Horses

I would like to introduce you to something you won’t see every day. I have a niece who is totally focused on horses. Horses are extremely important to her and over the years she has developed a talent to produce the most beautiful drawings of…..you guessed it…..horses. I have only picked 2 of them from her facebook page called “Randis Drawings” And the following drawings are not from her. They are from her Great-Grand Uncle Willi Harwerth. He made these drawings as young adolescent. Yes, he was approx. at the same age as my niece.                  This drawing is actually showing my Great-Grandfather, Richard Harwerth

Good Thing We Have A Hair Dryer

Today, the “pleasure” of winter took an unexpected turn. Well, maybe we should have been prepared for that, but this morning I could not get the trailer door open. The latch was frozen solid and there was no way I could move it. Bea had the idea of using her hair dryer to thaw out the lock mechanism from the inside. And sure enough, after a few seconds of giving full blast of heat to the lock-set the door opened up. The reason why this problem occurred was yesterday’s weather. It was sleeting and snowing and a lot of humidity came down, settling on everything exposed. Roads were slippery to the extend that most roads up north had been closed either because of road ice or accidents. Highway 881 leading up to Conklin was closed just south of town because of a major accident with a tanker on fire. Interestingly, I had just traveled that road the day before the freezing rain came down. In fact, the road closure came only a few hours after my arrival in Edmonton. The previous couple of days had brought much warmer temperatures. Snow had melted and water was dripping everywhere. But all that came to a sudden halt yesterday. Gas prices have now been on a steady decline and people in Alberta are getting worried about how long this hot economy will last. As a matter of fact no economic boom will go on for ever and history shows that clearly. The last oil bust was in the eighties and it can happen again. A moderate softening of the Alberta economy can be a healthy thing as there are a lot of people struggling to get ends to meet. Have you seen the yellow line over top of my postings? The reason why it is there is that I have been “graced” with lots of unwanted “comments”. Today 2 of those “comments” arrived again. Probably the sender could not read English, as his postings were in Spanish. They got deleted anyway. I am still hesitant to install an approval process, as that could prevent legitimate commenters from sending their comments. I will monitor the situation and as long as there is only a couple of soliciting comments I choose to hit the Delete-Button.

When Snow Is Measured in Feet Rather Than Inches

Looking at the series of pictures from Buffalo, NY, I feel reminded of our winters in Norway when I had to start my tractor every 2 hours to remove the snow from the road and our farm yard. It would almost be futile to keep track of snow amounts by counting inches or centimeters. No, most often it came by the feet. 2 feet in one night was not unheard of. The next morning we had to dig ourselves out of the door and make a tunnel to get into our 5000sqft. pig stable. At the time our house had a steel roof. When the snow piled up high enough you could hear a loud crack, then a prolonged rumble and hope nobody would be standing close to the building, because the person would be buried under heaps and heaps of snow. The entire roof load coming down like an avalanche, would have crushed him. I also remember the days and weeks after such a snowfall. Icicles would start growing from the roof edge. As the days went by those icicles would gradually be pushed over the edge and hit the upper-floor windows making it impossible to look out. Our house was a log home and we had 4 or 5 wood burning stoves in the house. We carried wood from the barn to the house and fed the stoves with it. A cozy warmth was filling the 150 year old house and we would sit in our living room looking at the high peaks, covered in snow and ice. When the sky had turned blue again we often observed strong winds blowing snow off the peaks. The high mountains kept the sun from shining into our valley, so it could get quite cold as well. When the month of February came around the sun got over the tops for a few minutes only. We would celebrate with coffee outside. From that day on the sun would shine longer every day. Those are great memories for us. We were much younger then and we thought winter was exciting. I still think that winter is exciting but I sure don’t wish 3 ft of snow making life difficult these days.

Getting A Tire Fixed But There Was A Problem

It’s been a couple of weeks that I noticed a loss of air pressure in one of the rear ambulance tires, and today I saw the reason why. A small screw had imbedded itself in the rubber and was causing the slow loss of pressure. So after a look on the internet I found a tire shop right here in Acheson. When driving off the RV-Park I was met with this. A semi was “parked” across the road leaving only a small area behind it to pass. But why was the tractor in the ditch??? My guess was that the driver had taken a wrong turn believing the road to be a ramp onto Highway 16A, which it isn’t. In fact it dead-ends in the RV-park. Sooo he must have tried to turn the rig around which ultimately ended him in the ditch. He wasn’t able to move neither forward nor backward. Anyway I got past him and was now heading towards the tire shop. But there I was told that they got no time for me today but that I could come back tomorrow. Another great example of Alberta service. After further consultations of the internet I decided to get myself over to Spruce Grove where another known tire shop could be found. They were busy as well and I would have had to wait 90 minutes minimum before they could even THINK of looking at my tire. After this I asked myself what if this would have been an emergency? Again: Alberta Service at its best. Another internet consultation brought another tire shop onto the screen. The address was along the same road, but I had not seen it yet. After cruising the entire length of the Avenue I saw the unpretentious sign over a small shop bay. I pulled up and walked into their office. It was unbelievably small, crowded and felt downright chaotic. I brought up my problem and was promised immediate help – after they had finished their lunch, which was alright with me. They had only room for one vehicle at the time as the rest of their garage was filled with junk. Or at least that was the way it looked to me. But within 30 minutes they had my tire fixed. I paid 20 Bucks and was on my way home, when my phone rang. It was Bea. “Don’t hurry home”, she said there is a semi across the road and NOBODY can pass by it. Didn’t I know about it? I sure did.   When I finally arrived at the scene a huge tow truck had pulled up alongside the semi and coaxed him up from the ditch. My waiting was cut short and now coffee and Christmas Cookies were waiting for me. Christmas Cookies? Well, well….of course I couldn’t keep my fingers out of the cookie jar. Even my home-baked cookies are gone.  Too bad. Temperatures have been really good today as we had no frost. At 0C (32F) it felt like spring had arrived. That led to a couple of outside errands been done. I had tried to get a quote from a propane company for a big tank delivery. A “PIG” contains 380liters and would last us a while. Unfortunately the delivery/pickup and rent of the tank is prohibitively expensive. Yes, they wanted 551 bucks for it. So I decided to ask my friend from the RV-dealership to borrow a couple of tanks from him. So today I got 5 tanks and got them filled up right away. Another change has been that we were lucky enough to find a home to move into. It won’t be before January 17 but then we will have a warm place for 3 1/2 months as the owners are snowbirds and will travel to Mexico for the winter. So from today on we are pretty much looking at 2 more months of trailer life.