Last week, (Jan 30 to be precise) Marsha was walking along the beach in Lantzville and there she found a camera. It was a nice little pocket digital camera in a nylon case and it was just sitting there in the beach. Marsha looked around but nobody was around. The tide was coming in and in another few minutes the camera would have been ruined so she picked it up. Back at home we looked through the hundred or so pictures on the camera. Most were of fairly generic things. Nondescript kids, things around a house, that sort of thing. We did find several pictures of a fairly distinctive house, two dormers over the garage and the other end had a double gable, so we printed a couple of them off and then the next day, Saturday we went down and drove around Lantzville hoping to see the house. Unfortunately none of the places there looked anything like the place in the pictures. We returned home (OK we finished shopping and running errands and THEN returned home).

We had just about resigned ourselves to posting a sign in the Lantzville post office and hoping the people would come in. the trouble we didn't know if they even lived in Lantzville. They could have been from Calgary or Toronto and were just passing through. I decided to do some sleuthing. I uploaded the pictures and looked through them. On the screen I could see about half of the pictures were inside a store. In particular a place that sells bottled water and water filtrations systems.

An aside here. To us the idea of a place that sells filtered water systems and bottled water in Nanaimo seems absurd. This place has some of the best water we've ever had. It has no minerals, no hardness, no nothing. They get their water from snow runoff from the mountains in the center of the island. Why someone would think they need to filter and 'purify' what comes out of the tap here is beyond us.

Anyway, I looked through the pictures and kept seeing all these pictures in this store. On a hunch I did a Google search for a Pure Water Store near Nanaimo. There is exactly one. It is on the north side of Nanaimo near the big mall about half a mile from the border of Lantzville. I decided that these had to be the people who belonged to the camera. The next morning I stopped at the store on the way to work. From the front I could see it was the same store. When I went in I saw the same newspaper clippings taped to the register. I even recognized the person behind the counter from the pictures. I walked up to the counter and asked him if he had lost his camera. He had no clue. He called his wife and as a matter of fact they had. He also described the house in the pictures.

Apparently I've been watching too many detective shows with Marsha, but regardless that was our good deed for the week.

PIX
1: Marsha at high tide.
2: There's this house in Lantzville where the seagulls hang out. There's about 30 of them in this picture. We've occasionally seen twice that number. We don't know why they congregate on this particular house; no other house around here seems to be a gull-magnet like this one. It's got to be a bit of a bother for the homeowners, the mess and noise you know. The house next to it looks nearly identical, same color, same roof, same size but we've never seen a bird on that roof. Just this one. Weird.
3: Still testing the new camera. It's really good with subtle colors like sunrises. I tried to photograph the planet Venus but even at highest magnification it just could not focus on a little dot in a black sky. Next I'm going to try taking some shots of the moon.
4: Fog on the water and the mountains illuminated by dawn.



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