We live in a rural part of the island and it is fairly common to have wildlife in the yard. Our visitors range from a variety of small birds who come routinely to our feeders to white tailed deer who love the taste of Val’s flowers and my vegetables. We’ve seen raccoons, foxes, a weasel and one warm summer night about 4 years ago a bobcat who had a taste for cat meat. Poor Mulder 
. Bad bobcat!
White tails survive northern Ontario winters because they have learned to expend the least amount of energy possible to acquire the most calories possible. That means that if they find a source of food, especially high energy food, they don’t go far. They regularly come right to the edge of our deck to vacuum up shells from the sunflower seeds that the birds love. Deer also have big brown eyes and when they can relax they look right in the windows at us. When Val sees them and I hear “oh they look so hungry” I know that I will shortly be going out to put some whole corn down in the driveway for them. Every winter I promise myself that I won’t do it but every winter it happens.This winter is proving to be no exception and late last week I heard those fateful words and Friday afternoon I dumped a pail of mixed corn and oats in the driveway. They were immediately discovered by a pair of blue jays who apparently love the taste of whole corn. Saturday – no deer, Sunday – no deer. Monday – same thing. Just those jays getting fatter by the minute! Yesterday about 9.30 am I looke dout the window intot he yard and this is what I saw:
15 wild turkeys came walking down the driveway and right in to that pile of corn. This not the first time we have seen them but it is the first time we have had them here in winter. They stayed for 15 or 20 minutes and then headed back down the driveway. But, before they got the road them seemed to settle down as if they were just going to rest there for a while. They are very wary animals and would rather walk or run than fly.Late in the afternoon they came back and were in the cedars in front of the house. They didn’t stay long this time but we are hoping that they come back again.
I would like to introduce you to my first pair of new sandals in many years. To quote the Monkees “And I think I love you.”
As I sit here it is -24C and the ground is frozen hard and covered with many cm. of snow, not normally the conditions that make one want to run out and buy a new pair of sandals. But we are headed south in a couple of weeks and that was the impetus for this purchase. When we get to Cuba I don’t really want to wear socks and shoes all the time (that is what diabetics are urged to do to help protect their feet). It is going to be hot and sunny and I want to wear as little as possible and that includes on my feet.The other option was to get a pair of Crocs and I am avoiding that option.
I knew what I wanted and where to find them but was having trouble with the cost. I always whine and waffle when it comes to spending money on myself. I found these last fall and immediately fell for them.The big attraction is the toe protection and protecting your feet is a priority for diabetics. Foot injuries can lead to infections and that can lead to BIG problems. Where did that foot go? Anyway, when we were in SSM yesterday I finally went to the store where I saw them months ago. Of course they were not on display but the owner was more than happy to go into the back and dig them out. I tried them on with socks (forgive me Clara) and said to wrap them up. At this point the cost was secondary. I did get a pleasant surprise when I paid for them. This is the 3rd pair of shoes I have purchased from this store in the past couple of years and when the sales person entered my telephone number he told me that I now have a $60.00 credit when I buy my next pair of shoes. Bonus!
So two weeks from now when I am strolling the beaches of Varadero I will be happy and my feet will be cool and well protected.
Motivation, where does it come from & how do you hang on to it? This a question that I have been meaning to think about and write about, if I can get motivated. January is a dark month and a cold month and those two things combined seem to have driven any motivation I may possess into the farthest reaches of wherever motivation goes for a holiday. Probably Bali or a tiny village near the headwaters of the mighty Limpopo River in central Africa. Anyway it seems to have gotten off my island.
I have not uttered these words out loud but I made two promises to myself sometime between Christmas and new years. I told myself that I would reinvigorate this blog. I’m not sure why this has become important to me but it has. It is a matter of great pride for me to write something (hopefully of some import) regularly. As I have said here on more than one occasion I am in awe of Clara’s skill with words and with her ability to find time in an incredibly hectic life to write regularly, articulately and very humourously in her blog. And if my son would start to write in English instead of techno-garble I’m sure that I would enjoy his blog also 
. These two are my motivation.
The other promise I made to myself relates to my health. I live with diabetes and hypertension. Both of these are invisible and both are controllable, by me. All I have to do is lose weight, exercise regularly, eat a far better diet and cut way back on the amount of alcohol I consume. Last year my motivation stayed home and I actually managed to lose weight during the winter, enough weight that people started to notice. My doctor sure did! My BP dropped right back into the very normal range and my bg readings were the best they had been in sometime.I was using a recumbent exercise bike and walking. In the spring I kept it up. I was outside gardening and walking.I managed to keep the weight off over the summer and things were looking pretty good. Good enough that I thought that I could start to eat a bit more than I had been and things that I know are not good for me. Just before Christmas I had an appointment with my doctor and although my BP was still good my weight had started to creep back up.That was enough to make me stop exercising completely. So I told myself that come January 1 I would get off my ass and get back to it. Well here we are on Jan. 23 and I am till telling myself the same story. I delude myself into thinking that hauling in firewood once a week and walking behind the snow blower are suitable alternatives but I know it ain’t so. I walk past my bike half a dozen times a day and every time I think I should park my butt and spend 15 minutes but its not happening and it is really pissing me off. I have to start! So if anyone who reads this sees my motivationwill you please tell it to come home.
When I moved to Nakina in the mid 70’s I didn’t know a lot about keeping warm in the winter but I learned very quickly. One of the first things I learned was that the Cree knew a lot about keeping warm and I should emulate them. So one of the first things I bought early in the first winter was a pair of moose hide mitts. I wish I still had them. They were made of smoke tanned moose hide and lined with thick duffel cloth or blanket cloth that was purchased at The Bay. They had long gauntlets that went well up over your wrists. The gauntlets were embroidered with bead work and trimmed with otter fur. I think that I bought them in Webique for less than $20.00. They were warm and for the first few months smelled like the very best smokey bacon you ever had. I wish that I still had them or at the very least had a picture of them. They were well-made, incredibly warm and served me very well for a long time. And they got used. From December until March I rarely went to work without them. After I got to Moosonee 4 years later I bought another pair, probably in Winisk and these ones were also smoke tanned but the big difference was that the back of the gaumntlet was one big square of beaver fur. This was a far superior for wiping your nose and for warming your face up, as long as you remembered to warm before you wiped . Near the end of my stay in Moosonee I ordered a new pair of mitts and vowed that these would be my “good mitts”. They would only be worn on special occasions, they would not get stained with grease changing a snowmobile belt or soaked with gas refuelling snowmobiles or aircraft. And for many years after we left Moosonee they were kept in a pristine state. the old ones got used lots in Temamgami where I was still a field officer and to a lesser extent in Hearst where I mainly flew a desk. But time and use overtook them and they were eventually discarded because most of the fur was worn off and the alms were worn thin to the point of having holes in them. Goodbye old friends. My good mitts have rested peacefully in storage since we moved to the island and have rarely if ever seen the light of day. Tuesday they reminded me why and I have them. We got about5 or 6 cm. of snow on Monday and Tuesday morning I decided I had better move it off the driveway before it got really cold (it is -26C as i write this Thursday morning).My snowblower has metal handles and normally here the temps are such that my sturedy work gloves with thinsulite lining are more than adequate to keepmy hands warm. But I was not outside for more than 10 minutes and my hands were very cold. I manged to be tough for another 10 minutes or so and by then the palm of my right hand was numb. I went inside to warm them up and as I was standing with my hands extended over the woodstove I realized that my old friends were within arms reach and would serve me very well. I slipped those lovely big mitts onto my hands and back out I went. I spent over an hour finishing the job and during that time my hands remained toasty warm.I had honestly forgotten how warm they are and how comfortable you can be outisde on a cold day if you just dress properly. And – here they are.
A couple of weeks ago my cousin, who makes his living on his computer discovered that said computer was infected with a number of nasty trojans and viruses. He salvaged his files and announced to me that he was switching to Ubuntu. He has listened to me echo my son extol the virtues of open source software for some time and the seed I planted finally germinated. I have two machines running Ubuntu, an old desktop machine that works fine and a laptop that has been a dual boot machine for several years. Both had Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) installed. When “cuz” downloaded Ubuntu he got the latest version, 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) and burned it to a cd which he loaned me and I installed it on desktop box. Only problem is that doing it this way removes all the settings and old files. OK on the desktop not OK on the laptop. Sunday I consulted my Linux guru and he said that that there is a way to upgrade rather than replace and promptly found and sent me the link to the instructions. Yesterday morning I started the update process. No sweat so far, sounds simple right? It is except that, the upgrade is 600+megs and my internet connection is via a satellite service and at the very best the download speed is around 60KBs. That is optimal and is seldom sustained for extended periods. And the service provider does have a “fair access” policy. That is also called throttling. So yesterday morning at about 8am I commenced the download. Last evening at about 10.30pm the download was complete. Yahoo! The installation process started automatically so I went to bed. When I got up this morning the process was halted waiting for me to tell the computer that it is OK to replace some now unneeded file. OK, OK, go ahead lets finish this. Finally at 7am the installation was finished, the computer restarted itself and the process was complete. It took 24 hours but it is done. Thanks Hugh.
Last Friday I walked out of the house at about 05:20 hr. At that time of day, at this time of year, at this latitude it is still very very dark. Where we live there is no ambient light to interfere with our view of the sky and all its natural beauty. Sometimes it is just inky black and you know that there is heavy overcast and clouds. Sometimes the fog is so thick that even though you can’t see it you can actually feel it. Sometimes it is so clear that you can see every star there is, or at least you think you can. I know, depending on the time of year, where to look to find the big dipper or Orion’s belt. You can, if you stand still for a few minutes, usually find a satellite streaking across the sky. But Friday it was really special. Before I walked out I knew that it was bright. And when I walked out there was something special. There was an almost full moon still high in the southwest, well above the treeline and in front it was a layer of high broken cloud. It was perfect. There was a halo around the moon, caused the light reflecting off the clouds. It was relatively mild, -10C or so I just stood there in awe. What a sight. And, there was no sound: no cars, no trains, no boats (we can, on a quiet night, hear the freighters blowing their horns as they make a turn at the foot of the island). It was eerie and I almost expected to see a witch on a broom flying across the face of the moon. I didn’t want to get into the car and head in to work.
Some of the best parts of living where we do are so free and so natural and so available that all you have to do is stand still for a minute and take them in.
Last night we watched the TV news from Vancouver thanks to the magic of satellite tv. We saw the results of several weeks of snow followed immediately by a rise in temp and a heavy rain. Roofs started collapsing. Not a lot but enough to scare the crap out of Val and to cause her to offer to use the snow rake to clear the woodshed roof. Well says I, I started part of it today and yes we will do some more tomorrow (that is today now). This what the woodshed roof looked like:
This is somewhere in excess of 0.5M of snow.Its deep and it is heavy. So after lunch today out we went and got most of the snow off the woodshed roof.
Next stop is the studio roof. It is a little flatter but there is not as much snow accumulated. That is tomorrows job.
Every winter we put up a bird feeder or two. Actually I should call them squirrel and bird feeders because those little red rodents are incredibly persistent not to mention dexterous, fearless and not easily deterred. And at night when it is dark we hear but rarely see their really shy cousin the flying squirrels.
All the critters enjoy the sunflower seeds. And a big bag of fat attracts a couple of more species. We routinely get chickadees and blue jays. The chickadees are dainty little birds who arrive on a soft whirr of wings pick up 1 seed and take off again up into an adjacent tree to break open the hull and eat the seed before coming back for another one. The jays come in with a flurry and often a screech and proceed to jam as many seeds as they can into their bills which they then eat while hanging there before starting again. They are however, very skittish and at the first hint of a face at the window away they go. At the fat bag we often get a downy woodpecker or two. Diminutive compared to their larger cousins the hairy and pileated woodpeckers they are also less flighty and much more likely to ignore an intruder of the human type and just keep on eating.
Yesterday was a banner day at the feeders. Not only did we have the regulars we had a few visitors not usually seen. We had yellow finches in their drab winter plumage, we had purple finches looking like their heads have been dipped in cranberry juice and just for a few minutes we had a white winged crossbill. I know that these species as well as several others which are common to this area are around but for some reason we have a hard time enticing them out of the trees. Add to this list pine grosbeaks and the occasional mourning dove which is apparently too stupid to migrate any more. I’ll try to get some pictures to liven up this posting but in the meantime we’ll keep filling the feeder. 
We are 5 days into the new year. It is the coldest, darkest time of the year and we are into another very snowy winter. It will be hard on deer and wild turkey populations. It is also hard on the snow blower. I have used almost 20 L of gasoline already this winter and there are 3 months left! The good part is that I get lots of exercise walking behind it.
This morning I have been moving snow between my portable garage and the wood shed so that I can move the accumulated snow off the wood shed roof.
Later that evening – I ended up spending about 2 hr at it today and there is still more to move but that will wait for Wednesday.
It has been a mere 9 months since I got off my ass and actually wrote something here. I was talking to a cousin just before Christmas and she mentioned that she has given up checking this blog because there is never anything new. How true. My determination to keep this going went the way of the dinosaurs. But in spite of the fact that I avoid new years resolutions like the plague this one has been eating at me for a couple of weeks so I am going to give it a try. Besides I have a great role model in my daughter-in-law who in spite of a new baby and a toddler continues to pump out witty, literate and hilarious commentaries on life and children and food and boots and general asshattery. I am barely worthy but I will try again .
The first thing I want to do is change the name of this blog, without starting all over again. Not sure if that can be done. Then I want to figure out how to clear the 85,000+ spam comments that have accumulated. Then I want to ensure that when I start a post I finish it. As I look at the top of this screen there are 9 posts in my draft file that i started but never completed. So stay tuned and hopefully my resolve will sustain itself.