Inversions

It’s Sunday, January 20, 2013, the second consecutive day of this weather inversion.  We’ve had a few lately, and as with many other things, it’s best to be on top of them.  I was yesterday because I drove up through the blanket of grey over Vernon to Silver Star at 8:30am in order to be ready for Shea, the 8-year-old autistic girl I help with skiing.  The sun was shining there; the shroud of mist below formed an opaque lake through which the distant Monashee Range and all other high points of land rose like islands of dark rock and bright white snow.  It was magnificent and warm.  The class with Shea started out well, but she tired and refused to continue after just over an hour.  My friend and usual partner, Marie, was enjoying a visit from her son, so I worked with an older man who was convinced he could get Shea skiing right away, until she disabused him of the idea.  I made her hot chocolate, we wrote up our report and I was happy to join Marilyn, another instructor, for a few runs before lunch.  I descended through the mist and hoar frost of the inversion around 2:00pm and spent the rest of the day grocery shopping and doing house stuff in the grey.  Today I have stayed below, studying Korean, cooking, filling the bird feeder and shoveling what snow I could from the roof of the back porch.  Yes, FedEx finally delivered the tapes and now I’m cursing them for that because it means I have to stop thinking about and start actually studying Korean.  Actually, I’m enjoying it.  But it’s hard.  My brain hasn’t hurt like this in a long time, and the worst part is that whenever I feel I’ve cleared a path and placed some new words and phrases down, it seems as if the fog rushes back in like an inversion and obscures about 60% of it.  It’s worse than shoveling, but then I like shoveling too. 

This Friday night I volunteered at the Vernon Performing Arts Centre for the Montreal Guitar Trio (MG3) concert.  It was spectacular.  The audience went wild many times.  The men were not only talented, creative musicians but also very funny.  I’ve seen two  shows by Quebec artists in the past few months.  The Ballet Jazz de Montreal was also very good.  I have a friend from Montreal and work with a woman at Silver Star who is from Quebec, so I don’t feel so far from the Gatineau.

This week was a great leap forward for our trip to China.  Jay and I talked about it last week.  He told me that he has a friend who went to Beijing last year and gave him the card of a man who is a good guide there.   That inspired me to push on with the reservations of the flights and hotel.  For the latter, I did quite a bit of research on line.  I  narrowed it down to about 5 places and finally chose The Peking Yard Hostel.  I found it through Hostelworld.  It looks and sounds delightful.  We’ll see.  I decided when I was about 20 and heading to Europe that I was on a trip and wouldn’t sweat the small stuff.  It mostly worked then.  I’ll try to open up those same channels in my brain for this trip.  Last year in Korea was ‘all good’, so the Ross family motto, ‘Success breeds Hope’, encourages me.  

It's Monday now.  I woke up at 7:30 to the forecast of cloud in the Okanagan Valley.   Could it perhaps be an inversion?  I went to the Silver Star web cam page and saw pictures of the sun just rising behind the hills.  My pre coffee fog was instantly dispelled.  I would go skiing.  I didn't rush up because the temperature was about -6c, and as we haven't had fresh snow in about a week I knew the surface would be hard until the sun warmed it.  But I was eager enough to make it to the top for my first run before ten.   The drive through the mist and frost was beautiful, and bursting into the bright blue was--- A visiting Scot described the morning best when he said, "It's brilliant." .  I had lots of runs, took pictures and talked with people on the tow.

Three photos from the top of Silver Star showing the Monashee Mountains rising above the mist of the
inversion.

2013 limps into action

It’s Friday morning and I’m finally getting back to the blog, partly because I’m waiting for FedEx.  It’s my present pet peeve, although I’m trying to remember one of my many resolutions of this year, not to be an angry old woman who’s incapable of handling the slings and arrows of this outrageous communication age, a time in which it seems to be increasingly difficult to actually talk to a real person and get something really done in real time.  Now I have vented here, but unfortunately I have to admit that I got pretty testy with the unfortunate real woman I finally talked to at the FedEx. office in Kelowna.  I won’t do that again, I hope.  Why is it so difficult to resist shooting the messenger?

This whole FedEx ‘issue’ started at noon on Wednesday, a day that was full of other small frustrations. I arrived home after meeting my Korean friend for our shared class.  I was happy that I had been able to help her with English but still irritated with myself for having forgotten my Korean notes so that I hadn’t been able to ask her about the questions I had.  The FedEx card was hanging on the doorknob.  They had come and gone without leaving the Korean language program that I had ordered on line and been eagerly awaiting.  I am hoping that it will help me to realize my main new year’s resolution, get back to seriously trying to learn Korean.  Thus started the series of small frustrations: call FedEx. to see what’s up; find out that I have to pay import duties; I can pay them directly, but they can’t make my Master Card work; call Master Card; they don’t know why F is having the problem unless it’s because Bert’s address as well as mine are on file; have Bert’s removed; call F back; they finally make the card work but still can’t just leave the package at the door because it costs over $100.00 dollars; I will have to wait at home one day for it or else drive to Kelowna airport, the only F outlet in the north Okanagan, to pick it up.  That’s why I’m waiting at home today.  I won’t bore you with the other hitches of the day.  Suffice it to say that I was again reminded of the fact that a person can drown in teacups, if there are enough of them.  At least in the ocean you can try to keep swimming.  It’s 10:37a.m., and F still isn’t here.

Now for some good news, the birds have come back to the feeder, at least a few brave redpolls have been there at breakfast and lunch for the last few days.  Not a flock, but neither have I bought the suet yet.  I’m going to do it today if F ever gets here. 

The times of my sessions with the Korean students continue to be in flux, but I hope that by next week all will be settled.  The adaptive ski classes start this Saturday morning; I have the same little autistic girl I had last year.  It’ll be a challenge because when she’s not ‘on’, she’s as limp as a length of over-boiled spaghetti, but she’s funny when she’s not furious.  I’ve been downhill skiing once, but cross country much more.  Mo has introduced me to a Silver Star special, the ‘flat white’.  It’s an Aussie specialty coffee.  As Silver Star is owned by an Aussie, they make it at the main restaurant on the hill.  Her husband John and I have a crazy system going.  John and I are very practical, one might say tight, so he buys me a flat white, I pick up my free seniors coffee, he’s not a senior yet, and we exchange.  I give him my freebie plus $1.00, and he gives me the $2.95 flat white because otherwise he would have to pay $1.95 for and ordinary coffee, which he prefers.  Life laughs on, except for FedEx, except for FedEx, except for FedEx.

Mo's picture of David's blue tree taken when she visited Wakefield in the fall

My copy cat red tree waiting in the new snow for the birds to recover from post traumatic stress syndrome.

Happy New Year 2013

Happy New Year!

I’m back in my wee house between the Anglican Church and the sit-outside-to-smoke and-drink centre for East Hill.  It’s Wednesday, January 2, and all’s quiet on the western front: no funerals, weddings or Christmas festivities at the former and at the latter, the party lights are lit at night but the voices are very muted.  Reading the local paper today, I think I may have discovered why.  The firemen were called there 3 nights ago because the owner’s 2002 Honda was blazing.  They extinguished it before the heat did anything more than break a couple of windows in the house, but the car is a totalled.  As I write this, I have one eye out the window so that I can see when my neighbor, Donna, gets back from work, partly because I want to give her a thank you gift for watching the house and collecting the mail while I was in Victoria but also because I want to ask if she saw or heard anything on the fateful night; her house is immediately behind party central so she sees and hears what I only hear.  More anon, if it’s juicy.

I drove to and from Vancouver Island with only one slight incident.  As I approached the dreaded Highway 10 that leads to Tsawassen on the way to Victoria, the car bounced, knocking the GPS, which I count on at this point in the trip, onto the floor.  I was stunned, looked in the rear view mirror, saw a tire on its rim rolling away behind me, assumed it was mine but was mildly surprised that as I pulled to the side of the road I was rolling smoothly.  I got out of the car to see what had happened.  Just as I had established that all 4 tires were accounted for and that the car appeared fine, I saw a young man with a blue tooth device in one ear, that’s all I remember about his appearance, approaching.  He was very concerned, as well he might have been since the tire I had bounced over was his; it had fallen off his truck somehow.  He wanted to make sure I was fine.  As soon as this was established, he went for his tire.  I got back in the car and drove off.  Only later did I think that I should have taken his name and license or something in case anything went wrong later.  It reminded me of Jay’s reaction after being hit by the Harley.  Of course I had not been bashed and thrown around as he was, but I think I was shocked by the whole thing and not thinking about anything beyond the fact that the car and I seemed fine.  And we were.  I was lucky. 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, one of the birds that eats at my feeder was not so lucky.  The drive home was on clear pavement all the way from Victoria, except for a whiteout on the last 20 km of the Connector that leads down into the Okanagan Valley.  A van going the other way had flipped and 2 ambulances approached it as we drove slowly down in almost zero visibility.  There was very little snow in Kelowna when I arrived, but I was so tired that I pulled over for a sleep. I hadn’t slept before that because I had wanted to get over the Connector and into the valley before dark.  I fell off for 20 minutes and awoke feeling much better.  Bert and Peggy had asked me to stop at their place for dinner, so I did.  They gave me a refreshing glass of wine and a dinner of barbecued salmon.  After eating and chatting with them, I felt much better when I got back into the car.  I arrived home around 8:30pm.  It was too dark to unpack.  It snowed that night, so I awoke to the first real snow of the season in Vernon, just about 2 inches but beautiful and white everywhere, except under my bird feeder.

 I didn’t eat breakfast until about 9 that morning.   When I did, I noticed through the window that under the bird feeder the snow was disturbed, reddish in parts and had what appeared to be feathers scattered over it.  Later, when I went outside to shovel, I discovered that there had been a mysterious killing.  It remains a mystery.  There were no tracks of either feet or wings in the area, all around was pristine white, but clearly some creature had lost a fair amount of blood, numerous feathers and in all probability, its life.  Nothing else was to be seen. I cleaned up the area with my shovel and have not seen a bird at the feeder since.  I think I’ll go to Canadian Tire to buy a suet ball to hang from my bright red tree in the hope of attracting some woodpeckers or other larger birds that might dare return to the scene of the crime and slowly bringing life back to my feeder.

The lavender Barbara and Terry gave me for Christmas in the living room beside the copper cactus we bought in Mexico years ago

The trail we were cross country skiing on yesterday.  I forgot my camera but ran into a friend who had hers and sent me a couple of the photos she took.  It's still amazing to me that Vernon has hardly any snow now while about 20 minutes up into the hills there's all of this.