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.