hydetimes

It is so warm these days, yesterday I saw +9 in the thermometer! We woke up this morning to +5!! We had about a foot of snow accumulate on top of our skating rink and we could get a round a bit… Temps went to just below zero, it was nice. The past few days has gotten so warm again, we don’t know what to do … If we plough we end up a skating rink again… If we leave it, we run the risk of it freezing all in ruts then will be impossible to drive on. We only have about 2.5 ft on the ground… Very low for February but it’s only because things have been melting so much. We actually don’t like this, too hard to keep things from getting slippery… We would like it if it hung around -5 to -15 so things stayed frozen…but that would be a perfect world and then what would keep us on our toes. In the long run… We haven’t used much wood, we only wear a hoodie to go outside and my office is always toasty warm so It’s all good. Hope everyone else is enjoying winter.

Stay tuned….

Tomorrow is the second anniversary of us adopting Lily, because we don’t know her actual birthdate, we call this her birthday… We think she is turning 7… Maybe 8. She had a bath today, nobody likes a stinky birthday girl! We are baking biscuits this afternoon and the pups will get an extra special dinner. Lily is the most loving kind dog we’ve ever known, we love her so much and are so happy she is part of the gang! Happy Brithday Lily!

A week ago I posted that I could see the nutcrackers whole hat, check him out today…The snow shrank about 6″ this week… And to see any of the lighthouse this time of year is unheard of! The creek is loud, sounds like April! Nice to have a mild winter.

We would like to send out a big huge thank you to Sandy Hucman and Terry Isaac for the wonderful wedding gift! Terry did this beautiful pencil sketch and Sandy had it beautifully framed… Thanks so much you 2… We are feelin pretty special! Having an original Terry Isaac has been a dream for both of us, we are overwhelmed! We have it hanging so it’s the first thing you see when you come into the house… We will cherish it always.

We have never seen the property like this! We had a few weeks of warm weather and rain and Everywhere that we have ploughed or shovelled turned into an ice rink. And I mean ice… Inches thick, clear just like an ice rink only slanted… Very challenging! The dogs couldn’t walk on it, they looked like Bambi on the frozen lake. Lily took a spill one day, she was a bit sore for a few days so we had to stop putting seed out so the squirrels stopped coming so she didn’t have anything to chase… Too dangerous. The dogs couldn’t go down the driveway, they just slide around… Kind of comical but at the same time we don’t need a injured pup so the walks and ball playing had to stop. The snow itself was way too soft to walk on as well so we were getting some restless puppies. We both have spikes for our boots and they were mandatory! Even with my spikes I’d have to go down the driveway and then back up to my office door, going straight across was not possible, I would start sliding sideways. So yesterday we woke up to about 4″ of snow on top of it and boy did that make it worse! With every step you had to try and get your spikes onto the ice otherwise you would slide for sure… It was still above zero so the snow would pack under your boot and it was treacherous to put it mildly. Barry went to town and drove the truck up before he went well I wish I had a video camera on him because the truck was sliding in slow motion all over and was pretty funny looking. Absolutely no traction! Luckily the highway was bare. We are hoping today is better, I miss my after work walks with the dogs… Stay tuned.

On his way home one night right before Christmas Barry came around a corner to find 2 big moose on the road in front of him. They both started moving off to the left so he slowed right down but wasn’t cranking on the brakes when at the last second … The big one… Decides to double back RIGHT in front of him! So now he has to stomp on the brakes and as the moose jumps over the snow bank on the side of the road he kicked the bumper of the truck… Phew! Left a dent in the bumper! Holy, that was a close call!!

Because there weren’t any photos to document this event, Barry recreated the scene on the brim of his hat with the miniature moose he got for Christmas.

More to come so stay tuned…

I finished another pet portrait, this is Katchoo.

I love the Barkerville photo so I wanted to still write this blog even though it’s January 24th. It was a really warm sunny beautiful day this year for Barkervilles Christmas. It was a pretty big deal, they had the Hanson Family singing (not the hockey players). A lot of shops were open, we got to see a lot of locals and Darren came out to spend the weekend with us so he came along too. We’ve seen a lot of Darren lately, it’s really nice!

We had a nice quiet Christmas this year as usual. We really missed Shooter opening gifts but we found that he has passed the tradition on to His sisters, they are both pretty good at it so we had a good time. I didn’t cook a turkey, I had some frozen from Thanksgiving so we had Turkey sandwiches for lunch and steak for dinner… It was delicious! Yum!

Darren came a spent New Years Eve with us so we had some fun but I was asleep before midnight.

More to come… Stay tuned

I sort of go thru writers block now and then, there is almost always something that I could be posting but periods of time will go by and I won’t write even one post… It’s not that I don’t want to, a lot of times I sit down to blog but get distracted easily or just cant come up with the words. I go thru times that I only want to be painting when I have a few minutes. Sometimes I wait until I can get a photo to go with my story and then more often than not, I end up not ever blogging about it, need to learn to just blog it without the photo. I hope I don’t loose too many of you during my blocked periods.

We are having a hard time calling it winter with such mild temperatures! We have about 2.5 feet on the ground, for long time followers…. I can see the nutcrackers whole hat. We usually have more like 5′ on the ground this time of year. It isn’t that we haven’t had the snow, it just melts fast because of the warm temps so we aren’t worried about the well level as a matter of fact yesterday it poured RAIN all day… Would have been a hell of a blizzard! We have used very little fire wood… Yay! One fire in the morning and one at night is all we need some days, we don’t need it to burn all day and night. Every year is so different from the others. Very interesting.

We would actually like it to be a bit colder so everything wasn’t dripping but at the same time it’s kinda nice to be wearing just hoodie in January. We’ve had 3 or 4 big dumps of snow and we have ploughed about 6 or 7 times already. Fun times!

Stay tuned…

Last month I was in Penticton when I got a call from Barry in a complete frantic state. He had lost Lily, it was cold out and night was coming soon… He was freakin out! He called Hildur to come help with her tracking dog, she came right away. He had been over to the studio and Barry was carrying something so he wasn’t paying attention to the dogs, when he got to the shop, only Mini was there… Where’s Lily? He had just got his fitbit and had it on so we know that he put on 18,000 steps frantically running around the property looking for her. Long story short, he went back to check the studio again and looked in all the rooms upstairs and found her in one that if you go in, the door will close behind…. Ugh! She needs to be more vocal! He had gone into the house over and over and called for her and she didn’t say anything. Since this incident, Lily has become a lap dog and nobody argues with her. We love our Lily!

We removed the 2 big trees in front of the house last summer and now winter is right at our doorstep. Those trees kept most of the snow away so now we have new challenges. Mini spends most of her day on the deck, keeping watch over the yard but with a larger snow bank in front of the deck, she can’t see anything so she gets up on the snow bank but that is super dangerous because the house now sheds the snow with the tin roof. Also this started happening…

So we built this and the problem has been solved… Mini loves it and spends all day on it, out of harms way. Lily is never away from Barry’s side so she was never a concern.

We are happier as well because we can see her from inside and know she is safe. She was pretty excited when she saw that she could see inside the house too! Very spoiled, yes!

Next summer Barry will build a pony wall so the snow doesn’t come onto the deck like this.

More to come so stay tuned…

Living here is so much fun, there is always a challenge presenting itself and it has become fun (doesn’t always feel fun at the time) trying to solve the problem. I have always thought of myself as a bit of a problem solver and it turns out Barry is one too so between the two of us we can sort anything out… So far.

When the studio died, our laundry facility died along with it… Big sad face!! Going to town to do laundry is just no fun at all so it had to be figured … This is what my smarty pants hubby came up with…

If you look back on this blog I talked about getting the laundry going and having a line outside for summer… Worked great, love it but we can’t use it in the winter so we brought the dryer over and hooked it up. Everything worked but it wouldn’t get hot… Barry tested every part and everything was working, he was stumped. One day when he lost Lily (a story for another day) Hildur brought her sniffer dog over to help look, found out we were having problems so later she sent her electrician over to take a look (she’s such a sweetie!) and it was the wiring that was not done correctly so once that was repaired, the dryer was working perfectly! Yahoo! All was going along nicely until it got cold… The water line froze! Crap! So we went out and purchased a big blue plastic barrel from the fireworks store and a cattle water heater from the co-op. We set it up outside my office and Barry shovels snow into it to melt then pumps the water into a tank inside that feeds the washer and presto… Landry facilities once again! Until spring that is when things thaw, no more snow and possibly cracked pipes but we will take it one problem at a time… For now we’re set up.

Lots more adventures ahead so stay tuned…

Eric, the owner of the Jack O Clubs General Store in Wells vowed to jump in the lake when he reached 650 “likes” on Facebook and he was true to his word. He scheduled it with the opening of the pub a few weeks ago during the day and had a big comedy show that night for the opening… Although we did not attend the pub opening we did enjoy watching Eric and his buddy take a dip. He also served free hamburgers and hot chocolate afterwards… Small town fun!

Meet Tim the Bread Peddler from Wells. He delivers bread to us every Wednesday morning and it is amazingly good bread! He built a special oven in his shop and cracks all his own grains… Super healthy and so delicious! The garlic olive is amazing with my butternut squash soup!! And delivered!! Wow, do we feel special!

Check out his web site… http://thebreadpeddler.ca/

We just found out today that our friend Corinne from the Mason and Daly in Barkerville has passed away. This makes us very sad, we really liked her and always took the time to stop by and say hello to her when we were there.

We will miss you Corinne.

The lean to next to the shop was in pretty bad shape. The posts were mostly Balsa wood and had totally rotted. Barry had added a few supports last winter just to get us thru. A few of the rafters had cracked under the weight of the snow over the years as well. Barry replaced all the posts and added extras. He reinforced all the rafters that were weakened. He cleared out and took 2 truck loads of junk that had been left and made room for everything to be undercover this year. His jeep is in front of my truck which hangs out about 2’… Next year he might remove some shelves so we can pull forward a bit more. Barry’s truck is right inside the shop this year and can be pulled out if he needs to run the table saw or build something (would be rather rare occasion since it would take a lot to heat). We have to do some walking to get and park the truck but we are okay with that. Eventually we will build a garage in our upper parking lot but for now we think this will work out.

I had to post this short sequence, my husband cracks me up! Everything is an opportunity to have a little bit of fun!

So the snow I reported about a few weeks back only lasted a few days and melted off. We went back into warm days and temps above zero overnight. We were able to get a few more jobs done in the warmth but today things changed, we are into winter temps. -8 when we woke up, it’s beautiful and sunny with a skiff of snow on the ground.

Modern technology sometimes gives us Too Much Information and I experienced it yesterday. Barry was flying home from Naniamo, he had a short layover in Vancouver. His first flight was delayed a half hour and then the second flight was delayed 25 minutes so he was behind but it all was clicking so no worries… until they got to Prince George…

He was supposed to land in PG 1:07pm. With the delay he should have been there about 1:40. He always calls when he lands and at 2:00 I realized he hadn’t called yet so I googled his flight number and wow, look at what I got!!

This was the first screen I found, telling the flight was late (this screen shot was not the first one I got, originally it said the flight was delayed 50 minutes)

This was nice to see, good information. When I clicked on the map I got this info…

Again, this was good, then I clicked on “track this flight in real time”. This is what I got…

You can clearly see they had gone up to Salmon Valley and were circling. This concerned me a little but I didn’t think tOo much about it and went back to work. About 20 minutes later I refreshed the page and they had gone back to PG and then back up to Salmon Valley and were circling again, I started to get concerned so I clicked on “see position details”. This is when it really got scary! This table has their positioning every minute of the entire flight … Here is their take off out of Vancouver…

You can see them ascending and they get up to 24,000 ft and stay there until they arrive in the PG area, then it got crazy. I didn’t get a screen shot of their first approach but you could clearly see they had tried to land and got only 400 ft off the ground and had to pull back up, back to salmon Valley in a holding pattern again… Why??? I started to get nervous and couldn’t stop watching and refreshing these pages watching as they circled and circled and my imagination started to go wild… Is their landing gear? Is there a problem on the ground? What is going on? I went back to work again and after another 15 or 20 minutes I went back and I could see they had tried to land again… You can see it on this portion of the chart.

You can see they dipped down to 2800 ft and then went back up to a holding pattern. Well now I’m really freakin out and actually scared! Texting with Dallas and she is trying to keep my mind off it and telling me he’s fine… I went back to work again to keep my mind off it… Finally the phone rang and it was him, I almost cried. He had a nervous laugh that told me he had been more that a little concerned. His biggest fear was they were talking about landing in Ft St John… Their fuel had to be getting low, the flight was originally only an hour.

The best they could describe it was a combination of the river and pulp mill (when they flew into this very low fog it strongly smelled like pulp in the plane) and the weather conditions that this very thick fog was sitting over the airport and they were hoping for it to lift. The flight was an hour but they were in a holding pattern for 105 minutes.

So … Although this is a really cool tool to find and we will track other flights in the future… I need to be careful, knowing only half the story was not a good thing… Nowhere on the site did it say why they were not landing. I was freaked out!

He is home safe and sound …

Mini…
Our little girl is becoming a very nice (albeit extremely spoiled) young lady. She has lost her spastic puppy outbursts. She is wanting to snuggle more and I could not be happier! One new thing is she loves to be wrapped in a towel when she comes in wet and it is so cute! She spends more time on our laps when we sit in my chair … She lays on our chest and wraps her arms around our necks… So cute! She is starting to like being brushed too! I started brushing her right when we got her but it’s been a struggle for almost 3 years! Now she let’s me brush as long as I want or until I pull too hard and she gets mad, then she leaves. She is extremely entertaining and such a little character, we couldn’t love her more.

Lily…
Continues to be the sweetest dog with the most love to give than any other dog either of us have ever known. We managed to break her from jumping up on us, yay! Teaching her to speak has been a fun but challenging process. The only reason why we wanted her to learn “speak” is Shooter was very noisy at dinner time, barking with excitement as Barry prepared their meals, when he was gone, it was so quiet it would break our hearts so we tried to get the other dogs to make some noise. Mini was pretty easy, she was all for yelling. Lily however would not speak. It took months of coaxing before she would bark freely but this week she has gotten into it and yells for her dinner. She is absolutely crazy for the tennis ball and loves a good run. Barry throws a regular ball for Lily and a miniature tennis ball for Mini and they all play catch together, very cute! Lily continues to be 100% devoted to Barry and follows his every movement closely. When Barry is away, they are both miserable, they lay in the window and mope.

Both dogs are loving their new door. It took a few days for them to understand the full scope of the doggie door but now they are pros and could not be happier. Mini especially, she loves to have some independence and the door gives her a lot of that.

They are such good buddies too, they are very cute together. Mini rules the roost but Lily is getting braver pushes her way in when it’s important to her.

We almost adopted this little guy but decided to wait. So cute!

It snowed all day, the ground is too warm for it to stick but it sure is trying! We had a super lazy movie day to celebrate.

First snow means Bon fire season! Always fun! Stay tuned…

We are supposed to get some snow this weekend. The air has changed in the past couple of days, only about 5 as a high and it’s right around zero in the mornings. As I sit with my morning tea the flakes have started to fall… I’m ready and excited about the snow… Barry says it’s too early. We are certainly prepared so I say… Bring it on!

Recently we have been getting visits from Arthur who was close friends with Jason. He drops in when he is in the neighbourhood. The day we came back from Costco, he and his wife Shastah were at our creek getting water so they came up to visit for a bit when they were done. (A lot of people stop and fill their water jugs at our creek). We had never met Shastah before so we were glad they stopped in. She hadn’t been in the house since before Jason passed so she really saw some changes. Since that visit Arthur has sent us these photos of Jason. The one over looking Prince George was taken a few years before he passed and the other was when he was pouring the footings for our house. Thanks Arthur!

The other day a man came walking up the driveway to use our phone, he had broken down out front. He is from Williams Lake and it was a company vehicle, Xplornet, so he made a few calls, chatted with Barry until the tow truck arrived and off he went after thanking the dogs for barking because he never would have known to come up here. This was the 4 th person to break down right in front of our house… What are the odds of this happening? The highway is 75 km long and the next possible place to get help to the east is about 20 km and to the west, 8 km. How is it that these travellers all broke down right here? A question that will never be answered but makes ya think.

Woke up to snow on the ground, might be a warning shot, stay tuned…