) long.

    I thought it was unusual the way the tracks were presented; in ice with a snow fill.  We could see the tracks just about the whole length of the short section of road.