The
Squamidian Report – Jan. 12 / 13
Issue #555
Including:
The Ontarion
Hi All,
We have very strange snow here. That’s something I noticed the first winter on the west coast, strange snow. Our snow doesn’t seem to be effected by rain. It does not wash away like normal, back east snow. I spent the first 50-some years of my life living where rain would melt snow and wash it away. I got used to that being normal. If there was snow and it rained, the snow would melt, if there was snow and it poured, the snow would melt faster. But not here, nope, doesn’t work that way. We had close to 2 feet of snow around Christmas and since then we have had days of non-stop rain, and days of non-stop pouring rain. But, the snow has barely gone down. It has compacted and stiffened, but has not washed away. Just seems to be the way it is here. The sun can melt it but not the rain. Good thing the sun has finally come out and is expected to stay out for a week or so.
But speaking of rain and snow, I used the snow blower again early this week. The Coast and the Interior were being hammered by a major winter storm that had slammed in from the open Pacific. Parts of the Lower Mainland received 3 or 4 inches of rain on Tuesday. The mountain passes were shut down, some of them receiving 2 ft or more of snow in just a few hours. Here in Squamish we were supposed to get just rain although we are right where the boundary between rain and snow tends to happen. It had been pouring all day, and our existing snow-cover was staying fairly well in tact. Then, about mid afternoon the rain turned to snow and it poured snow for a couple of hours or so. Just before 6pm the snow turned back to rain, but there was a good 5 or so inches of very wet snow covering everything including my driveway. So, I fired up the blower and blew snow in the pouring rain. Interestingly, my snow blower seems to be able to blow very wet snow right across my double drive with no problems at all. It seems to be able to handle wet snow as long as it isn’t so wet that it splashes when you walk in it.
I came back into the house pretty wet but with a clear driveway. This was my weekly meeting night with my motorcycle chapter in Horseshoe Bay but I bowed out, the hill up into the Highlands, and the highway down below were a slippery mess. No point in being just one more idiot out driving around when there was no real need to be out. Just about the time ‘the wife’ had almost finished preparing dinner, the hydro went out. We used to have hydro outages all the time the first few years we were here but our hydro has been very dependable for the last several years. But, it was out so we had to deal with it. Several years ago we had purchases a box of emergency candles, and had never needed them. Luckily we knew where they were. So out came the candles and we even found the matches with the help of a flashlight. Guess what…. We didn’t have any candle holders that would work with these ‘normal size’ candles. All our holders were for those silly little decorative things. We managed to light the house just fine with those little ones and then used their melted remains to stand the bigger emergency candles up in. Yes, we will pick up normal, every day type holders and store them with the candles for next time.
Interestingly, that flashlight we used, we have had for 15 or 20 years and it does not use batteries. It was given to me years ago by ‘the wife’s’ father and you shake it, causing the metal plunger to pass back and forth through a coil. The induced charge is stored in a capacitor or something I guess. Equally interesting, that capacitor seems to be able to hold a charge for months. I can pick up the flashlight and it will light up after not being touched for very long periods of time. It just works, very well and every time. There is no brand name on it, and I have never been able to find anything quite like it. I’ve tried other battery-less flashlights and they all proved to be pretty well useless. Just thought you’d like to know.
And speaking of sunshine, the sun did finally come out this week after a long session of dark wet weather that is typical for late December. It is now cold and clear. That’s when it is spectacular. The mountains glow in the sun, the snow is incredibly deep up in the high country. The sky is clear, the air is clear. The eagles are hanging out by the rivers. There are a dozen or so that sit in the trees above the highway by the Mamquam River bridge. The younger ones will sometimes dive at the cars, I guess playing with them. The older ones probably look at that kind of behavior as undignified.
doug
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THE ONTARION REPORT
Hello everyone!
Friday was my 64th birthday and experiencing that made me think back to my youth and of course how it compared to the lives and activities of today’s youth. Of course the big difference is the advent of the electronic age over the past 25 or more years. The biggest electronic device we had when I was a kid was the transistor radio! Today’s kids and young people are masters of the art of multiple methods of communication due to the age of computerization. This phenomena has virtually made prisoners of us all due to the fact that at least here in the “non third world” every moment of our lives is managed and controlled by computer! Sadly, this means that our enemies just have to figure out a way of crippling our computerization and we’re doomed! Oh well, hopefully that will never happen! The point of my writings today is that the computers of today have pretty much kept our young people in doors and for the most part disinterested in anything other than that which is related to computers. Also the fact that they, from their first need to venture outside the home to attend kindergarten, are chauffeured by their parents wherever they have to go. This takes away from the youth of today experiencing nature from most personal viewpoints. The kids seldom spend any time just playing outdoors in the playgrounds and parks of the city or even the fields and natural surroundings of the countryside. The rural kids I’m sure still spend more time with mother nature than the city kids but they too are affected largely by computerization. I was saying to Doug the other day that when we were kids we used to just sit by the hour and watch how the ants worked to build the mounds of sand granules around their tiny holes in the ground to protect their homes. I seriously doubt that any kid of today would “waste” time with such inactivity. There are so many interesting things that kids can do and learn outdoors if they only took the time away from their computers and iPhones to do so! The fact that while riding in their parents vehicles they miss out on such simple things as experiencing the different smells and sights that riding on the outside of a motorcycle for example affords the rider! If they were to walk to and from school more they would be open to noticing such smells and tiny facts of nature that are right here in their neighbourhoods. The most exciting event in today’s youthful activities is walking up to the corner store to hang out with their friends and text each other while standing in the same group! I think it would be an interesting experiment for a teacher to have his or her class spend two days over a weekend without access to any computerized devices with a promise from the students to spend 5 full hours outdoors observing the natural world and then write a report about their findings the following week! I’d be willing to bet it would really produce some interesting results!
In the 50’s and 60’s just hopping on our bikes and setting a destination for a Saturday brought many a fun adventure into our young lives. Every time we left home for a fun day out, we learned something! I never would have discovered the industrial waste bin beside the wood working factory on Maple Ave that was filled with totally usable YoYo’s had I just sat at home listening to my transistor radio instead of venturing out. The company made YoYo’s and tossed the imperfect ones into this bin by the hundreds and we used to have dibs on the rejects first thing Saturday mornings! This is just one example of the fun things we found to do without computers. I guess this seems rather simple when I tell it but it’s the simple things in life that teach us life lessons. Walking through the open fields that existed not too far from home before they became occupied with urban sprawl afforded us lots of opportunity to explore. Just picking the little blooms off the flowering purple buds of a thistle and sucking the sweet nectar out of them opened our eyes to the many eatable substances Mother Nature provides us. Todays kids really do miss out on some wonderful experiences when they confine their activities to the electronic age products. It should be mandatory that every person under the age of 18 spend one day a week without computerization at their fingertips. I’m sure their world would be improved!
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying we had things better than the youth of today, just that we had a more natural way of learning about life and the natural things around us! The kids of today are wonderful and very impressive with their demonstrated ability to adapt so quickly to the wonders of computerization. I’m merely pointing out that it might be fun for them to learn about life and all it has to offer through personal experience rather than through the display on a computer monitor!
That’s it for this week folks!
Thanks for tuning in and I’ll look forward to talking to you all again next week in The Ontarion Report!
Bye for now … Greg
PS: Something To Think About>
Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says, “I’ve lost my electron.” The other says, “Are you sure?” The first replies, “Yes, I’m positive!”
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Have a good one..
the doug
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