The Squamidian Report – Sept. 25 / 04
For the ‘ON LINE’ version of this newsletter, go to:
http://www.members.shaw.ca/doug_b2/2004/sept25.htm
Also in this issue:
Indian Arm Ride
The Ontarion
Hi All,
Hey, look at that. We are now into autumn. That means we are only 3 months away from when the days start getting longer again.
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I bite the bullet and bought an old Honda 250 dirt bike. This one is dual-purpose, meaning it is also street legal with working lights etc. It is a bit younger than the ones Warren bought a few weeks ago. But more important, I can license it for the street, which I already have done. That means I can drive it to the trails rather than having to have Warren truck it around for me. Should make his life easier, for him as well as me.
We took our dirt bikes on another fun run last weekend. Our route took us up over the Indian Arm pass and down to salt water at the top end of Indian Arm Inlet at the top end of Burrard Inlet. In fact, we had our lunch while sitting on a dock and watching a couple of seals swim in the water. The riding was relatively easy going with only a few steep loose sections. There is one place where a small river runs crosses the road, kind of fun to ride through that. Biggest challenge was keeping my eyes on where I was riding rather than on the surrounding scenery.
I won’t go into details, don’t want to bore anyone. Besides, how do you describe the kind of terrain and scenery we find ourselves in? However, I have posted some pictures we took, they can’t do it justice either but at least you will get the idea.
http://members.shaw.ca/doug_b2/Pictures/IndianArm.htm
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Kind of wild how our weather has changed. After that very hot dry spring and early summer we swung all the way to the wettest September on record. The up side is that our lakes, rivers and streams have been replenished. The moisture content is back in the ground. One of the lingering problems from the hot dry spell is that all the bear food up in the high country ripened early. There is no food up there for them now. They have had to move down to the lower elevations, which is where the towns and people are.
There are bears all over the place now. Just the other evening as we were coming back from Yogi’s dip in the river a very large black bear ran across the street in front of us. This was just a few doors down from our house. There are constant warnings on the radio to watch for bears and to remove anything around the outside of your house that may attract them. They even recommend taking down bird feeders, the bears can eat the seeds.
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I brought home a rather interesting relic from our construction project at Britannia Beach. We are ripping out a lot of very old services that were put into place for the original settlement. The thing I brought home is a connector for connecting water main piping together. Thing is, the old water mains up in there are almost a hundred years old and made of wood. That’s right, wooden water pipes. The craftsmanship is amazing and the pipes are ingenious.
They used the same principle as for building wooden barrels. The pipe is made from tongue and grove hardwood slats that have been milled into an arc so that when a group of them are put together they form a circle. Then there is a wire wrapping to hold it together. The whole thing was covered with tar to protect the wood and wire from the acidic soil. The wood would have swollen enough to seal any leaking. They survived just fine all these decades under ground, doing what they were supposed to do.
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I’ve jotted down some thoughts about Windows XP Service Pack 2 that I won’t bother you guys with. Instead I’ve posted them to one of my web sites for anyone with a lot of extra time on their hands to check out.
http://members.shaw.ca/doug_b2/sp2.htm
Now here is an interesting thing, and very Geeky. If you own a Window XP CD, any version, you can create a new CD that is a merge of your WinXP and the SP2 upgrade that you could use to do a fresh install of XP that is completely up to date and includes SP2. Instructions are at:
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=47212312
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Doug bought his 1986 Honda 250 dirt bike last Saturday so naturally we planned a good ride for Sunday.
Each time we take a new route we have experienced different riding conditions from rough and overgrown to today’s ride of wide open, winding and gentle where we can let'em rip.
At the summit, Doug let me try his bike out. Wow, she starts on the first kick, unlike mine where it can be a might temperamental. This Honda is sprocketed low and shifts real smooth but the steering feels like someone dumped her hard on the right side. ( I'm trying to talk the lingo of the pros )
In no time flat, we were at the saltchuck having our lunch on the dock watching the seals and soaking in the awesome view of the Sound. This trip would normally take me, in my old half ton, 2and a half hours where we did it in a little over an hour, I guess. We even stopped along the Indian River where I showed Doug an old log bridge taken over by the forest.
On the way back, we burned up to Norton Lake where the tortuses(us) passed the hares(a group of 2stroke bikers hell bent on covering every road they could find. They were tired, bent and busted and had given up trying to find the lake when we sauntered by them. Five minutes later we were at the lake.
When we got back to the truck, Doug tells me the GPS indicates we are back at the truck??*^,!? I feel so much more prepared when he carries all that high-teck junk.
What a great sport we have found.
Warren and his Rocket.
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THE ONTARION REPORT
SEPTEMBER 25, 2004
Hello everyone!
It’s been an interesting week here in KW. We’ve had amazing weather and beautiful clear air. I do think that the pollution dies with the Summer. Today being the first day of Fall was more like mid July. I was asked to work for Waterloo Nissan driving their customer courtesy car for two days. Their regular driver had to take a couple of days off for some reason. It’s not a job I’d like to do on a regular basis but once in a while it’s kind of fun. You get to meet all kinds of people and of course they take their car frustrations out on me. That is not to say they’re rude about it but they seem to think that I have something to do with the repair end of things not to mention control over the final bill! LOL! I just sympathize and tell them to buy a Jeep! Hahahaaa……! Not really, I guess no matter what make of vehicle you own you’re going to find it in need of repair sometime. Most people don’t seem to do anything about the state of mechanical condition of their vehicle until it starts to clunk or sputter or refuses to stop at a stop sign some day. Then they cry like babies when they get a bill that amounts to several hundred dollars. Oh well, that’s life in the big city I always say! If you want to impress the neighbours with your expensive toys, you have to be ready to pay the piper come repair time. I guess that’s not really fair is it? There are more people that just own a nice vehicle hoping to have something that will be reliable for a few years than there are those that purchase to impress. I see them every day that I’m working for the Nissan dealer. You know the type, the one’s that drive the $50 to $60 thousand dollar yuppie 4 door pickup trucks that could pull over a house. Not to mention the upper crust SUV models that have more bells and whistles than your computer has programs! You tell me the last time you saw a Cadillac Escalade SUV covered in mud and stone chips from a weekend of Off Roading with the boys! Who in their right mind needs a Cadillac or Lincoln 4 wheel drive Sport Utility Vehicle? If you want to go mudding, buy a Jeep Wrangler or a 4X4 short box pickup and hit the trails! Preferably one that’s got a few years on it and won’t mind the mud and scratches too. Anyway, to each his own, I guess it just seems to be such an extravagant waste of money when I see such vehicles. Heck, I remember paying $29,000.00 for our first house. Now you can’t buy a good SUV for that!
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In the NEWS here in KW.
Last Sunday evening around 8:30pm there was an explosion that lifted a house in old Forest Hill off it’s foundation and moved it askew about 8”. The windows and doors blew out onto the street in front and into the neighbour’s back yard. It was reported that the 36 year old male occupant of the home was in the basement cleaning a frying pan with Naptha Gas while his 7 month pregnant 32 year old wife was running a bath above him for their 4 year old son when the fumes from the gas were ignited by an electrical spark. Wow, what a tragedy this was! The wife and young boy escaped from the house with only a few scratches on their feet from broken glass outside. The father of the young boy made his way out of the basement onto the driveway and was said to have burns on the front of his legs. The Fire Dept arrived and the house was fully engulfed in flames. They managed to get the fire under control within an hour and extinguished within a couple more. The owner was interviewed by fire officials and police a couple of times while at the scene and on route to the hospital. During this time, he changed his story no less than three times. Now most people would attribute this to being in shock. Not an unreasonable assumption considering the circumstances. It was reported on the eleven o’clock news in detail. I immediately commented to Carole that something didn’t sound quite right. This man is a welder by profession and should certainly know enough not to use a flammable gas inside a house with ignition sources all around him. I said to Carole that I thought he was up to something more than cleaning a frying pan. Well, the compassion of the neighbourhood kicked into high gear over the following couple of days. The neighbours said he was such a nice guy and deserved every helping hand they could muster. A bank account was set up to collect donations of cash and several of the people on the street gathered clothing, toys and furniture to help them get their lives back together. The fire Captain on the scene thought there was something fishy when he heard the male victim telling the police officer a different story as he was being loaded in the ambulance. He pointed out the discrepancy to the Officer and the policeman contacted his superior who got the detectives involved to dig a little deeper. The burn victim as it turned out has 3rd degree burns over more than half his body and was flown to Hamilton Burn Unit for treatment. He’s been placed into an induced coma to help him handle the pain. His condition has been upgraded to slightly better than critical. He’s got a long way to go before he’s out of the woods. I was talking yesterday to a friend of mine that is a Captain on KFD and was at the scene for the first three days of this week assisting in the Fire Marshals investigation of the incident. The Regional Police Drug officers have been involved as well. As it turned out, the floor of the raised bungalow had collapsed into the basement in a position that acted as a lean-to. It actually protected and preserved the area of the room in which the explosion originated. When they finally dismantled the house room by room and got to the basement area, they found liquid gases and equipment that are used in the extracting of Hash Oil from marijuana plants. They found a pot on the freezer containing a quantity of hash oil and a couple of kilos of marijuana in the freezer. The leaves are soaked in liquid naptha, butane or other such gases. They are then slowly cooked in a pan over an electric element to vaporize the gas. Once the gas has dissipated, the plant oil can be pressed out of the remaining concoction and voila, you have Hash Oil.
Now, doesn’t this revelation change the whole picture? It sure as heck does for me. This poor “victim” not only darned near killed himself but he came as close as you can get to killing his whole family and a few neighbours as well without succeeding. He’s incredibly lucky (if you can call it that) to be alive. Not to mention endangering the lives of the fire fighters that responded to his aid. Suddenly, I doubt there’s a fire fighter or police officer in the province that has any sympathy for him! Of course strictly from a humanitarian standpoint we all feel bad for the victims of this situation. I feel bad for his child and unborn baby and I feel bad for the relatives and neighbours of this couple that are disappointed in these two adults because of the stupid, illegal act that got them into this. It was their choice to become involved with drugs and the manufacture there of that caused this tragedy. If this man lives, he’ll undoubtedly go to jail for a good period of time for his actions. Of course there’s the question of whether or not his home owner’s insurance company will pay for the replacement of the family home since the destruction was the direct result of an illegal activity of his choosing. Not to mention that if he should die from his injuries, will any company holding a life insurance policy on him deny his spouse’s claim for the same reasons? I have my doubts on both counts! I’d say his choice was a major booboo for sure. This couple’s activity in the drug trade has ruined or tainted many lives due to the results of this explosion. Everything they had both worked for over the course of their marriage is gone. They are ruined financially and morally for the rest of their lives. One has to wonder how many lives they adversely affected with their drug production over however long they’d been involved in it! I’d say they knew the risks and thought it would never happen to them but………..guess what? Boom, it certainly did Blow Up in their faces. I say God bless their children and I hope the lives of the kids are still salvageable for, in my mind they are the only incentive for the good neighbours and family members to keep up the campaign of restoration that they have started. It just goes to show you that one never really knows what’s going on in the house next door.
Whew! What a serious Ontarion this turned out to be! I know we can all learn a lesson from this type of incident. It’s just unfortunate that regardless of this happening, there is undoubtedly another dealer cooking up a batch in most neighbourhoods at this very moment. The war on drugs will never be won as long as there’s money to be made and people evil enough to disregard the health and safety of others for the almighty dollar!
Better sign off for this week, my fingers are aching and I’m falling asleep at the keys!
Thanks for tuning in and I’ll talk to you all again next time in The Ontarion Report.
Bye for now…. GREG.
PS: Something to Think About>
Think all you speak but speak NOT all you think!
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or
http://members.shaw.ca/doug_b/
Have a good one..
the
doug