Oliver and Korea

We have gone very quickly from hot and smokey to cool and rainy. I prefer the latter, especially as last week when it really was rainy in Vernon I was in Oliver on the shores of Tucelnuit Lake at the VOC bike camp. It only rained a couple of nights while we were there. The days were perfect for biking, especially on an ebike. It's the best toy I've had since can't remember when. I no longer have to fear long hills; if I start feeling breathless, I can put her in 'eco', the lowest level of electric assist, and carry on. You still have to pedal, but my legs are strong. So it's back to being good exercise without the fear and fact of chest pain.

Jay's still here. May's additional papers arrived yesterday. He immediately put them together with his, walked to the post office, mailed them all express post to the South Korean Consulate in Vancouver and now awaits his fate. Meanwhile they talk on Kakaotalk for hours every day, and he and I are having a good time together.



Stopping at the Haynes Ranch, the oldest ranch in the Okanagan, on one of our bike rides.


The first rattler I've seen since I arrived in the Okanagan. If you look closely you can see her two babies curled up near her.


This plant looks innocuous, attractive even, but it's well named. It's hard pointy seed pods we're responsible for four flat tires, not mine fortunately, over five days of biking.


Me in my Korean grandma's gardening hat at the crazy hat barbecue. The even daffier looking person beside me is a friend's husband. He is part of a family that has been involved with Sovereign Lake Ski Club for years. He brought me back to the lodge on a snowmobile when I dislocated my shoulder a few years ago.


Mixing the fruit salad for the pancake breakfast. Each person threw in a cup or so of fresh local fruit.

Clearing up

We've had some clear, bright, early fall days lately. There are still fires burning in BC and a bit of smoke in the air at times, but the worst is over 🤞. Jay and May's work on all the tests, papers, forms and what not that must be amassed and sent hither and yon in order for Jay to return to and work in Korea seems to be getting cleared up too. Last Tuesday they were hit with the revelation that the only available forms on line, the ones Jay had been working from , had not been updated, so much of the information he had presented was incomplete. Information that had been classified as optional is now essential. After the cursing, there followed a few days of visits to medical and government offices in Vernon and Seoul and many conversations on KakaoTalk. It seems now that the bureaucratic ball is again rolling, albeit like the frozen flat tires on old cars in Thunder Bay winters.

My ebike is perfect now. The fenders and skirts are off and all the parts are lubricated and tightened. The new car carrier has also been improved, and for the first time I have a new helmet, not a hand me down from Mara Shepherd or Barbara Chase. Not that I wasn't grateful for those when I was given them. Tomorrow I drive with Marg, a new biking friend, to the one week, VOC bike camp near Oliver.



Last Saturday Mo, John and I biked to watch the parade at the Armstrong fair. The theme this year was Sheep Thrills. This man was the most eccentric entry. He never waved and didn't crack a smile. Stare as I did, I could not figure out how he powered and steered his ???? Is that a sheep he's astride?


There were many creatures in sheep's clothing, but this beaver was the funniest and least sheepish.





First bounty from the yard. Jay and I made plum sauce from the Green Gage and Italian plums and there are still plenty more on the trees.


The Thursday ride with the VOC. My mother would say that I look like Happy Hooligan in my new turquoise helmet and electric yellow jacket.

Smokanagan 2018

Today the air quality index in Vernon is 10.5. You can smell and taste the smoke. It doesn't just blanket the surrounding hills; it seems to swirl with the wind at the end of the street. I was wakened by its arrival around 1:00am. We shut all the windows. I could feel a tightening in my chest, and Jay was really stuffed up by it, as he has been for days. This morning I wanted to do yard work because it was necessary and it was beautifully cool. I dressed appropriately.






Smokanagan, Asian Fusion gardening gear (Korean purple pants and Vietnamese plaid breathing mask)
Normally you would see hills in the distance behind the church.

Banff

VOC in Banff National Park

I spent last week in Banff National Park with the VOC. Six of us shared a condo in Harvie Heights. On Sunday, I drove three of us and two of our bikes from slightly smokey Vernon into the towering, rugged Rockies. Visibility remained clear on the Monday hike along the C Level Cirque Trail and also on Tuesday as we biked into Banff and along the Vermilion Lakes. But as we rode home that afternoon the smoke drifted in. It had caught up with us.

By Wednesday morning the peaks that surrounded our place in Harvie Heights were no longer visible and the smell of smoke was in the air. We six decided to drive into Banff instead of going on the planned hike. Fortunately we arrived in town early enough in the morning to get one of the many free, three hour parking spots. We went first to the Whyte Museum, founded by local artists and philanthropists Peter and Catherine (Robb) Whyte. In the room that explained the development of the museum, Chic was recognized as having been a major contributor of time and information. We spent quite a while there. I was particularly impressed by the works of Carl C Rungius, especially his paintings of moose. By the time we left the museum the streets were alive, not with the sound of music, but with other tourists, talking, shopping and snapping selfies with no mountains in the background. We drove to a golf club for lunch. Later, Mo and I had one of many soaks in the hot tub at our condo. During and after dinner we discussed which of the two possible Thursday hikes we would take: the easy, the difficult, the first half of the latter. By morning we realized it had all been a waste of time and hot air. The smoke was still quite thick. We went off together to join the easy hike to Johnston Canyon and the Ink Pots. I, who remembered it from when I was twenty and working for Brewster's, had dismissed it as too easy the night before but found it in my seventies to be quite enough of a challenge and well worth the walk.
Our last hike on Friday was around the Sunshine Meadows. We took a long gondola and short chairlift ride to the top and walked up and down and around for hours. It was beautiful in spite of the fact that we couldn't see the distant peaks.

Lack of clarity was a theme of the trip for me. I felt quite on top of things while packing and driving to Banff but lapsed into confusion on the second day when I thought I had lost my MasterCard. I panicked. Then calmed down, went on line, got the MasterCard number, phoned it and canceled the card. I was just gluing together my shattered nerves when Jane came downstairs waving my MasterCard. She'd found it in the folds of her quilt. OMG. Oh well. It was a bit of a laugh until I went to put it in my purse, even though it was now useless, and discovered that what I had really lost was my TD debit card. So I was beginning my holiday with no plastic and very little cash. Lynne volunteered to accompany me on a bike ride to the TD bank in Canmore. By this time I was as rattled as the character in the Stephen Leacock story. But for no reason. The teller was sweet, helpful without being patronizing. In five minutes I walked out of the bank having already used my new debit card to withdraw cash from the machine. When I arrived home yesterday I found the envelope containing my new MasterCard where Jay had put it, in the pile of saved mail.

Unfortunately the weather has not cleared as quickly as my confusion. The smoke from the forest fires is now so thick you can taste it. My chest even feels a bit heavy. BC is still burning.









Donna and me on the Cirque C trail







Lunch with Lynne and Aleta. I'm using the chopsticks Gord made. I forgot a fork to eat my salad, so he looked around, found a stick, broke it in half and gave me the pieces to eat with.










The trail back from lunch on the Monday hike






Peek a boo. Mo on our first hike.







A painting by Carl C Rungius in the Whyte Museum in Banff





The falls at Johnston Canyon







A hippy on a stick in the Sunshine Meadows








Map of fires currently burning in BC

All the young Thai soccer players and their coach are safe. Milagro!Only one rescuer died. In the last picture I saw of the boys their heads were shaven and they were offering prayers of thanks to those who had saved their lives. The last bit of fine tuning of my new ebike was that Jay tightened everything that an Allen Key can turn. It has run smoothly ever since. Two stories that occupied my life for a while have both ended well.

Now we are into the real heat of summer. I've been staying inside between 1 and 5 most days, rising around 7 to bike, hike or work in the yard early. I water two evenings a week but that barely keeps things growing. Everything is getting crisp and fires are now banned everywhere. The sunflowers did much better than I had expected, but this morning I chopped most of them down and cut off their heads, which I set out in the garage to dry for next winter's birdseed. Then I leaned the long parched stalks against the back fence to wait for Jay's next dump run. The back yard is drab without them. Then Jay and I had a big, late bacon and egg breakfast after which he drove to Enderby with a friend to float down the river. He worked last week building a carport with Everett, the carpenter he finished the basement with. He will probably continue working with him for the next few weeks, maybe until he leaves for Korea. That is still the plan, but there's a lot more preparation to do in Manila, Vernon and Seoul. Vernon is certainly the the skimpy filling in that city sandwich.

I'm getting to be quite a small town old lady, sitting in the afternoon in my favourite chair by the window in the living room. When I first sat down to read today, I was distracted by movement in the church parking lot across the street. I put on my glasses, which I take off to read, and watched a thin, drugged or drunken man with wildly dishevelled hair who was staggering around the lot, pulling things out of a green garbage bag and stomping on them. I took my glasses off again to continue reading and writing. The next time I put them on he had disappeared and there was a young mother in a bright summer dress in the same parking lot practicing riding her bicycle with her daughter who was wearing a pink bike helmet sitting on a special seat behind her. I don't have a grand view of Lake Okanagan, but the church across the street entertains me with the gamut of humanity that comes to its services, weddings, funerals, concerts, soup kitchen lunches and day care programs.

When I finish this I'm going to make iced tea and continue reading, If I Die In A Combat Zone, Box Me Up And Ship Me Home by Tim O'Brien. I taught his collection of short stories, The Things They Carried, when I was at the lycee but had forgotten about him. He writes very well.






Terry Keough sent me these pictures this week. He took them when we were having lunch together in Victoria. It was surprisingly moving to open his email and see mom and dad again.





I proudly present the biggest garlic in my crop. I only had seven in total and two of them were really small.

Well, the ebike odyssey continued. On my inaugural ride last Monday the bike made a scraping sound and erratic clicks even when it was not in assist mode. Then on Tuesday when I went for a ride with Miriam the electric assist screen showed a series of letters and numbers that the manual said meant trouble, so we canceled the ride. Miriam volunteered to go with me to Kamloops the next day. We arrived at Cycle Logic at 9:00am, David was ready to go and we went walking around Kamloops. Among other things, we found a thrift shop with bargains for both of us. When we returned to the shop, I took the bike for a test run. Perfect.

I now have a name for my bike. When I was in the Rec. Centre sauna last week a man who's there regularly and whose banter I usually ignore because I dislike his attitude made me laugh. He got an ebike recently and said that when he took it out to ride for the first time his neighbour came out and yelled, "So now you're driving a Hardly Davidson." My bike is now called Hardly.

Jay is on call on this his last week of work for Okanagan Restoration. He left early but sent me a message soon after to tell me the good news that four of the twelve Thai boys trapped in the cave have been rescued. What a moving story that is. It's an inspiring example of youth, the will to live and the readiness of skilled people to do whatever they can to help, no matter the danger to themselves. We are so flooded with self interest these days that this is a deep breath of fresh air. May they all get out alive.

My new bike kit includes a gift Caroline gave me when she returned from Thailand last year.









Caroline's Thai purse carries the valuables








More news from the back yard.

HAPPY CANADA 🇨🇦 DAY

Saturday, June 30th has been productive. Jay and I were at work well before 7:00am. I cooked and gardened while he replaced the really old door on the equally ancient back garage. He was using a slightly newer door that he'd got from our neighbour a few years ago when he helped him tear down his portion of Jim's Eccentricity. My job was easy compared with that. I was trying a new recipe for salmon croquettes, but at least all the ingredients were fresh. He, on the other hand, was struggling with old doors and a frame that time and weather had been warping since the '30s. It's not perfect but it's over 80 years old and it swings freely now. It was a good day for working, not too hot, cloudy and the threatened rain didn't come. Although there's a strong wind now. As I look out the window I see only the backs of the leaves on the grape vines. I remember Ron Noginosh passed on a bit of First Nations lore to me once, in his educating whitey way. "When you see the backs of the leaves, it's going to rain." So perhaps it will. I wouldn't mind and neither would the yard, in spite of the fact that it's been cooler and wetter than usual in the Okanagan lately. I heard on the radio that it's going to be really hot in Ottawa tomorrow.

I finally have an ebike. Thus ends the most serious shopping I've ever undertaken. And in spite of the fact that I did countless google searches, visited six or eight bike shops in Vernon, Kelowna and Kamloops and test rode quite a few bikes, I bought one yesterday in Kamloops that I had never heard of until about two hours before I bought it. I had gone there ten days earlier with my friend Jane. We had bought identical bikes, but there was only one in the shop. We were in Jane's car and she had a rack, so she got it and one was ordered for me. NOT. It's a long story, but I ended up back in Kamloops yesterday to pick up a loaner to ride until mine came in. BUT the dealer called while I was there to say that there was no hope of getting the bike I had ordered, not even for ready money. Ebikes are as popular as pizza these days, and not as quickly made. I had reached my limit. Shopping rattles me the way banks rattle the character in the Stephen Leacock story I can't remember the title of. David, the man I'd been dealing with at Cycle Logic could see that I was getting psychologically shattered. He said I could keep the loaner as long as I needed to. But I couldn't bear the thought of dragging out the agony of shopping. So a couple of hours later I was headed for home with a new ebike, a bit of a deal because of the inconvenience but still a bit more expensive than the one Jane and I had originally chosen. Now I have to study how to make it work. You don't just jump on the thing and ride. I still haven't set the clock on the control panel, and that's the easiest of its functions. Yikes. I'm not going to really appreciate it until Monday when I get to the first hill and engage the battery.



The new door and ebike


The new bike in front of the sunflowers in the back yard.