The Squamidian Report – Oct. 14 / 06
Issue #228
Also in this issue:
The Latest Article From Pte Larsen
The Ontarion
Hi All,
Well, the bear was back. Or at least a bear was back. Silly Sue made the mistake of filling the bird feeder and setting out some suet cakes for our little squawky feathered tormentors. Next morning the feeder was down and in pieces, the thing it hung from was all bent out of shape and not much was left of the bird food. The suet was completely gone. Right now the bears are crazy hungry as they try to pack on the blubber and are all over the place and into everything. Kind of like raccoons in the city. They make a real mess. They leave nothing untouched and eat pretty well anything they can stick in their mouths. Makes me wish a few of the neighbors would leave their kids out at night. But that wouldn’t be fair to the bears so I guess it’s a bad idea after all.
*
New web space! More web storage space! That’s what I needed and now that’s what I’ve got. Ryan needed about 40 meg of space just for his wedding cruise web site and I was quickly running out of space for pictures and stuff so we set up an account with a provider that gives 100 gig of space. That should do us for a while. Funny, I think I said that once before. In the old days of mostly just text web pages and a few simple graphics 10 or 20 meg of space was considered to be a huge amount. You could never fill it all up. Now, with higher resolution pictures and small video and audio files the megabytes get eaten up real fast.
The provider we went with includes two domain names with each account (you can buy as many more as you want). The domain names can both (or all) be pointed at whatever directorys or root positioned files you want so we can easily share the space provided. Ryan has set up ‘brubacheronline’ as his domain. I’ve stuck with my previous theme and have set up another ‘thedougsite’. This one is a dot-net while the old one is a dot-ca. My home page and all the Squamidians will remain at their .ca location. The only things that will be over at the .net location will be new web pages and pictures. The links to them will all be in their usual places and will simply point your browser in the right direction. So if you were to click over to my www.thedougsite.net location you would just find a ‘home page’ telling you to click on back to the www.thedougsite.ca location. Try it if you want but its pretty boring there, just a big storage area.
But following a link to pages that I’ve posted there will be just like following any other link I post to my growing number of pages. In fact, you probably won’t even notice that you’ve jumped to another domain unless you read the address bare closely. And now you do get to give it a try. We headed up Mt Mulligan for another dirt biking adventure and the pages I’ve posted are nestled on the .net site.
Mulligan is on the east side of the Squamish Valley, overlooking the valley and the Sound. It forms the north side of the Indian Arm Pass. We had tried to get up into the high alpine valley known as Roy Basin a year and a half ago but were turned back by snow. This time there was no snow but the road has deteriorated so badly that it is almost impassible. Actually, it is impassible but we just didn’t bother to notice that. Add to that the fact that it is so over grown you can barely push your way through and you have a fairly hard ride.
Everything started off OK as Ryan, Warren and myself slipped past the gate at the trail entrance and headed on up. The trail is very rocky and loose and any attempt to see where you are going is blocked by leaves and branches until you get right up to the high areas. My misadventures started when we got to a badly washed out cross ditch. To cross, you have to drop straight down about six feet to the rocky bottom and then climb out up a steep bank, all the while making a turn to the left. Just as I cracked the throttle to shoot up the slope my front wheel hit a rock wrong and the bike and I were propelled too far to the left where we hit the vertical side of the washout. The bike rolled over up-side-down into the bottom and I did an ‘ass over teakettle’ maneuver over the bars. That was a good thing because I landed in some brush relatively unscratched. Had I stayed on the bike I would have been on the rocks with the bike on top of me.
It took some effort to get the bike up and pointed in the right direction but we managed and off we went again. A bit further up the slope was so steep and the gravel so loose I actually got stuck when the rear wheel dug itself right up to the hub. Another bit of effort and away we went again. The rest of the ride was uneventful except for having our heads banged around by low branches and we finally made it right to the back end of the Basin. Beautiful old trees, rocky bluffs and a pristine alpine meadow were there for our viewing pleasure. We ate some lunch and then headed down. Going down was almost as hard as going up but we made it back down without any more mishap. Pictures can be seen at:
http://www.thedougsite.net/Mulligan/mulligan.htm
Enjoy.
doug
****
The Latest Article From Pte Larsen.
Sent in by Sheri
If this is an Operation I would hate to experience war
My bi-wheneverly situation reports apparently have caught the eyes and interest
of quite a few people back home in Canada.
So I set out to make my latest reports more dazzling and spectacular than the
last, which is hard, at times I feel like an author suffering from writers
block but frankly the sad truth is that there is nothing really dazzling or
spectacular about my situation and location in the world right now.
As I sat here thinking about what kind of news could possibly captivate the
readers back in Canada, I was dealt a serious blow. The name of the
40th Canadian soldier to die in Afghanistan was released, Trooper Mark
Wilson. Wilson was a friend of mine.
During my short military career Wilson had always seemed to be just where I
was, despite our obviously contrasting careers, he was armoured and I was a
clerk. We first met in basic training, where we were both nursing
injuries on PAT platoon. A short time later we met up again in CFB
Gagetown and later we were both posted to Petawawa. Our last meeting
though is still too fresh in my mind to shake out; it was a mere three weeks
ago. Wilson had just arrived into camp for a 36 hour reprieve, to do
laundry, get cleaned up and what not before heading back out to the Panjawai
area, but of course he was not too busy to sit and shoot the breeze with me for
awhile. We talked for short time before he realized he should get
some decent food into himself before heading back. As clear as it
had happened 2 minutes ago, I recall myself saying to him "stay safe, and I will see you when you
get back in ". If it were only that easy!
I have had family members and friends pass away before, but not like this, this
is different, it feels different inside you, it makes you numb. You
know that millions of people in Canada will see his picture on the news and in
the papers and grieve in their own way, I don't want to down play how others
may feel about the loss, but to me he was not a picture on the news or a
statistic, he was a friend, a good soldier and an individual extremely
committed to his job here, He will be missed.
As The Canadian Forces continue to add remarks into the history books, I am
proud to be apart of it, there are not too many Privates in Canada who have
only about one and a half years of actual military experience that can say they
are receiving on the job training in a war zone.
As the death toll mounts on both sides, Roto 2 will be known as the bloodiest
tour in recent Canadian history, but mark my words, it will also be known as
one of the most successful, and a gauge or guide if you will, for upcoming
rotations.
Peter Larsen
Pte Larsen P.J.
NSE MAINT PL CLK
TFA R2 KAF
****
Hi eveyone!
Well I had one heck of a day today. Actually I didn't but Adam did. I killed the power to my computer and somehow destroyed my hard drive. Adam spent the entire day building me a new tower for our computer. I'm afraid this will be a bit of a short column this week. I'm typing this on Adam's computer and I'm not used to the tiny keyboard.
Last night Carole and I had a chance to attend another play at the St Jacob's Play House. The play was called "Corpse" and it was a very well done play. It was a murder mystery / comedy and only had 4 actors in it. If you get a chance to see it in your city, I recommend you do so for sure. It was really a hoot! We had a good flash of snow yesterday afternoon and it stayed on the ground for a good part of the day. By the time we headed out to supper before attending the play the sun had come out and it melted most of the snow. Flurries were flying again by the time we came out of the restauant but not a great deal this time. The temperature was -2 as we made our way home from St Jacob's and I had to watch for black ice on the roads. We made it home OK and didn't see too many Oktoberfesters on the way. This is Oktoberfest week and the cops have been really busy writing tickets up and arresting drunks. This year has been a bad year for drinking drivers. The Regional Police have laid a couple dozen impaired charges compared to only 1 last year. I guess we have a new crop of drunks visiting us this year. I don' t think it's the locals that are drinking too much because most of them avoid Oktoberfest. They did say that many of the problem drinkers are University students. I guess they're too young to have learned to act responsibly yet. Let's hope that nobody gets killed before it's all over this year.
Getting back to the snow,,,,, Fort Erie got whacked with 50cm of the white stuff today. That works out to be 20 inches for you non-metric folks. That's one helluva lot of snow for October! Let's hope it was a fluke and winter will stay the hell away for another month or two yet! I'm not finished putting the patio stuff in the shed yet so I hope we don't get any more snow at least for a few days. I think I'll sign off for tonight and I thank you all for tuning in this week. I promise a better column for next week, when I look forward to talking to you all again in The Ontarion Report.
Bye for now.... Greg.
PS: Something To Think About>
The difference between a snowman and a snow
woman.....snow balls!
****
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.