Fraser River Tides

In our nightly dog walks along the dyke that separates Richmond from the flooding by the Fraser River, we've noted a particular marker that helps us figure out just how low or high the tide is. Here's High tide, looking vaguely northwest from a particular point on the dyke:

And here is a photo taken from nearby, but looking northeast at a low tide:

That stump goes from almost submerged to full exposed, and if you look closely you can see the water's edge way out beyond.

This is a closeup of that stump:

I think it's somewhere between 4 and 6 feet tall (I haven't clambered down there to get a better estimate) and as you can see the tide goes well out beyond it at times. A particular tide tracking website tells me that the maximum tidal swing here is 5.06 meters (or 16.6 feet), and it's pretty impressive. Those photos are not taken at those absolute maximum swings, though, just a couple of times when we've noted it's been particularly high and low.

When the big one hits at high tide, Much of Richmond will have a foot or two of water in their homes, including the house we are renting. That's assuming the ground doesn't liquefy and all the houses come down, which is what I actually expect to happen.

Back to school

Today is Labour (Labor) Day, in celebration of which I do not labo(u)r.

Tomorrow is the first day of school. Tomorrow, I labo(u)r. Possibly a lot. Tomorrow, I begin a new chapter in life, and start to figure out what some of the decisions we made over the last six months really mean.

For the curious, I am taking five classes this semester:

• Ceramics Studio
• Design Studio
• Drawing Studio
• Painting Studio
• Visual Culture I

The first four are art classes. Each meets once a week for four hours, and I am told to expect four hours of homework from each per week (which will have to be done in the studio rooms themselves in most cases) except for ceramics, where I should expect eight hours of homework per week, all in the studio.

The last class is from the Art History department. I chose it as this sequence (Visual Culture I & II) looks more interesting to me than the traditional, chronological art history presentation, but I could be wrong. Additionally, the class has a new instructor, just hired into Langara College. It will - no doubt - involve extensive reading and writing papers, and thus add to the homework commitment.

It is my goal to post about art here, as well as other aspects of life. As I have previously mentioned, though, I don't yet know how much time I will have for anything other than course work, so time will tell. Please be patient as I adjust to the new schedule and get my life in order, again.

Thanks all!

More power isn't always better

Maybe it's an American thing, that belief that more power is always better. The big engine, the big car, and so on. Today I have a story where (so far at least) the opposite is true.

At our old home in the Santa Cruz Mountains, we had 2.5 acres of land, on a slight slope. We had redwood trees, what remained of an old pear orchard, and a lot of very tall weeds that needed to be mowed several times during the season to keep the fire danger down. Then the rains arrived and you didn't mow until it started to dry out because your mower would get stuck or slide on the hillside.

To do that work I used a walk behind, high weed mower from one of the big manufacturers of such things. (DR, in my case, but there are others.) It had a 17 HP motor and a 30" blade. It had four speeds powered going forward, one in reverse, and weighed something like 400 pounds. Steering it was real work. I also used a heavy duty, gas powered string trimmer made by Stihl.

Mowing took 12 - 16 hours spread over 2 or 3 days, and left me dehydrated, with leg cramps, blisters, and callouses.

Then we moved away from all of that. And oddly I am mowing the yard in our rental. Doing so got me a small reduction in the rent and the landlord bought me a mower and string trimmer to do the work. The lot is large by suburban standards, perhaps 20,000 square feet, or nearly half an acre.

On arriving, the house had not been maintained for months. The grass was two feet long, dried out, and matted down.

Based on the agreement with the landlord, I bought a $300 gas mower and a cheap string trimmer that is either battery or extension cord powered. Both are laughable in comparison to the gear I used in California.

And yet...

Despite worries from the landlord about how large the lot is and the work involved, once the initial overgrowth was mowed down, mowing this place is trivial. I can mow and trim the whole thing in two hours or so.

It turns out that the cheap gear is just fine for this job. It uses a lot less gas, and is easy to steer and move. (The mower doesn't even have powered wheels... it's up to me to make it go.)

Fascinatingly, I am told the previous owner of the house had a riding mower (amusingly called a "sit mower" by some up here). I didn't even have a riding mower in California, as I didn't trust such a thing on the sloped ground. But I am certain that a riding mower is totally unneeded for this lot. Compared with what I am used to, this is an easy lot to maintain.

I admit that first mow - trying to cut the grossly overgrown grass - took a long time, and required hours of effort. But now the job is easy.

And I find it interesting that in this case, less power is just fine. Not a very American point of view, I fear.

Random Canadian Obervations

Just Trudeau tweets in both French and English. Should be obvious, but still made me say "huh... that's kind of cool." Imagine if Donald Trump was able to tweet in two languages. Actually, forget that. Imagine instead that he was actually fluent in English. How different things would be.

Tortillas in Canada. Yes, they exist, but note the manufacturer:

I have to admit I laughed out loud when I found these in Costco.

Speaking of Costco, you know how the items they carry are different from store to store down in the US? Well, it gets worse up here, because there are products that are US only or Canada only items. Years ago they stopped carrying Turkish apricots in the US, switching to California apricots (which are not as good in my opinion) and (for a while) some awful organic things that tasted like bland cardboard soaked in bit of corn syrup. Well, those Turkish apricots are available up here. For me that is just about reason enough to remain a Costco member all by itself.

Also, alcohol is expensive. We're trying BC wines out of curiosity. So far they are drinkable, but a bit sweeter than CA wines. The red varieties I see most are Merlot, Malbec, Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, plus blends of those. On the white side I see Pinot Grigio, Chardonnay, and a couple of others. Thus far the most impressive bottle we've had (and all the ones we've tried have been comparatively inexpensive) is the Naked Grape Pino Grigio. It's quite good. Not too sweet, with some citrus notes in it. Most of the local bottle shops, however, have fairly poor selections as a rule, and we'll have to go a bit farther away to find more choices. The Wikipedia article on BC wine indicates there are more varietals grown up here, but I haven't seen them yet.

People are pretty much unfailingly polite, unless they are driving. A small but significant percentage of drivers are rude, aggressive, horn honking, elegant gesture making, um... individuals. Not sure why that is, but it is a thing. In person, though, apologizing really is as common as the stereotype would indicate - much more so than in the US - and it's a way of greasing the skids, of making society work more smoothly. Apologize early and often - and be certain to politely acknowledge apologies! - and you'll blend in a bit better. (Being American means I will never completely blend in, but I try.)

Some things are expensive. Car insurance is something like four times what we paid in the US. Renters insurance is also costly. Maybe our rates will go down once we've been in country and insured for a year or two, but I have my doubts. Gas is also really expensive. Blueberries, though, are pretty cheap at the farm stands. Still trying to figure out electricity and natural gas. The weather has been so warm that we haven't needed much of either yet. Come January, that will have changed, and we'll see what the bills look like.

The overall pace of life is a bit slower here. Admittedly I am used to Silicon Valley - where things are rather intense - so perhaps most places would feel slower, but it is notable. It's not quite all the way to island time, as on Hawaii, but it is still significant. I am told that Vancouver Island - home of Victoria, the capitol of BC - runs on island time. Eventually I will confirm that one way or another.

Video availability on the internet is highly variable. Some things I used to watch simply aren't available. John Oliver is mostly not accessible. Rachel Maddow's stuff on YouTube is available, but the free segments from her show on the MSNBC website are not. (And don't ask me how to get paid content. Last time I looked into that, MSNBC wanted to know which cable service we subscribed to. Being cord cutters, we had none, and the same is the case here. So I guess we're out of luck on that front.) But some of these limitations are odd. Why isn't the stuff that John Oliver puts up on YouTube available world wide? No clue. Seems like they are unnecessarily reducing their available audience, but maybe there are considerations I don't understand.

Speaking of TV, so far it appears the city of Richmond mostly shuts down on Sunday evenings for Game of Thrones. Without a cable subscription, we don't watch it (and I began loathing the books somewhere along about volume 4 or 5) but we can see the park is mostly empty on Sunday nights when I think it is on. We walk the dogs every night, so the difference is pretty obvious.

Canadians pay for most everything with plastic. Credit or debit, makes no difference. Some, apparently, never carry cash at all. And they use a tap & go (NFC) system for smaller payments that doesn't require any ID confirmation. Above a certain amount, though, you have to enter a PIN. We had the tap & go system in the US briefly. I think it was called something like "pay wave" but it never caught on, and as far as I know it disappeared from all our cards after a brief time.

And of course the US never went to chip & PIN on credit cards, opting for chip & signature instead, which is dumb. Chip & PIN is much more secure, but apparently the CC companies in America thing Americans are too stupid to adapt to that. Alas, the current occupant of the white house makes me think the CC companies might be right about that.

I'll probably have more observations like this over time, but school will overwhelm me starting in about two weeks, and I hope blog posts start being about art more often once that happens.

The Eagle Has Landed

Short post today.

We've arrived at our rental home in Richmond, BC. It's still here, exactly as we left it a month ago.

The dogs are exhausted and clingy, but they seem to be realizing ("realising" in Canadian English) that we're staying here for a while. At the moment they are all stretched out on the floor around Anne as she talks with her mom. We went for a long walk this morning and that combined with the stress and the complete lack of desire to eat anything other than junk food (which always happens on long car trips) makes for tired puppies.

Today we build a list of things to do while Anne organizes ("organises") the kitchen. There is a bit of shopping to do, and I get to start mowing the jungle (formerly a yard, before it was left unmowed for months). That will take me several days, I am sure.

The moving truck doesn't get here for a week or more. When it left our place in the Santa Cruz Mountains it was heading to LA, and then to Calgary. It will arrive when it arrives. We're fine.

Not much else to report for now. More in a few days when I have started to catch up.

When Moving Preparation Goes Wrong

So, you know how you're trying to plan way ahead of things when you're moving? Everyone does that, right?

Because you're doing that, a few days in advance of moving you call your Internet and phone provider (who shall remain anonymous, but whose name might partially sound like something you do when you're fishing) and setup a disconnect of your service the day after you need it. After all, you're going to be in crazy mode for a few days in a row, and the internet and a phone will help deal with surprises and thus keep you sane, right?

Your service rep is very nice and sets it all up just fine. Disconnect is set for Friday, since the moving truck takes all your stuff on Thursday. The call goes so well - almost no time on hold even - that you are lulled into a false sense of security.

So Tuesday arrives, and at about 12:30 pm, just like you didn't schedule it, your internet and phone go away. Poof.

So you call your COMunications (and fishing related) service provider and get into their automated system, which helpfully sends a reset command to your equipment and tells you to wait ten minutes to see if that worked.

But you're smarter than that, so you push deeper into the phone tree saying "Representative!" until you are hoarse and eventually (after three hours and a light snack) get to a "Live Body" (tm) who might be able to look at your account and figure out why it's stopped working three days early.

The "Live Body" (tm) eventually isn't sure but it was probably someone who didn't read the date right on the disconnect request and just did it. They are escalating to the service rep that setup the disconnect and that person's boss...

[[Here we have to make a slight digression...]]

You know how calls like this go. They always take longer than you expect, and you might as well sit down while it is going on.

And (at least in our case, though possibly not yours) the cellular phone service at your home isn't exactly stellar, so you need to step outside to make this call, where the walls and some air won't interfere with the tenuous cell reception you get from an antenna powered by three geriatric squirrels running in wheels in a cage some 18 miles to the east.

So you're standing outside and as realize you should sit down for this conversation. Happily, you have a deck and some chairs and even a table you might put your feet up on while you wait through this.

[[Here we return you to the original narrative, but you have no idea where this is going.]]

So you pull out a chair, sit down, and just as the "Live Body" (tm) is starting to explain that he's escalating this ticket to someone, your left elbow hurts. A lot. And then your right elbow. And then you realize that there are rather a lot of flying, stinging things around you. Quite a lot of them, in fact.

You leap up - as one does - saying a lot of four letter words - as one does - that almost certainly surprise the snot out of the "Live Body" (tm) - as they can - and eventually get far enough away to be sure that you're not being chased by a horde of angry, stinging things. But what things?

Wasps, as it turns out.

Once you finish the call from a safe distance, and are assured the internet and phone will be restored within one - two at the outside - hours, and drive to the local store to purchase the needed "Horrific Chemicals" (tm), use them, and retreat again for a while, you eventually turn the table over and find this:

Yes, that's the "Trump Nest" (tm) , created sometime in the last three or four weeks by a group of rather unpleasant freeloaders living on your property without paying rent. And stinging you for disturbing them besides.

Anyway, that evening, when the stinging nasties that weren't in the nest when you nuked it from space are trying to figure out what to do with rest of their lives - ideally somewhere in Siberia - you scrap that nest off the underside of the table, hose off all the "Horrific Chemical" (tm) residue, and set about dealing with all the stuff that you put off while:

• Dealing with an Internet outage
• Being stung by insects that don't care about your Internet outage
• Exclaiming in pain/fear/frustration in the ear of the "Live Body" (tm) trying to fix the Internet outage
• Running from said stinging insects whilst teaching the "Live Body" (tm) some exiting new words
• Figuring out what sort of medical treatment you have for stings, since everything is already packed
• Mentally recovering from the stress induced by these two, entirely separate - but now horribly related - events

I'm sure something just like this happened the last time you were prepping to move. Right?

Oh, and it took 1.5 hours and another email - sent over those tenuous cellular radio waves - to get the Internet back.

Snow, Snow, Snow...

Four inches at least here in the Chicago suburbs.  Streets are a mess, still, and though the forecast said it was going to be only sporadic snow today, it's basically been continuous.  Yet another example of the inability of anyone to predict the weather with any accuracy.

I hope whatever you're doing for the holidays you're comfortable and happy.  Cheers!

Happy Holidays, Everyone!

For those who don't know, I'm traveling this holiday season and thus not spending much time on the computer.

I wish you all the best, and I'll be back here with new posts in early January.

Take care!

Well, That Was a Week of Work

Finally finished setting up my book review blog.  All the ancient posts are there, they've been spell checked, re-read, some tweaked, some commented upon, and the infrastructure in blogger worked to my satisfaction.

At this point all I need are a few hundred thousand readers. 

More to the point (for this blog, anyway) is that I have more time for other things now.  Tomorrow I direct at a fencing tournament.  Next week I will bathe dogs, something they will hate with a passion.  And I can read again, instead of just working on creating a place to write about what I read.

Changing topics, next week will be the first time I see my former co-workers since I was let go.  I'm already wondering how that will make me feel.  I've got a certain amount of guilt about the entire situation there.  I hope no one is holding anything against me.

Several Posts Coming Today...

Thanks to various events I have several things to write about. Each is going to go into its own separate post, so be prepared to read a few things over the next few hours. And thank you for doing so!

Strange Silence

Yes, it's been 12 days since my last post here. Or something like that.

You'd think - with the inauguration and all - I'd have something interesting to say. Not really, and that's why I haven't written.

In all honestly, I was happy to see our new president take office. So far he's kept to the script as I envisioned he would, and I agree with the things he's done, at least to the extent that I understand them. But he's still human, as is his staff, and the mistakes and issues will inevitably come.

And that's where I peter out. Happy, but wary. Not much there.

I could write about my own life, right? After all that's not getting any simpler. There's a new printer sitting on the table behind me that hasn't been setup in the week since it arrived. There's the DMV testing I need to finish to finalize the drivers license that will let me drive fire engines. There's work, which brings with it a whole slew of things I need to do and understand. And there are friends and commitments that I need to keep up with. There are dogs to pet, sculptures to carve, and so on.

Mostly, though, it's overwhelming and I'm tired. That's not where I want to be, and it makes for lousy blog entries.

Slowly, however, I can see things changing. I'm actually less exhausted now than I was a month ago. The schedule that came with going back to work is getting a bit easier, and I've ordered a new computer that will make it simpler to work from home a bit, letting me dodge the worst of rush hour, at least.

But that's all pretty mundane stuff. As you can see, I haven't got anything of substance driving this post. Mostly I'm just writing so my readers - and there are a couple of you out there - know that I am still here. Oh, and Paul, I really will write that next update on the water system one of these days.

Where does all the time go?

You cannot imagine how much time disappears down the rat hole that is page formatting for web browsers. And I have this fundamental issue - I dislike using PDF to format pages.

Yes, I understand that I could get perfect layout using PDFs, but I want my pages to load quickly. PDF files are huge, load slowly, and every browser I use asks before downloading them. Sometimes they don't even display within the browser window.

And beyond that, I don't really like style sheets. I've seen way too many sites that setup some area for text to appear in, but the text doesn't fit in that area, so it runs over onto something else (usually other text, rendering both illegible) or it disappears under something else. Not good.

Nope. I use tables. Everyone hates them but me, I know, but even that may be changing.

Right now I'm chasing down a table formatting issue that I don't understand. Tell the row that it's a certain height. Tell the cells they are the same height. Tell the image tag the image is the same height, and yet the row is still taller than the image, and nothing I can find fixes that. At this point I don't even know if it's Firefox that is causing it, some subtle bug in my HTML, or something else. I'm down to asking people with other browsers to send me screen shots of the page so I can figure it out.

I think I need to do something else for a while.

Today I'm avoiding wor... er... the heat

It's 93 degrees at my house in the shade right now. I should be out carving stone, but I just can't bring myself to go do that. I'd just be a pool of goo on the driveway long before i was done.

But such is life. Instead I am hiding in the relatively cool house, trying to stay cool with the dogs, while the day passes by. It's supposed to be much cooler tomorrow, so perhaps I'll be working on a stone then.

For those of you looking to kill some time, I can recommend this blog:

http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/

There are some very funny things here, and clearly the world is full of people who should not be allowed to bake cakes.

Busy busy busy...

Sorry for the lack of updates, but I've been stuck doing many things, few of them relating to things will appear here.

However, I intend to spend some hours today working on a new stone for the show in September, and I've been preparing new information for my website about that show. That's all good.

Oh, on the downside, still no news on the water test samples I sent out 1.5 weeks ago. Whenever I hear about that you'll know it here.

So, stop reading this and go do something productive. I am.

No lightning, we hope...

The chance of lightning tonight and this weekend seems to have gone north of us, and for the moment I am breathing a sigh of relief. Today's smoky haze was enough to drive everyone nuts, but it cleared slightly this afternoon. Not entirely, mind you, but slightly.

I'm not sure what else to write about tonight. I've been tired for several days now and can't seem to shake it off, but I have no idea why that would be. Given the comments at the gym this morning, though, it appears I am not the only one suffering. Perhaps the smoke is responsible for my lethargy.

Anyway, I hope to do some serious carving this weekend. I've got a big piece of pumice out on the driveway that needs to get finished up soon. If I get somewhere with it I'll try to get a picture put up here.

Wind, Wind, Go Away...

For those of you living in Northern CA, things are pretty ugly right now. We have a large batch of wild fires burning from Monterey all the way up through Sacramento. And we have wind to drive them along with tinder dry brush and trees to burn thanks to an extremely dry spring.

Last night I slept only in fits because the wind was blowing so steadily. I expected my pager to go off for a tree down, wires down, or a fire. The recent Summit Fire was wind driven and it's left me wondering just what we're going to be dealing with this Summer.

In the end we got through the night without incident, and things are calmer now, but we still have some wind. And according to the NOAA weather site it's predicted to continue through Thursday evening. That's a very long time from now.

In addition, I've learned that Doug's home is threatened by a flood, so now I have to worry about him too.. I hope he has a home to go back to when his current trip ends.

The Overhead of Life

I have to credit my friend and former co-worker Jesse Mundis with the phrase "the overhead of life". Of course he may not have originated it, but I think I heard it from him, and it turns out to be useful. That's probably because I spend a lot of time dealing with the overhead of life now, and wondering how I ever managed to get anything done before I stopped working full time.

What is the overhead of life? Well, it's the stuff you have to do to get to the stuff you want to do. Laundry. Washing dishes. For some, cooking. Cleaning. Paying and mailing bills. Going to the grocery store. You get the idea. None of it is very exciting, but if it doesn't get done other things grind to a halt.

For me, today's big time sink was mowing a part of the lot to get our 100' clearance on that side of the house. I mowed the entire thing weeks ago, but - of course - all the weeds came back. The problem is that when they did grow back I was in the thick of other work and didn't have time to get after them again right away. But today, at least, I did get a chunk of that issue handled. More will probably happen over the next few days as well. Thus, the overhead of life sucks time away from other endeavours.

Despite that, I did manage to publish some more of my VFD related articles. I keep them online over here if you're interested. I was a few months behind in getting them uploaded, but with a new article for the local news magazine about the Summit Fire, I figured I'd better get caught up.

I've got 4 books stacked up too, waiting to get reviewed, and those reviews need to be posted both on my site and on Doug's site too.

I have a web page to create about the sculpture I repaired. I have all the pictures except the last one of the piece in it's home, but the rest isn't started yet.

And I've got a commission of sorts that I need to work on for an outdoor sculpture. That's on a tight deadline and I need to get moving. I spent time yesterday getting the stone to have a base and sit upright, which is good. Then this morning I had an "ah-hah!" moment about what the piece may look like, but I haven't yet managed to get back out to the driveway to work on it. My thermometer says it's 93 degrees outside, so I'm lying low after mowing and trying to get other things done while staying cool.

Hopefully you'll find links to all these good things around the site in time, and maybe a few other interesting things as well.

I hope the overhead of life doesn't get in your way too much. Go out and get something useful - or fun - done!

Why "The Powell Triangle"?

Someone at my last job - with Concentric - is responsible for the name of this blog. Or at least, they made the name up in response to something I am still capable of, and I've kept it around.

I have a knack for causing things of just about any sort to fail in mysterious and unreproducable ways. At work this would generally happen when I was using some bit of software that was working perfectly for everyone else. I'd do something perfectly normal and not at all dangerous but which would result in something going gloriously wrong.

With the evidence sitting on my screen I would go find whoever was responsible for the software in question and show them the mess. Almost without exception I'd hear words like: "I've never seen that before" or "No one's ever made it do that." Whoever it was would stand there gawking for a minute or two longer and then ask me to reproduce it while they watched.

And here it gets interesting. Some large percentage of the time, whatever happened would not happen again when the individual who could fix - or at least understand - it was present. If they wandered off, I'd often be able to recreate the issue on my own, but not while they were looking over my shoulder. Personally, I think the universe has a sick sense of humor.

In any event, my ability to break software that was tested and working through normal use was well enough known that someone - probably my boss, David - decided that I was the center of the "Powell Triangle" - a place where things that otherwise worked normally would fail unexpectedly. Somewhat akin to ships and planes mysteriously vanishing in a similarly named chunk of ocean.

It's a good name, so I've used it here. It may be me that founders upon my own words, or it may be the reader, cursing me in the process, but I hope it's interesting and occasionally amusing.

But now, I have a lot of Saturday chores to get to. sigh. I'll post again on Sunday or Monday.

Long day

Just a brief post tonight. It was a very busy day on many levels. This morning at 1am the pager went off for a fire and Loma Prieta's water tender was requested. I got to the station and was on the rig. We headed out and almost got to 17 before we were cancelled. Thus, I spent from 1am - 2am not sleeping, and that has made today that much more interesting. The morning was spent on "the overhead of life" and the afternoon was spent on repairing a sculpture, which I needed to get to. Then it was off to teach stone carving class. I'm exhausted.

The big news on the Summit Fire today is 100% containment has been achieved, and everyone who was evacuated has now been allowed back into their homes. That's a big milestone.

Perhaps tomorrow I will post a photo I took on my Sunday evening water tender shift, but I'm too tired (and it's too late) to do that tonight.

Welcome to the new blog!

Well, I have now created this blog and posted the information from my massive Summit Fire Update emails that have been sent out over the last three days. I expect people to comment on these, either in the blog itself, via email, or via my contact form. However you chose to do it, please let me know what you think.

Oh, and I am well aware that there is a lot for me still to do to make this blog more complete and fit in better with my existing website. I'll get there someday.

Thanks for reading and I hope to hear from you soon!