It’s official: August was a really lousy month. April’s got nothing on this August. Just one bloody thing after another. The final straw came Saturday. You see we were at the Superstore. My nephew Andrew and his friend Martha are staying with us this weekend and we wanted to pick up a couple of things to get ready. As we were walking through the meat section Marsha slipped on something on the floor and went down. No permanent damage but her left shin has a couple of nasty bruises >5 inches across with swelling and everything. Her right knee also took a nasty thwack on the cart and is stiff and turning all sorts of colours. The side of her head is swelling where it hit a merchandise rack, but it’s under her hair so we don’t know if it’s also going technicolor. She’s stiff and sore as heck but she’ll recover. I keep bringing her fresh ice packs and aspirin. She’s hobbling around OK and by Tuesday should be fine, but it kinda shoots a hole in the weekend. We’d been thinking of taking Andrew and Martha to see all the sights around here. This made it a bit tough.

As you know I can’t drive them anywhere myself as I’m still working with just one good eye. That is, the right one that was repaired can only see distance and the left one can only see close up. Between the two I figure I have one functional eye, but somehow I don’t think the RCMP Traffic Enforcement division would approve of me getting behind the wheel. The doctor in Victoria said the right one is healing well, the complications seem to be resolving themselves but it will take six to eight weeks for it to heal completely. Then we get to do the other eye. The second one should go better, heck let’s be blunt it almost HAS to go better. Once the second eye has healed then I can get reading glasses and I’ll be back in the saddle. With luck I’ll have two good eyes in time to see the Christmas decorations.

Of course there’s the bit of news that led off the month. Some of you may have already heard about this through the grapevine but at the beginning of August during a routine exam they found I have colon cancer. I go in for surgery to have it taken out on the tenth of September. August however, has been a string of visits and tests and scheduling, and setting up a leave of absence from work, and such. So much fun. The best part of course is all the meetings to discuss and explain what’s going on to my boss, the company’s accounting person, random nurses, doctors, hospital scheduling staff, and so on. I SO enjoy discussing my ass with total strangers.

See what I mean about August? It’s just been one thing after another. I was reminded of an old song that went  “If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all”. When this came to me I couldn’t remember what song it was from, just the line. Curious, I did a little bit of on-line research. The first reference was from a lesser known but truly fine Blues number by Ray Charles.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCDFwTRlBZY  The second was from a running gag on Hee Haw. Of course as luck would have it, guess which version I was remembering.

But it wasn’t just a bad month for us. The Canadian Navy had an incident this week. Two of their ships were travelling from the base here at Esquimalt, BC to Hawaii when they collided. The ships were the HMCS Algonquin, which in a lovely bit of irony was struck by the HMCS Protecteur. That’s right, the whole of the bloody Pacific Ocean to sail in and on a clear day just before noon the two ships ran into each other. Somebody’s got some ‘splanin to do.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2013/08/31/canada-warship-collision-hmcs-algonquin.html

Friday morning I was awoken by a roaring noise. At first I assumed that it, like most weird sounds in the night, was coming from Marsha’s CPAP. This time it wasn’t though. A very intense squall line was going through dropping buckets of rain. I ran around closing windows and checking for leaks by the light of the lightning flashes. As it crossed the water and entered Vancouver, the storm intensified and there were a lot more lightning strikes. Around a thousand at least. It dropped between 13 and 17mm of rain (1/2”-3/4”) in less than an hour which would be a heavy downpour in the prairies.  Here it was off the charts. I mean we get a lot of rain, it is the Pacific Northwest after all, but not all at once. Those were the official measurements too. Unofficially some spots might have gotten several times that. It was a wild night.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2013/08/30/bc-vancouver-rain.html

Thursday the town of Terrace was also awoken by a loud noise. A weird squeaking grinding noise that was loud enough to be heard all over town and echo off of the nearby hills. It woke people up and really freaked a few of them out. There’s a video in the linked article of what it sounded like.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2013/08/30/bc-terrace-sounds.html
All sorts of exotic theories were suggested, but in the end it turned out that one of the city workers was using a hand grinder to resharpen the blade on the cities road grader. While this is a logical, if mundane, explanation, it’s not stopping people from proposing all sorts of more interesting alternatives including a battle between a Spirit Bear and a Sasquatch and/or UFO. Here’s an idea, next time how about not doing this kind of work first thing in the morning.

But finally let’s finish with a bit of good news. They just recovered a nearly complete hadrosaur from Tumbler Ridge BC. It’s been excavated and flown to The Peace Region Palaeontology Research Centre for preparation. Now Alberta is of course, well known for its dinosaurs. They have a really fantastic museum, the Royal Tyrell Museum, in Calgary with all sorts of exhibits about Dinosaurs and other prehistoric life. http://www.tyrrellmuseum.com/index.htm.  BC on the other hand does not have very many dinosaurs. The rocks are either too old or too young, or too mashed up to have a lot of dinosaurs. This is why finding and recovering this hadrosaur is such a big deal.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2013/08/28/bc-dinosaur-skeleton-airlift-tumbler-ridge.html

So here’s to August; good bye and good riddance.

Doug & Marsha.
PIX: 12" Jellyfish, Beach Textures, Andrew & Martha, A Happy Home