Notes from the Honeymoon (Vol. I)

This is where I spent the first day of my honeymoon. It's a relatively secluded spot on the Kennedy River. Good for swimming in the heat...but seemingly gaining popularity by the year (even though the road is greatly deteriorating).
It got cloudy today, so we left...just as (quite amazingly and unexpectedly) thirty some odd children from a day camp showed up (good timing really).
I’d write more about the honeymoon...but I don't think they would allow that sort of thing on this site.
I would also post pictures of my wedding, except I have none. My sister has taken care of that Blog. So I’ve decided that any writing to be done this week will be on my much neglected travel blog...see link on sidebar.

T Minus 5 Hours

Impending nuptials...so not much time to BLOG. Anyway...this is the setting. I spent 2 hours sucking spiders out of my basement with the shop vac...do you think any of the guests will notice???Lordy it's hot...38 in the shade. Wish me luck!!

Weird Things in the Hills

Every so often when I’m at work, I stumble upon something interesting. Usually its an animal or a nice view, but sometimes it’s stranger. It’s absolutely amazing how far people travel to dump their trash, or grow their pot.On Wednesday, I stumbled upon what I consider to be my most unusual discovery in a clear cut to date…the grave of a three year old child.

Now, this was no body dump…which actually would have been less perplexing (although more disturbing), but a very well kept, and highly visible from certain roadside points (once you knew what you were looking for) grave (or more probably a memorial).

At the time, I had no context to put this in so I was highly perplexed. My partner did not believe me, so I took him up to show him…he became perplexed as well (he has a three year old himself). We considered the possibilities, and poked around the area trying to figure out just what the hell was going on…I mean people don’t typically burry their loved ones in the middle of clear cuts. There was no particular view, and although the south western exposure was a warm sunny one, We couldn’t figure out why here of all spots. Given the young age of the child, it seemed unlikely that it was his favourite spot, or that he even had a close connection to it (although that assumption would later be proved wrong). Upon initially seeing the cross at a distance, I thought it was a loggers joke. I have seen crude crosses constructed from planks cut from trees before. But as I got closer the quality of the materials indicated something more profound. I was working on the assumption that perhaps a logger had died in a falling accident or something…but when I saw the dates I was forced to reject that theory.

A later examination of the find (by Googling the child’s name) revealed that this was in fact, the precise location of an airplane crash. In January, a flight from Tofino to Vancouver went down, killing the pilot and two of the passengers. This explains both the memorial and the odd piece of yellow aluminium paneling I found nearby. It didn’t, on reflection, strike me as looking like a place where a plane had crashed. There wasn’t much disturbance (although I later discovered that they removed the plane off the hill with a helicopter). It looked like a rather typical clear cut with a grave.

Now, looking back, I probably should have pieced this together…I do vaguely remember something about a plane crashing in the hills somewhere, but the January 21 date puts that less than a week after I got back from Asia, so my mind was probably not processing the local news quite as deeply as normal. Other people at the office where as mystified as I first was when I showed them the pictures, everyone except my friend Mike, who said (without blinking or any apparent surprise that I had found and taken photos of a grave at work) “oh, is that from the plane crash?”. Some people are just too rational to be mystified these days….probably why fortune telling and rain making are on the decline.

Anyhow, so I have walked on a piece of local history…the very site of the Sonicblue crash. The case is before the courts at this time…apparently the airline had a very sketchy safety record. Check out this link for the full story (actually the only story I could find about it).
PLANE CRASH

So mystery solved. I, however, still have some questions. Is that actually a grave? Or is it simply a memorial? I may never know.

The Dog Days of Summer

It was the ancient Egyptians that coined the phrase “the dog days of summer”. They believed that the dog star Sirius was responsible for the hot weather in early July through August. I learned that little gem from “The Coffee News” at breakfast this morning.

Being a long weekend, I was planning on going camping. I took Friday off work because Kira is home, but goes back to work on Monday. A number of events transpired in that period between Thursday night and Sunday afternoon. Here’s a timeline of sorts:

1:00 am Friday morning – awoke to here animal on roof…presumed to be racoon but got up to investigate…turned out to be Sasha chasing racoon.

2:00am Friday morning…finally coaxed very large (and suddenly very scared of heights) dog back in through second story bedroom window.

6:00am…awakened by Kira who informed me that she could just not deal with large amounts of dog pooh sprayed on kitchen floors and walls.

7:15am…finished cleaning most foul mess.

2:50pm…Kira returns from vet to inform me dog seriously ill…required to collect stool sample before lab closes for holiday weekend.

3:20pm…jar full of poop…back to vet. (Parvo virus suspected)

I will break from the timeline format here, as I took off my watch for most of Saturday, but suffice to say our camping trip never got off the ground. Had to give Sasha re-hydration solution every 20 minutes with an oral syringe…also needed to get her back to the vet for a re-hydration IV pack.

Anyway…and fortunately…it turns out not to be the fatal Parvo virus, but instead an unknown illness. On the unfortunate side, the lab tests, the re-hydration IV’s, the antibiotics, the anti-nausea pills, and the weird injection of a drug for horses with colic (I actually had to sign a waiver stating I would not slaughter my horse for meat products???), and the very expensive gastro-food diet came to about $600…that’s more than I was planning on spending on my upcoming wedding.

So…like I said we were planning on camping, but the threat of Parvo made that impossible as we had to isolate Sasha from other dogs and keep here inactive (I also had to spray bleach on all her poops in the yard…an unpleasant task considering the volume and nature of recent movements). Instead…we decided to refinish the deck (a job just the night before I had decided that I was not going to get around to). So here’ a before shot. It’s usually not that barren, but I took all the stuff off to stain it, and also replaced some rotten boards. The plan was to stain it brown, but we ended up going with a more radical colour. Navajo Red…the official colour of Mexican colonial cites (ever been to seen Patzcuaro?). We just gave it one coat to give it that “we just didn’t paint our deck yesterday to impress you people” look, and also because it took all freakin day in the very hot sun (although the stain dried very well in the heat…on the brush if you weren’t quick enough). The upshot of Navajo red (admittedly a 70's trailer park colour) is that you can kill people on it and no one will notice (except those damn CSI's with their fancy blue light things).

Today, I finally got around to digging out a bed for the plants I took from my sister last weekend…I hand crumbled all my hardpan clay from the sod I dug…it took three hours to make that little bed...but good soil structure is important.

This last picture is of whats going on in the front yard. The Asiatic lilies and the Crocisimas are beginning to go off…it promises to look good.

5:00pm Sunday…Sasha takes her first drink from the toilet since Friday...hopefully a sign of recovery.