OK, seriously, it’s 9pm and it ‘s 29.3 degrees on my deck…OUTSIDE!!!!
This is not the desert…it’s Vancouver for Pete’s Sake!
By the way…ever wonder who Pete was?
Archive for July, 2009
Too Hot to Handle!!!
July 27th, 2009, posted in The Environment
OMG. Seriously. This is too much. I moved to the Coast 20 odd years ago because it was a temperate climate. OK, I moved here for other reasons…that was just a bonus… but it really doesn’t get hot in Vancouver….it’s not supposed to. This is a temperate rainforest afterall. Sure, we might see a day or two of 30 degrees every couple of years…..but a whole week of it?!!??!
That’s just too much to bear!
OK, yes, I’m whining…..but I am a Northern girl and not used to wilting under heat unless I head to the Mediterranean or the Okanagan.
Not Vancouver!!!
But when it is 29.5 degrees C in my bedroom at 8pm…. I think I’m allowed to whine!
Enough already!
Another week of this?
You’re kidding……..
Wilt……
Well THAT was Cool!
July 27th, 2009, posted in The Environment
We are two nights into the Celebration of Light that Vancouver hosts each year and has hosted for 19 years now. Canada was last Wednesday and Saturday night was South Africa’s turn.
We had pulled our boat into the tidal grid at BYC for the weekend to get the bottom painted, props replaced etc, and a friend invited us out onto her sailboat to go see the show. We said yes (Of course!!). But late afternoon, around 4pm or so, some clouds started to pile up over the North Shore mountains and were pushing in from the East. Very strange in itself since most of our weather comes from the West. It had been so hot that I said I expected lightning….but I did NOT expect the magnitude of it!
It started to rain a bit as we got to the baot but we figured it would pass quickly…we were wrong, but then that’s boating…the good with the bad.
We got ourselves anchored out in English Bay and settled in to watch Natures prelude to the fireeworks…and what a show she put on. The lightning was streaking across the sky in all directions. We were confident in our safety out there since there wer many boats with taller masts than ours…. much more attractive lightning rods available.
But what really made it spectacular was the colour the sky turned…bright yellow and orange. Simply unbelievable. In a weird way… it was eerie and almost felt like there was something … terrible … about to happen… like a nuclear holocaust had occurred without our knowledge… there was an eerie quiet to the evening too….
I did not take the camera since it was raining and wasn’t into doing fireworks shots from the boat. Now I’m sorry I didn’t. But below are some amazing shots by others and a cool video of the day as taken from the Vancouver Katkam and a couple of Flickr photos by others… all of the photos look like they were through an orange filter… but this really was the colour of the sky….. it was surreal….
Oh yeah, and the fireworks were OK too… 
Remembering Jack
July 24th, 2009, posted in That's Life
Jack Hunter was a man I’ll never forget. He was one of a kind.
Jack taught me how to tie a bowline, he taught me that I really, really wanted a Bruce anchor on our boat, and he showed me that the old salties could manage to get somewhere in the fog without all the fancy contraptions you’d find on a mega yacht.
He had a smile that lit up a room, and a laugh that was positively infectious.
Sometimes you had to yell in his ear because he couldn’t hear worth a darn. But his mind was sharp as a tack and every time he read something about fish in the paper he’d corner me at the next function and ask me about it.
He had an infectious laugh, and a twinkle in his eye. You hear people say that, but it usually isn’t true….it was with Jack.
He always called me sweetie….and actually got away with it….
I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to Jack….because nobody told me that he had left us until after the funeral was over. And it was after I’d sent out the newsletter for the month of July, so others probably don’t know either. Somehow it didn’t widely get out that we had lost someone special.
| Hunter, Jack Thomas |
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| HUNTER Jack Thomas November 22, 1923 – June 26, 2009 Jack was predeceased by his first wife Phyllis. He is survived by his wife Barbara, son David Hunter, daughter Judy Connors, four grandchildren, seven great-grandchildren. There will be a graveside service for Jack at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, 3789 Royal Oak Avenue, Burnaby, BC on Tuesday, July 7th at two o’clock in the afternoon. In lieu of flowers donations may be made to the heart and stroke foundation. | |||
Geotagging on the Mac
July 24th, 2009, posted in Mac Stuff
I’ve played around with this for a couple of years now, but I’ve only switched to the Mac in the last year and geotagging has been trying my patience ever since. I used to use Trips and Pics ont eh PC, but the software doesn’t run on the Mac OS. Of course a query to the software manufacturer merely resulted in “Just run it under Windows on Bootcamp”. Idiots. Why exactly would I want to pollute my new Mac with the very thing I am trying to get away from?
So I bumbled around a bit and had a few false starts.
The first problem was that the Pharos iGPS500 isn’t recognized by the Mac and the driver they provide…simply doesn’t work. In trying to get my vessel navigation charts functional again I discovered this rather large problem. A nice person reworked the driver for me so the GPS would be recognized, but the data logging function never quite worked right. The GPS works just fine for navigation, but it isnt’ great for the track recording I used to do when out doing some photography.
So I wandered across HoudaGeo and thought this might be my salvation…except it wouldn’t work with the Pharos GPS at all.