Home on the Hill

It snowed a bit last night. When I was backing up the trailor to unload the new Iron Remover I ran over a bog that I had inadvertantly made myself. Last summer we graveled part of the road to the house and installed a culvert to drain a wet spot on one side of the road. Unfortunatly I didn't put a culvert on the south side to drain the water away and lo and behold made a beautiful truck trap. Tried the waiting till it freezes trick, but it just didn't get cold enough. So, some shovel work, gravel and a couple of boards ( and some swearing ) later and I got out. Now have plans to put in a culvert and make a new gravel road to the basement ( South ) side of the house. Continuing the packaging rant. And thanks for the suggestions, keep 'em comeing. Here's one I like and tried the other day. When purchasing something like a mouse just take it out of the packaging and leave all the packaging crap at the store. It's not reducing the amount of crap but it gets the message ...

OK rant starts here. I have been doing some thinking lately about sustainable living and how that fits into my life personally and dare I say it - globaly. The straw that broke the proverbial camels back of my personal indifference, although it was probably more like powerlessness. Or perhaps procrastination coupled with lazyness. Anyway here's the packaging from a mouse we bought the other day: And this is what came in the package. The goods. What is the point of so much packaging Who decided that this is a good idea How much of this crap ends up in landfills Why should I care What am I willing to do about it I am spending some time thinking about these questions. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. More ranting to follow. In a loving non-threatening way of course..

We stopped by a friend of mine's today and during our socializing I mentioned that I had always wanted to get an original Cowichan wool sweater. Especially now that the Chinese have started mass producing look a likes. So my friend reached into his closet and came out with a wool sweater that his Mom had knitted for him but it was too big for him and she had made him another one. He selected the loon pattern. He gave it to me and said he was glad it was going to a good home. Which it its. It is something that I will treasure. I wore it home and used it when I went out to do the chucks. And measure the new tire garden. There was a bitter North Easter blowing and I was warm as toast. With my Elmer Fudd hat pulled over my ears. Even the Mizzes , who has glycol for blood put on a pair of wool gloves for the yard expedition. I am starting to get the stuff, sawdust, pex conduit and another 150 tires together for the new expanded "retired" garden on the West side of the house.

Winter that is. I got back from the Coast yesterday after a run that started at 3 am. It was the quickest run yet. No traffic in the Fraser Canyon so that part went fast. Leaving at that time of the morning I was able to get home by 1:30 pm. I was glad to have my road lights installed as there was plenty of deer on the side hills as I went by. Wreckage. I think that the major snow falls are over. Now that its melted it shows where all the crap was that was buried in the snow. Or knocked over by the snow plowing guy. Me. The gravel we put down last summer made a huge difference in the Road. And where we didn't put it, like around the house, it's still a sea of mud. Not much I can do with that before we do the foundation around the house. Then I can dig out the yard add drain rock and build a proper road around the place. One of the problems is that I have natural springs all over the place and one is right in the middle of the front yard. Or backyard - depending on whose telling...

It didn't take to long, like zero minutes before Xena and her friend Ewe were renewing their friendship. I think they both missed going outdoors when ever they wanted. Ewe has been in and out like a YoYo since we got home. I was pleasantly surprised to see the road and the ditch clear and hard. That is untill we got near the house. We never put any gravel on that part of the place last year and now I remember why I had wanted to. I don't want to put any down around the house untill I dig it up to waterproof the basement. We got home to free range chickens. They had managed to work a pop hole loose and were merrily cleaning up the new grass that is starting to show where the snow has melted. And it is melting, slowely. It's -7c today, that's around 20 I beleive for those of you South of the Border. And snowing lightly. I noticed the tops of the tire garden showing through the snow. I will have to take a tromp out to them to see what the temperature is getting t...

Living in the City can wear a girl out. All that shopping and making buying decisions can be just plain exhausting. Time for a little nap and think about tomorrows adventures. And what treasures we found today. In the "English Foods" department of a local safeway store we found this. Mushy Peas. One of my favorites. I am not sure why the English would make this stuff just for bachelors but I guess the old adage about bachelors eating out of cans could apply. We also found this. Spotted Dick. Not sure what it is. Or what it tastes like. So far I haven't got any takers. But every one around here, except me and Xena are on the healthy diet and excercise plan and eshew any desserts with sugar in them. Off to visit some customers today and then probably tomorrow or so hooking up the trailor, a half ton of rocks and taking highway 97 back to Endako. Seems like we've been gone forever and I am sure it's not just Xena who is missing here Buddy, Ewe.

One of the things I like to do when I am at the Coast is go to the T & T market . T & T is a huge oriental food store. Like a Hong Kong Safeway. My daughter Sara and I went there yesterday after her work to get some inspiration for supper. As we were checking out I noticed this gotta have impulse buy: We haven't found a volunteer tester yet. Don't know what the problem is. Maybe the mouth watering? Certainly not the kissing. Brown rice and stirfried Shitakes , red pepper, snow peas, onions and water chestnuts. Our secret ingredient was peanut butter powder. Its dehydrated peanuts with the fat taken out. Wonderful. Of course none of this stuff made the 100 Mile Diet list.

But it's Close. I am now the proud parent of terrabytes. Is that something that eats the earth. Well no. It's a thousand gigabytes and I now have four of them in our new computer. Well two terrabytes inside and two in an external NAS storage. We were due for a new machine and we took advantage of a trip to the Coast to build one form parts. More power - less cost. Could never imagine that I would need or could use 4T of storage. When I started out mainframes didn't have that much storage. The first computer I bought I had a big dilema over getting a 50 gig or 100 gig hardrive. I opted for the 50 gig as it was feared that the 100 gig unit would lead to sloppy computing. BTW my pinky finger is sticking through the port for the glycol cooling hose. Can you imagine, a computer with a radiator! We haven't been at the Coast for over a year now. It sure takes some getting used to if your from the sticks like Endako. Construction is every where. I counted 14 cranes on ...

O.K. it's official. If it's wet you will need a 4X4 to make it the last 100 feet up our driveway. My dreams of an all weather driveway have been squashed. It's the part that didn't get enough gravel on it last fall. The rest of the roadway is holding up really well. It's a sure sign that spring is on the way with the advent of the "Winter booted blue breasted short tail snow bird" A.K.A. My Sweetie Pie. Wondering what all the commotion is while I crawl under the trailor to splice some new LED tail lights in place. I long for a dry, heated garage. I will have one. I will not have to lay in the mud in order to crawl under vehicles for repairs that never seem to be required on a dry day - or one that is above -20. My friend Audrey has remarked that plumbling repairs around here are only carried out when the temperature falls to -30. She could be right.

As part of our business we joined the Microsoft Empower for ISV's program. As part of that we got a subscription to the MSDN developers network. It provides the latest Microsoft software for Independent Software Vendors ( that's us). It's a huge help for us as purchasing the software otherwise would cost thousands more than we could afford. Microsoft also offers networking and advice on how to grow our business. I had been waiting for several weeks for some notification that we had been accepted. When I droppped by my brother Tiny's place on the way back from getting new tires at Vanderhoof he mentioned that some one had dropped off a package for us to his house. I guess they didn't want to try and make it up our driveway. One of the benefits of living in a small community - the delivery people know who is related to who.. Here's Uwe trying out the software..er box..Five seconds after I opened it. "Jeez, Dad, forget that stuff --have you tried the box ou...

Can't you just hear Xena's dream: "... OK if I snap my eyes open suddenly the ginormous bone I am dreaming about will be right there.." We picked this bone up at a local feed store where we buy our chicken feed. We are going to get another beef cut up as the going rate for one on the hoof now is under $300 bucks. They are just not selling up here. A farmer the other day offered me a herd of 200 for walk away prices. It is almost like the large feed lots are trying to kill the local meat producers. We notice that even with beef being so cheap here it hasn't come down any at the local Super Value. The next time we get some beef butchered I will save some of the big bones and smoke them in our smoker for Xena. (And her yet to be introduced friend Tommy, my friend, RT's new dog.) Speaking of Cheese Heads: We bought about 10 lbs of cheese on our last trip to Burns Lake and after doing some research ( much of it contradictory ) on freezing cheese decided to give it...

Woke up this morning to a blizzard with about a half a foot of snow accumulation. There is a strong East wind blowing also so that means the driveway and road are drifting over. I was thinking yesterday that I probably won't need to clear the snow anymore. Maybe not. We were off to Vanderhoof today to meet the UPS delivery person to get some truck parts we had ordered on Ebay. UPS only delivers to our area once a week and I wanted to work on the truck this weekend. However I think I will wait for the delivery on Monday. We payed 30$ to have it delivered so they should probably earn their money. So today it's back to coding in the office. We've run into some problems with Vista and are having to re write our code to fix it.

Kinda, well maybe in 10 days or so. I have been having problems with seeing the monitors. The back of my neck is sore from raising my head so I can see out the bottom of my gradiated bifocal glasses. It's been four years since I had my eyeballs checked so time to do it. We're off to Burns Lake now to the optometrist. Just when I was starting to plan the garden project ( having bought some seeds at the local Safeway) We were faced with full blown snowstorm. I about to take a picture of the mud starting to show in the driveway. That will have to wait for another day. Well, here's what it looked like. Time to get another work computer. The old 800 mhz machine I do my developing on is getting a little long in the too th. I have been doing some research on apple Mac Pro's But I have lived in an Intel/Microsoft world for so long it seems like a waste to not use all the software I have now. Of course, with Vista, I have to upgrade everything anyway. Not an inexpensiv...

We've had ginormous eggs before but never one this small. Maybe the chicken that was laying the giant eggs finally got worn out.

If you haven't heard that term you probably will in the near future.  It's the way software is being sold.  Like most things if you think about it for a minute, we don't buy things anymore, we purchase subscriptions. So that's something I am looking into now.  Seeing it's too cold to do the garden.  Making our software available as a service.  In other words you would "rent" the software for as long as you need it.  The advantage to us is that it is easier to keep it updated.  To our customers it could mean that their data is "autoMagically" backed up. It's a beautiful clear day. This is an aerial photo of the place taken about 10 years ago during the summer.

The internet just came up! Well, our portion of it anyway. We get a highspeed internet connection via a tower on a mountain 17 kilometres away. So when something goes wrong it is quite a trip for the guys to skidoo up the mountain to get at the tower. It couldn't have happened at a worse time. I had customers I needed to dial in to and we had some online stuff that was costing money not to get done. Five days without the internet. It's got us thinking about a two way satellite system. We keep hearing rumours about Telus or Rogers but so far just not enough customers to make it worth their while. After a week of 0c when we got up this morning it was -12c. A more familiar temperature for this time of year.

I went into town and had the local Autosense shop fix me up with a replacement main hydraulic hose for the skid-steer. On the way back I drove through a rainstorm! Go Figure. It's plus 5c and the water is pouring off of the roofs with a heavy chinook wind blowing. that's like a 31 degree rise in temperature in a couple of days. I got the skidsteer back in operation and managed to get the yard cleaned out. I got stuck last night in my round about, coming home from Stellaquo and had to shovel my self out as the Skidsteer wasn't going yet. Hopefully that will be the last of the snow fall, but as Jo-Ann points out: it snowed a lot later than this last year. Hope springs eternal. Our friend, Audrey, just faxed me her seed order for the year. Time to start thinking about gardening.

Even tho the temperature dropped to -26 we had a two foot dump of snow over two days. The two days right after the YRB grader made it up our driveway. However he came back yesterday and pushed did the driveway again, pushing 6 foot drifts out of the way on the upper road. I tried to no avail to get the skidsteer started to clear the couple hundred yards to our top gate - where the grader stopped as he doesn't come in the yard. After removing the fuel filter I noticed that it had big rust clumps in it. Also the block heater had packed it in. Although it had warmed to -16 there was no starting it. Today were going to bash a trail with the Toyota to the cleared driveway and make it to town for some victuals and new fuel filter and block heater. The snow should be light enought that I don't have to chain up.

On the way home last night I ran into the Bump in the road. It is almost like a fixture on Savory Road. Every January there are three bumps that arise about a kilometer from our driveway. They seem to be where there are underground springs that freeze up and expand. The largest one covers the whole road from side to side and is about a foot high. Suddenly, the thought crossed my mind: "They ought to do something about that bump." By now, I know I am on spiritually precarious ground when I use the word "They" in the context that some one else owns the problem. It's not like I don't have options. Slowing down to second gear adds about five seconds to the trip. Funny how five seconds can seem like a serious amount of time. Especially when I am in a hurry to get home and relax. Now there's a sentence. In a hurry to relax... I think a lot of problems I have seem to have a natural rhythm to them. Too fast and they can be jarring. The right pace and th...

My brain is working on a database problem. Well, solution actually. As it likes to do from time to time, it sends me off to do something else while it's working. To get out of the way, as it were. I am rewiring parts of the house to provide more outside outlets and an emergency lighting and backup power system. Eventually, I want to have the computer rooms all powered from battery backups via an inverter. We have notoriously bad power here, with spikes and brownouts a daily occurance. Using a battery/inverter system will provide an industrial strength power conditioner and UPS for our working computers. I decided to add some outlets to the front of the house. We don't have enough and the one we do have needed to be extended by an inch and a half to account for the rigid foam insulation we used to insulate the floor joists. I have some electrician friends and my ego just couldn't stand them seeing the plethora of extension cords snaking around the house. In a former life I w...