The Squamidian Report – Dec. 23 / 06
Issue #239
Also in this issue:
Some Squamidian Business Repeated
Fall Storms 2006, Tantalus View Retreat
The Ontarion
Hi All,
Well, here we are. It’s THAT time of year again, already. And would you believe this is our 5th Christmas out here since we abandoned our roots back in Ontarion and started anew the adventure of life. Well, that’s laying it on pretty thick but when you take as big a step as we did at our stage in life it is a renewal and an adventure. The people who would understand the scope of what we did the most would be Jackie and Jim, Karin in Melbourne, Nova Scotia Sus and Warren and Janice as well as their kids and our kids. And anyone else who has at some point made major changes in his or her life, which would be everyone.
It’s been quite a full 5 years for us. Sue spent the first 4 of them mostly on the road with Audit and at times seemed more like a visitor than a resident. It is only now that she is the manager of her own bank branch in down town Vancouver that she truly lives here. During the first few years I went through 4 different employers before finding one that is actually worth staying with. For a province as unionized and socialistic as BC, labour relationship practices are quite barbaric. Most employers treat their people very badly and seem to get away with it. But as long as you have a trade skill, the options are always open.
It didn’t take long for ‘here’ to become home for me and now this is what and where and who I am. That simple. But I seem to have gotten off topic… Christmas… I had my shopping done a week early this year. On many years in the past I have done it on the 23rd or 24th. Due to some weather related days off work I finished up a whole week early, which left me with nothing to do and nothing to panic about. Actually, that’s not true, I never panicked. Shopping on the 24th was both fun and inspirational. If you didn’t get inspired, you didn’t get it done.
As much as we may miss being with family and friends back home over Christmas, we have our own new traditions here. Christmas Eve is now a quiet evening up at Warren’s log home nestled in its little valley in the rugged Coastal Mountains. Christmas Day is an extension of what it used to be, family and friends come here for dinner. We eat too much and life goes on.
Christmas Eve back home was always out at the homestead. I would imagine it is nice and peaceful now but about 15 years ago or so it reached a frenzied peak. That’s when most of my generation’s offspring were children. Pack about 40 or 50 people into that house with over half of them being kids in the grip of seasonal excitement and expectation (a better wording than ‘greed’) and then add a few pets, a toppling pile of gifts and a table set for royalty and you had total chaos at an acoustic volume capable of causing permanent hearing damage. I’ve never figured out how my mother put it all together and held it all together and did the cooking and baking and never cracked under the self imposed pressure. But I guess that’s the kind of stuff mothers are made of. Incredible inner strength and patience. By the time we moved away most of the children had reached the age of young adults and Christmas Eve had become a much more peaceful event. I know our absence has left a large gap in the family fabric of the Evening but moving away was not just something I wanted to do, it was something I had to do.
So have a nice quiet relaxed non-stressed Christmas everyone, the way it should be. Enjoy the company of friends and family and most important of all, enjoy the company of yourself. Because if you can’t, no one else can either.
doug
****
The time has come to clean up my Email address book a bit and I’m going to need your help in the form of a very tiny bit of effort on your part to do it. As you may or may not know, I have two lists of Squamidian readers that I send to, the group list that is aware of the others on the list, and a quiet list that consists of people who don’t want to ‘hear’ any extra chatter or who I have to put there to avoid Spam filtering. The names on the quiet list are each sent to as individual Emails, while the names on the group list are all sent to as a mass mailing. In order to clean up my address book lists and to avoid sending to anyone who doesn’t really want the Squamidian to turn up in their Inbox each Saturday, I would like each of you who do want to receive our little news letter to simply replay and let me know. That simple. Couldn’t be easier. Anyone who I have not heard from by the end of the year will be dropped from the list, simply because I do not want to be sending to anyone who doesn’t actually want to receive the letter.
I will repeat this message in next week’s issues in case anyone misses this or the last issue. Thanks for your help.
****
It's a
much different way of life up here on the mountain, away from the grid. One has
to foresee any problems that may arise long before they are allowed to happen,
otherwise everyday life can become quite unforgiving. Our self-made, mountain
retreat has no services from the outside world, at least not what is visible.
That is, except for communications services.
These would be satellite TV, cellular phone and the remote cellular
modem for our computer.
The
kilometer long road for instance has to be maintained and plowed. In summertime
the maintenance to the road entails top dressing whenever good deals come along
in the way of gravel or crushed asphalt. Because of the steep grade, we find
the fines in the gravel keep getting washed away making it a continual job each
season. We have three cross-bars or open ditches on the way up that help to
direct water to the side ditches to minimize this erosion. I'm slowly
convincing our one and only neighbour that she do the summer maintenance and I
take care of winter maintenance. Her boyfriend has an excavation company so she
does have access to equipment.
I am
fully equipped to handle the winter roadwork. My 6 cylinder diesel Unimog (
yes, I own a Mercedes! ) with 10 ft swinging, hydraulic plow can tackle any
amount of heavy snow that nature can throw at us. Yes, and I mean
heavy........mashed potatoes kind of snow where a single snowflake can reach
diameters of 3 to 4 inches!. This last storm dumped 20 inches of very dense,
hard-packed snow overnight which took me about ten hours to plow the one
kilometer of road and my large work yard out. Then, in these rainforest
conditions, all the cross-bars along our road must be shoveled clear to allow
quick passage of water. Generally, a dump of snow is followed be at least 40 to
60 mm of rain.
Swift Creek, our mountain stream, provides us
with our domestic water needs while all the while generating our electricity,
by way of gravity fed water pressure spinning a turbine which in turn spins a
generator. This constant source of electricity (almost 1 Megawatt) is harnessed
by way of a battery bank which stores enough energy to run our log home,
workshop and chalet rental all year round; as long as the stream keeps flowing.
The last
few summers have been drought years for us. A scary thing when you depend so
much on the creek for water. I've learned to sprinkle silt over the stones in
the bottom of my intake pool. This seals the tiny areas where water is
escaping. We have not had any power outages in the seven years of running this
micro-hydro system.
The
climate, in particular, on this south west coast of B.C. has been changing
steadily for the better or the worse, depending on which way you look at it.
More sun in summer with less rain – longer gardening season. Milder winters but
many freak wind, rain and snowstorms that, like I said, get washed away quickly
before the next one hits. This is a great advantage for me, in that it ensures
I always have a place to put snow. A disadvantage, however, is that we have a
fair bit of shoveling and snow raking to do, keeping decks and roofs clear to
prevent excessive snow loads from rain saturation.
In
Whistler they build way-overkill for snow loads but down in the Squamish
Valley, not so. Occasionally, you hear of a barn or some kind of building
collapsing in this area. Our log home and chalet are steep roofed with steel
roofing, which shed snow quite well, but my 'wildwood shelter' and woodshed are
temporary, light, pole shelters that need to be snowraked.
And of
course when the rains come Swift Creek goes from a babbling brook to a
cascading, whitewater, raging river.
Believe me, I put a lot of thought
into the engineering of my water system. The four-inch polyethylene pipe
that traverses 600 feet down from my intake pool to the turbine shack is
supported by cable in many places, anchored into solid bedrock, keeping it well
clear of natures wrath. It is important to prevent as many dips as possible in
the pipe. Otherwise, this can cause turbulence, which causes air pockets to
occur, thereby losing valuable pressure and possible freeze -ups.
You'd
think my neighbour would take my friendly advice from what I have learned.
Every
winter they have had to break their waterline, trying to free the ice and have
suffered many water shortages. Why this year, they went to great lengths to
improve their system only to have it all blow out from the last flash flood.
(.....but I won't go there, any further).
So you
see now, what I mean by working with nature, not against her? She'll drive some
people right back to the suburbs where they belong.
I have
included pictures to help better illustrate what I have written. They can be
seen at:
http://www.thedougsite.net/Warren/warren1.htm
A Merry Christmas to all and a Prosperous New Year in all your
endeavors, fellow Squamdians.
Written by Warren and a shared experience by my loving and supportive wife, Janice.
****
Hello
Everyone!
WOW! Has
this year flown by! Do you all feel the same about that? Sheesh it’s gone by
like an F16 at full throttle! All of a sudden Christmas will be a thing of the
past as well and we’ll be into the New Year. I’m not looking forward to having
this weekend over with but I guess there’s nothing I can do about it. We will
be sure to enjoy every minute of the celebrations of the season.
Carole,
Adam and I wish all our Squamidian family members a Very Merry Christmas and
the Happiest of New Years!
*
I’ve
spent the past week getting out to shop whenever I could squeeze a free moment
out of my busy schedule. The one thing I can’t do is shop for someone when they
are with me. I’ve never been good at slipping away while Carole is looking at
something and picking up a gift for her. It’s just a lot easier when I’m on my
own and can concentrate on the task at hand. This year has actually been fun
out there, crowds or no crowds. At least nowadays I don’t have to fit the
shopping in between work hours. One bonus of being retired I guess! This year is
really different since we still don’t have any snow on the ground. We did have
a few inches last week but it’s all gone and isn’t expected here any time soon.
Blame it on “Global Warming” or whatever you want but we also had the same
green Christmas thing in 1994. I can handle the snowless winter for a change.
At least I got to try my new snow blower once this year. I’m sure there will be
many days of snow once we get past this “Christmas” tropical spell. It’s BC
that I’m concerned about with the severe storms happening every second day out
there. On the news they said that half the trees in Stanley Park have been
toppled over or badly damaged during the past two weeks. What a shame since the
park is world famous for being a completely natural habitat in the middle of
civilization. Doug said it’s an amazing place and it’s a shame when something
like this is spoiled. Oh well, hopefully the people of Vancouver will put their
shoulders to the wheel and rebuild the park once things settle down. Here in
Ontario the ski resorts are hurting big time! Out of 121 ski resorts there are
only 4 that are open for business. That too will change once we pass the warm
spell we’re in and things will get back to normal for them as well.
*
One
thing’s for sure, the holiday traffic hasn’t suffered from the weather. The
number of cars on the roads these days seem to be increasing wildly! Especially
since they built the new Sunrise Shopping Centre at the corners of Ottawa St
and Fischer-Hallman Rd. I think every shopper in the city spends their days at
this outdoor plaza. It’s incredibly busy and there seems to be no let up to the
volume. I wish I had the toll concession for every car that enters that plaza
in a day let alone a week. Talk about a
retirement fund, wow! And to think I used to duck hunt at the pond where the
Canadian Tire parking lot is now! Hmmmmm…. Amazing!
*
With the
warm weather we’ve been having, there has been a plethora (good word eh?) of
motorcycles on the streets. It seems that with bikers having to pay year round
insurance in Ontario they like to use their bikes every chance they get. Of
course it’s very seldom one gets to ride one’s motorcycle in December in
Ontario. Usually we’re up to our knees in snow by now. I don’t think it’s fair
that the insurance companies be allowed to gouge motorcyclists like that. If
you can only use the vehicle for ½ the year then you should only have to buy
insurance for ½ the year. What a scam that is! I guess they save a lot of money
not having to do the administrating of the “half year” coverage not to mention
receiving double the cash from charging a full year’s premium for half a year’s
coverage. I guess there’s no way around it for the bikers, if you want to ride,
you pay! Out in BC it’s different according to what Doug tells me. You can buy
any amount of insurance for any duration of time you wish out there. If you
just want to ride your bike in July and August, that’s the amount you pay. If
you want to buy 5 months of insurance you can do that. Now that’s a democratic
way of doing things. I wonder if I can buy insurance in BC to drive my bike in
Ontario? I’ll have to ask Doug to check into that for me. Might just be a way
around the big insurance bill.
*
With the
holiday weekend in full swing, I hope you all have a wonderful time, filled
with Love, warmth and happiness!
Thanks
for tuning in and I look forward to talking to you all again next week in
The
Ontarion Report!
Sincere Best Wishes to All…… Greg.
PS:
Something To Think About>
I guess I
should give you the answer to the number of reindeer that Santa really has as I
promised last week. You were all so curious and showed so much interest when I
posed the question last week. Here’s the answer to the big quiz. Santa has 10
reindeer as I told you last week.
They are:
Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen and #9
Rudolph. Oh ya, and #10 is
Olive………………….you know, Olive the other reindeer! LOL!
So now you know!
****
The Family and the Squamidian sites:
http://members.shaw.ca/doug_b/ and http://www.thedougsite.ca
Have a good one..
the
doug
The Fine Print!
The articles in these issues are the sole property of the persons writing them and should be respected as such.