The
Squamidian Report – March 5 / 11
issue #458
Including:
The Ontarion
Hi All,
I’ve learned from experience that most people would rather I talked about the weather than about computers. Well, I’m going to do both, at least a little bit so just be patient.
Firstly, I’ve got that computer I was putting back together up and running. It’s got some small glitches and I have no idea how reliable it will be but for now its doing what it needs to do. The lack of dedicated motherboard drivers was a problem but by using a software program called Drive Detective I was able to find, obtain and install third-party drivers that took care of most of the issues. I was never able to get the system to recognize the sound card but one of the third party drivers did get the on-board sound working. I thought I had some issues with the USB ports not working up to snuff but it turned out that my external drive cradle was faulty. There are a few other small issues but for now it is filling in for the old system that died a while back. If (or when) this system packs it in at some point in time, I’ll simply salvage that 1-TB SATA hard drive and go from there. Done with computer talk!
Now for the weather, which incidentally, I was well under when I got home. My ‘Ontario allergies’ had kicked in by the last day or so and my sinuses and throat were killing me. I was so stuff up on the plane home that my plugged ears couldn’t adjust to the pressure change during landing and I thought my eardrums were going to explode. They didn’t but it took me two days before I could hear anything again and a week before I could hear much more than that. Didn’t really matter because I couldn’t talk either because my throat felt like I’d swallowed molten metal or some such uncomfortable thing.
And then there was the ‘other’ weather. The west coast had been and still was and is setting cold records all over the place. They had enjoyed some fairly substantial snowfalls while I was gone and that didn’t change after I got home. We switched between arctic sunny cold and heavy snowfalls that turned the highways into treacherous ribbons of ice. Of course, once the weather forecasters decided to actually forecast that it was going to snow, the snow stopped. That seems to happen all the time around here. You can usually be pretty sure that when ‘they’ issue a heavy snowfall warning, that any potential future snowfall is pretty well not going to happen. Weather reports seem to be a lot more reactive than proactive. They can’t forecast worth a darn.
Here’s a neat weather related piece of info.. Ryan had been in India where it was in the low 40s (C) at times, back to Vancouver for a day and half and then on to Calgary for a week that included some -30 (C) temperatures. That’s a temperature swing of 70 centigrade degrees. On the old Fahrenheit scale that most of us grew up with that’s a whopping 158 degree adjustment. No wonder he said it felt kind of cold there.
And on the topic of things feeling different than one is used to, have you ever used one of those Neti Pots? The only way to describe the sensation of having water flow in one nostril and out the other, on purpose no less, is GROSS!! I’ll leave it at that.
doug
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THE ONTARION REPORT
Hello everyone!
Good to be home and good to be back on the ol’ keyboard!
I not only missed writing the weekly column but I missed reading it as well. I hope I didn’t miss too much while basking in the sunshine of beautiful Florida! We sure did enjoy the beach and weather while down south this time. The first week was cold, anywhere from 35F to 55F and overcast with a few days of rain mixed in. Not what I’d call the sunny south! We managed to get in some shopping and resting in the condo for the first week and then the sunshine hit and things warmed up nicely. We were treated to temps from High 50s F to mid 70s. We spent many days wandering the beautiful white sand beaches with nothing but our bathing suits on and of course a big smile! The Gulf is still beautiful but the thought of all that Oil sludge is ever-present these days. The disaster that took place last June took a big toll on the people and their tourism businesses.
I managed to flag down a young man driving the beach in a John Deere 4x4 mini pickup. I asked if he knew the fellow that I met doing the same thing last year. He told me that he didn’t work for the town of Pensacola Beach so he didn’t know Gerry that I befriended last year. He did tell me that he was a BP employee scouting the beaches of Santa Rosa Island for remnants of oil from the Big Rig explosion of last year. He said that they are still finding small amounts of oil on the beaches most mornings. To me the beach looked every bit as beautiful as last year and I would never have known that there was any oil washed up on it if I hadn’t seen it on the news. He showed me pictures on his cell phone of the beach at our location, Portofino, that reveled several miles of black coating on the sand. The beach where we were staying is about 50 meters wide from waters edge to the dunes at the rear or the beach. The pictures showed that most of the sandy beach was covered in black sticky oil. He said it was like strands of seaweed stretching from the Gulf up onto the beach about ¾ of the width of the sand. When the disaster happened, BP didn’t take very long to get the ball rolling to start the cleanup. He told me that approximately a day after the oil began to show up on the beach at Pensacola, BP brought in 600 workers trained in oil spill management and clean up and they spent every day 24 hours a day working on the restoration of the beaches. They brought in huge raking machines that moved up the beach raking as deep as 24” into the sand and processing the separation of the oil from the sand.
The work force had been working on the Gulf beach cleanup from early June until two weeks before we arrived for our vacation. The workforce was then reduced to approximately 100 men. The remaining crew was split into groups of eight to ten guys that would walk the beach from dawn till dusk with long handled scoops the size of soup ladles and long handled plastic bags, picking up the small remaining lumps of oil sludge and dropping them into the bags. They travel with a small pickup truck such as the one he was driving and they would place the bags of sludge into large barrels on a trailer behind the 4x4. He told me that they expected to be working doing this same process every day for at least another year! WOW, what challenge it is to clean up such a mess! I have to say though, for all the time we spent on the beach, we never saw one bit of oil sludge on the sands or in the water. I also talked to a gentleman that was driving a John Deere full sized tractor pulling a grooming “Zamboni” style machine up and down the beach every day. He told me that he worked for a company that was contracted by BP to groom the sands of the coastal beaches with their “Rakes”. He said that he was retired from the US Navy and applied for a job part time with this company. He was working for them two weeks when the disaster happened and they were picked up by BP to do this cleaning of the beaches. They told him to expect to be doing the same grooming for at least the next three years full time. So he said he’s now making more money than he had after being in the Navy for 25 years, he was all smiles as he told me that one! He said that BP had made a mistake by spraying a chemical on the oil spill to dissolve it that had only made it sink to a level between the surface of the Gulf and the ocean bottom. All the chemical did was hide the huge oil slick from site. The mass is still floating about 50 to 100 feet below the surface and whenever the Gulf is stirred up by rough weather the slick is brought to the surface for short times and winds up on the beaches. This could continue to happen for years! What a shame this whole mess is and it seems it will never go away completely.
Last year when we were in Pensacola Beach we spent many a day watching the beautiful Dolphins as they swam along the shore about 50 yards from the beach. We saw them every morning and late afternoon passing by in schools of 5 to 10 beautiful creatures each time. This year we didn’t see any! Although, the lady in the condo next to us told Carole that she saw the Dolphins passing by one morning but that had been the first sighting she’d made this year. I hope the oil problem doesn’t destroy the habitat of these and other Gulf inhabitants to such a degree that they never return! It’s such a magnificent sight to witness these creatures first hand as they enjoy their freedom in the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico. What a shame it would be if they were to be wiped out of existence even if it were only in a small area of the Gulf. The people down there did say that BP is doing a good job of the cleanup and they are confident that they’ll succeed but it’ll take many years yet! I sure hope they do succeed!
I’ve got lots more to tell you about our trip this year but I can’t do it all in one session! I’ll be continuing my tale of the south for at least a couple more columns. I hope you all enjoy reading about our vacation of 2011.
That’s it for this week folks! Thanks for tuning in and I look forward to talking to you all again next week in The Ontarion Report!
Bye for now…. GREG.
PS: Something To Think About>
Please don’t flush or toss anything away that can be recycled and reused!
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Have a good one..
the doug
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