This week Marsha has been fighting a cold. The big effect was that it's been a week since she picked up rocks from the beach for the front flower bed. This is bothering her more than the cold itself. But there has been much more going on around here.

We went to a U-Pick strawberry farm a few kilometers south of town. The berries were really good. In about 20 minutes we had filled four buckets. The best part is that not only were they just $2 per pound, normally they are at least $3 in the store. We also got to select the berries so there were no bad ones. We ended up freezing 16 quarts plus kept some out to have now. The bad part came when we went to pay. We didn't realize that we had 25 pounds! Yikes!  We had to scrounge all the cash both of us had, plus all the Loonies and Toonies from the car. When it was all done we left with our berries, and about 12 cents in our pockets.

Speaking of Kilometers, we've gotten more feedback on my use of Celsius temperatures a couple of weeks back. The big question seems to be how hard is it to live and work in metric. Actually not too bad. The highway speeds are in kilometers, but we just go whatever the sign says so there's no conversion needed. Pop has been in 2 liter bottles for years so we're used to that. A lot of grocery items are in pounds or kilos (1 kilo=2.2 pounds). This leads to some confusion as at the Superstore the ad lists prices in pounds but some ring up in kilo's. The price is the same but Marsha has had to explain it to some people who think there was an error ("Your ad says a dollar a pound but you charged me $2.20"). Actually in the early 1980s when Canada was converting to metric there was an Air Canada flight that ran out of gas. It had to land on a drag strip near Winnipeg because the ground crew put 22,300 pounds of fuel not 22,300 kilograms of fuel aboard. Personally I grew up in Eugene Oregon in the '70s so I knew from elementary school on what a kilo was (and usually the street price as well). It was that kind of town.

There have been a number of Mountain Lion attacks in the area this month. Not on the Island yet but near Vancouver. Initially there were reports of missing dogs. Usually someone would be running through the park and they'd here a YIPE!. Then the dog they were running with would be gone. As you might expect there was a bit of consternation about this. At the beginning of the week they had tracked down and taken care of the first cougar. It was a very old, very thin female that couldn't cut it in the wilderness any more. Then on Thursday there was another attack. This time a mother and her three year old daughter were in a Vancouver park. The kid was literally just a couple of feet away as the Mother picked berries. She heard a YIPE!, turned and saw a cougar had her daughter. She leaped on the cougar, pried it off of her daughter and drove it away with her bare hands (and then ran like heck). All in all pretty amazing. The mother was unhurt. The kid seems unharmed other than a couple of punctures on her arm and scalp.  She seems to have come out of this pretty well, but does and keeps asking "Why didn't the kitty play nice?"

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2009/06/17/bc-squamish-cougar-shot.html

English Lesson of the week: Irony is the disparity of intention and result: when the result of an action is contrary to the desired or expected effect. (At least that's one way of defining it). Irony does NOT mean humorous, though it's often used in error as such. Irony may be funny, but as often it is dramatic or even tragic. An example of the latter happened this week on the mainland. A guy was driving through the Kootenays and fell asleep at the wheel. He ran off the road and crashed into a rest stop killing several people who were taking a break because they were too tired to drive.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2009/06/19/bc-kootenays-crash.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kootenays

This is right up there with the Minnesota guy last week that said to the cops something to the effect of 'I'm not drunk, give me a breathalyzer and I'll prove it' and then blew a .375. Of course I'm not sure that was so much ironic as just really really stupid.

http://wcco.com/crime/dwi.son.passenger.2.1038428.html

And while we're learning Canadian geography did you know there was a Great Slave Lake up here. It's in the Northwest Territories. It's actually named for the Slavey Tribe that lives in the area.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_slave_lake

In other news (we get a lot of BBC stories up here) we found something that WAS funny. Alitalia like most airlines has their own in-flight magazine with articles about the places they fly and maps of where they go. We heard that this month's magazine came out and somehow Sicily was missing. The whole island was just not on the map. Sardinia, and others were fine, but where Sicily was supposed to be was just blue water. A passenger brought it to their attention.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8106606.stm

That really inspires confidence.

D&M

Pix for the week
Saturday Sunset