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Do the dead speak?

As we stand for two minutes of silence, we remember those who are not able to communicate with us directly because they did not return from their term of service.

But, even though we are no longer able to hear their voices, the dead do speak. They speak when you cast a ballot in an election. Their words resound when you wear a crucifix, or a yarmulke, or a kirpan, or a hijab. They are heard in every letter to the editor, or when 3,000 march to protest the hypocritical closing of the Veteran’s Affairs office in Sydney.  They echo when you join a union, a political party, a club or group of any type.

Do the dead speak? They speak every day. Our job is to listen.

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Firewood and quiet hours

I do have two pet peeves with camping in Yukon campgrounds: firewood and quiet hours.

In Yukon government campgrounds, firewood is provided. This is a huge bone of contention with the territorial government environment department. Providing firewood is expensive, and usage has increased dramatically over the last few years. There is a departmental budget for firewood, and when this is used up, that’s all there is. For example, for Fox Lake, Twin Lakes and Labarge, the total quota is 90 cords of wood.

We were camping in Fox Lake two weeks ago, and apparently, the week before, there was no wood. The weekend we were there, they restocked the firewood. However, when I went to the box, I got quite a surprise. There were bits of cut up plywood, sawmill ends, some chopped up 2x6s, and even the seat of a hardwood chair that had been chopped up. My guess is that the quota has been used up and, if you’re headed there, you may want to bring your own.

What causes this, since that’s a lot of wood. When we used to heat the trailer with wood, I’d go through about 2½ cords a year. In short, there’s enough to heat almost 40 poorly insulated houses for a year.

I don’t use much firewood, since it normally only takes about 3 or 4 pieces to have a fire through the evening. However, I’ve seen people with fires with flames 4 feet high, and I’m not sure what they’re trying to accomplish beyond wasting wood. Whenever I see one of these huge conflagrations, I want to walk over and pee in their campfire (you’d have to drink a lot to have any effect other than a symbolic one but I think people might take a hint).

The other issue is quiet hours. Yukon government campgrounds have quiet hours between 11 PM and 7 AM. During this time, you’re not supposed to make excessive noise, run generators, play loud music, etc. It doesn’t happen often, but enough times to be annoying. There are campground officers, who enforce these rules among other things, but they can’t be in all campgrounds at all times.

My problem is that there shouldn’t be a need to have an officer in every campground at every time for the sake of keeping quiet hours. Surely, people should have enough sense to not run their generator after 11 PM (why would you be running it at that hour, anyway?) or to be blaring music late at night in a campground. If you want all the comforts of home, why are you out in the woods?

Well, there’s my rant du jour. I suppose it’s my two cents worth, although with the demise of the penny, I guess it’s rounded down…

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Quite the storm

Last night, we had quite the storm come up. It was promised in the forecast, although after little threats all day with nothing to show for it, it was a bit of a surprise.

Stormy skyFor about an hour, there was thunder, lots of lightning, high winds and heavy rain. In fact, 1.8 mm fell during the storm. Considering it lasted less than an hour, that was a pretty huge amount of rain. Neither Clara nor I can remember it raining that heavily here.

 

We did figure out something was coming shortly before it started. I was working in the yard and saw how quickly the sky had changed.

I must admit, this was probably all my fault. When it started, I had the sprinkler going, since I had held off all day due to the forecasted rain that had never arrived. And, of course, I finished staining the deck about 30 minutes before…

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A problem solved

I have very few issues with the new motorhome, although there were a couple. My biggest one involves storage space as it relates to toast.

I know you are wondering how these link. However, the smoke detector in the new motorhome is a wee bit sensitive. The camping toaster you throw on one of the burners of the stove generates enough smoke to set it off. There’s nothing quite like trying to make breakfast to the tune of beep-beep-beep.

This would be easily remedied if I simply used a standard electric toaster. This being said, a small generator is only really good for 1000 watts, and a toaster tends to eat more than that when you fire it up and about 1000 watts after it starts to heat. I’ll throw into the mix the fact that I bought a 1250 watt peak Hyundai generator several years ago. However, the second time we used it, it starting throwing enough blue smoke to keep away every mosquito in two square miles and, of course, the warranty had expired by that point.

Last year, towards the end of the season, I went shopping for another one. Here’s where the fun kicks in. I could have bought a 1000 watt with 1300 watt peak generator at Canadian Tire for $300, and another $50 for wheels and a handle to make it easy to move around. It’s not a big issue since it’s only 60 pounds. However, on sale, I could buy a 3000 watt sustained load/4000 watt peak generator, with wheels and a handle for $300. This puppy will run a microwave oven, and other things like my sliding compound mitre saw or my table saw and my compressor. I bought it, of course.

storage rack pictureIt weighs a little over 110 pounds and is considerably larger than the smaller one. Here’s the problem. There’s no storage area in the motorhome that is big enough to take it with us.  I thought of a storage rack that goes into the carrier on the trailer hitch. This is a problem if you want to bring the boat camping.

In a fit of brilliance, the following question came to mind last week. Who says the trailer hitch has to be on the back of the truck? I bought a storage rack with a 500 pound capacity and a front trailer hitch for the camper. I installed these yesterday, and now have a way to bring the generator with us.

The trailer hitch was easy enough to install. There would have to have been a few hole modifications more than necessary if you follow the instructions. The holes aren’t big enough to work the bolts and plates into the frame to get to the inside. I did, as it was, have to expand the two front mounting holes, as the ones there already were ⅜” but the bolts are Class 10 ½”. The easy way is to remember that four bolts hold the front bumper on the truck, and taking it off took almost 5 minutes and allow you access to the inside of the frame. Easy-peazy!

Now, I just need to get another toaster…

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Fishing failure

I went to Fox Lake yesterday in hopes to get a bit of fishing in on the weekend. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there was some function going on at the picnic shelter at the campground.

There were more than 40 cars parked in the shelter area and around the boat launch. More than a dozen were actually parked in the approach to the launch itself.

Launching the boat would be difficult, although not impossible. However, there would have been no place to park the truck and trailer after getting the boat into the water.

I haven’t got the faintest idea what was going on. However, I must admit it’s a bit selfish to block off something supposed to be for a specific purpose for some other reason.

Oh, well. I suppose it was also a nice day for a drive…

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A lovely day

It’s a beautiful day, warm but not too hot, a light wind, and sunny. It’s a perfect day to do some more yard work. I did fill some of the knots in the top railing of the back deck and went down to the hardware store to pick up some sandpaper to sand and then, prime them.

I also have a few other things to do. One of those is painting the shelving unit that was on the deck so it can go somewhere else, as well as painting some of the deck chairs I have been thinking of completing and staining for a while.

With the perfect conditions, there’s only one thing to do. If you’re looking for me, I’ve gone fishing…

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Fixing the deck

The deck was built in two stages. First, I built the veranda when we built the house. This was in 2005. And, because the veranda is more than two feet above grade, there were railings required by code.

I built the deck the following year, with a step down where the back steps were. The deck was built 15 inches below the veranda. This created a bit of an issue, in that the railings on the veranda closed that section of the deck off. So, this weekend, I pulled the railings off the veranda, built a new step along the full width of the deck.

I was going to stain the full deck, using the gallon I bought a few weeks ago. However, Home Hardware is completely sold out of the base used to make the colour and won’t have any back in until later this week. This screwed up my staining plans. I was going to stain at least the veranda and the new step, but the rain and other things joined up to keep me from doing it until Thursday (yes, it’s supposed to rain tomorrow.)

I also put in a new hidden screen on the back door. Now, I need a project.

deck with new step
The veranda and new step.
Screen door picture
The new screen door.

The project I’ve chosen for the new deck, even though it isn’t stained yet has been picked: maple smoked lake trout…smoker

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Some thoughts for Canada Day

With Canada Day coming up, and since this particular post has been viewed several time through search engines, I thought I might run it again.

Doug Rutherford's avatarDoug Rutherford

I’ll willingly admit that this is one of my favourite holidays. I know, nothing holds a candle to Hallowe’en but, this is close. Because, much as we are governed by idiots and often, our leaders aren’t sure of where we are going or what the handcart has to do with it, we still live in the greatest country in the world and the last 40 years of imbecilic governments at the Federal, Provincial/Territorial and Municipal levels have failed to destroy it, regardless of how hard they’ve tried.

Living in Canada:

  • I can e-mail my MP and tell him he’s an idiot and a liar.
  • I can get really pissed at my MP and run against him in the next election.
  • I can join a union.
  • I can join any political party I want to (and, when you consider how wing-y some of those parties are, that is really saying something).

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What? Another Facebook scam?

If you have a Facebook account, as many do, you may have received an e-mail similar to the one below. It claims to be from Facebook and asks you to confirm your request for deleting your account.

e-mail image

“Wait!”, you say. “I didn’t ask to delete my account,” although like most sensible Facebook users, this has crossed your mind on many occasions. You notice the instruction near the bottom, “To confirm or cancel this request, follow the link below.” Is this legitimate?

Here’s a hint. First, you’ll notice that the e-mail sender is not Facebook. It comes from an account called noticemail5490@facemail.com. That doesn’t really look like a professional e-mail address, does it?  And, while Facebook’s e-mail system is called Facemail, it does not have a separate domain name from Facebook itself. Facemail is part of the facebook.com domain.

Another hint can be seen in the fact that there is only one choice to confirm or cancel the deletion request.  Normally, this would be two separate operations, and any reasonable website developer would have two separate links, one for confirmation and one for cancellation. Also, with alterations to any profile of any type of website account, you usually receive an e-mail that states that you should ignore the e-mail if you did not initiate the change in question.

In short, this is an attempt to get you to log on to Facebook, although that’s not where you’re really logging into, and giving the perpetrators your Facebook e-mail address logon (which they already have) and your password. This allows them to either take over your Facebook account or to logon separately from you and glean any information about you and all of your Facebook friends that they can.

Suffice to say, don’t click on the link in the e-mail. Simply delete it and forget about it, after a good laugh at your superior intelligence at avoiding the fraud.

By now, you may be asking, “Why did I get this in the first place? How did they get my e-mail address?” The short answer is that one of your friends did this to you. And, they may not even be one of your Facebook friends, either. Your e-mail probably got gleaned from someone using the Facebook Friend Finder, where they basically gave complete access to their e-mail address book to Facebook. Facebook retains the information in your address book, other than the username and password which they promise not to keep, to create shadow profiles of their users. They integrate the information from e-mail address books with the information you’ve shared on Facebook itself to build a substantially more detailed profile on you than you have provided.

And, since Facebook does seem to be incredibly lax in their internal security, it appears that much of this information has been stolen in a data breach.

Here’s a few things you may want to consider if you have a Facebook account:

  • After every published data breach, regardless of whether or not you think your data was affected, change your Facebook password.
  • Never use the Facebook Friend Finder. All you’re really accomplishing is screwing over your friends.
  • Read any e-mail claiming to be from Facebook, or any other social media site for that matter, with a grain of salt.

And, whenever you use social media, keep in mind the advice they used to give the police officers at every briefing in Hill Street Blues: “And remember. Be careful out there…”

 

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Coming back

Campfire and waterfallI haven’t posted a lot lately, but this is due to us either being camping or getting ready for camping. We’ve made two trips since I last put something up on the blog.

We went back to Fox Lake for five days, although conditions were quite different. There was no more flooding, the weather was quite sunny, and there was no snow this time. We brought out the boat with the camper and I managed to get a few days of fishing in. I’ll admit, Fox Lake is not the world’s greatest place to fish for lake trout. However, I’m happy bobbing up in a down in a boat on a nice, peaceful lake, even when the fish are not cooperating.

I did get one fish, but it was quite small. It was of legal, but not moral, size. The fish was about 12″ long, and I prefer my “lakers” to be at least 16″ long before I keep them. After all, it is still a baby.

I was pleased to see that the flooded out campsites and roads had been repaired. It was a little rough, since some of the gravel in the sites wasn’t packed down as much as the old sites, but this opened another eight sites at the campground.

We were able to get a site just above the creek and you could see the little waterfall that’s about 20 yards upstream from the site. In the picture above, you can see our campfire and the little waterfall in the background.

Enjoying the weatherAs you can see, Clara is enjoying the bright sunlight in here zero gravity chair. She spent the time enjoying the campsite while I spent much of my time trolling for trout.

As mentioned, the weather was really nice. It was nice enough to go out in the boat in shorts. This had a bit of a down side, since I managed to sunburn my knees. I didn’t burn the upper parts of my legs, or the lowers. All that turned out crispy were my knees. For what it’s worth, it did look a lot worse than it actually was. They seemed warm for the first day but didn’t really end up hurting. I could have done far worse, I suppose.

We headed out to our favourite campground last Wednesday. This is Kusawa Lake, a little more than an hour west of Whitehorse (60° 35’N, 136° 9’W).

We left about 4 PM and it was almost the last trip we took. There is a turnoff from the Alaska Highway to the campground road. I signaled my left turn, started to slow down, and checked my side mirror. I learned the last part in the two Defense Driving courses I’ve taken (one in high school and one in the army). The car behind me was slowing down but the idiot behind him decided to pass both of us. He should have been able to see the turn signals so he probably knew exactly what they were doing, and did it anyway. I caught a bit of his facial expression and he seemed unhappy with what I screamed at him while waving a one-finger salute. If I didn’t have the motorhome and boat behind us, I may have followed him down and yelled at him at his first stop. I’ll admit, visions of a tire iron may also have crossed my mind. It was a dark blue Toyota or Subaru, by the way.

We spent five days at Kusawa, and in a trend, the fish weren’t biting much there either. I did catch two trout, one about 1½ lbs. and one about 2½ lbs. I froze these and will smoke them some time this week. The weather was hot, with temperatures in the high twenties, except for Thursday. There was a nice overcast and it only got up to 23°. It’s hard to argue with weather like this for a whole weekend, and we enjoyed it to the fullest.

There were three more things to the trip that were an annoyance. First, the neighbours on one side of us had the most whiny dog. He was constantly whining and the neighbours really didn’t seem interested in doing anything about it. On the other side, the other neighbour was a bit of a winner, too. There was someone who moved into the site Thursday afternoon and, before that, there was nothing at that site at all. A little later Thursday, this guy shows up and says he had that site and, basically, kicked the other people out of it. If you like trends, the people at the two sites on either side of us were together.

The third problem was the road itself. I have never seen the road in such rough shape. There are 11 km of washboard, and some of the dips in the washboard are three or four inches. It is one lane in a few places and there is no evidence the government has graded it this year. Before they fixed it almost 20 years ago, it was better than it was this week. And frankly, that annoys me since, for the last three years, you see the following sign at the beginning of the road…

EAP