Last month we decided to celebrate Marsha’s birthday by going down to Bellingham Washington for the day. Why Bellingham? Lets just say Marsha likes Bellingham more than Las Vegas or  Disney World and I’m not gonna complain about it. As it turned out though, something came up and we couldn’t go that weekend. Then the following was a Seattle playoff game so it would have been a really bad time to try to cross the border and find a hotel. Seattle won so that blocked off the next couple of weeks and Marsha wasn’t feeling well so we missed more. Then last week was the Superbowl. Now the game wasn’t IN Seattle but the team was IN the game so we expected things to be busy at the border. Finally this weekend everything looked clear. Nothing was on the schedule. No huge events were going on in Seattle. This time it was going to work. We got everything ready to catch the first ferry on Saturday. We had our bag packed and by the door. The cats were set and we went to bed early so we could be up at 4:30 to leave at 5:30, to catch the 6:30 ferry out of Departure Bay. 

And I woke up with a bit of a cold. 

Not a bad cold mind you, but enough that I didn’t want to spend a soggy day in a car. We’ll get there eventually. It isn’t a trip we HAVE to make. It’s one we WANT to make and we want to really enjoy it. The only real time constraint is that once we get sworn in as Canadian Citizens, we’ll lose our Permanent Residence Cards and I’m not sure we will be able to cross the border and come back until we get our Canadian Passports. But we don’t know when that will happen. Oh well,that’s something else that’ll get sorted out, someday.

As it was it wouldn’t have been a good weekend to drive down to Bellingham anyway. BC is getting drenched with rain, warm tropical rain. Imagine some leviathan standing on Hawaii with a giant fire host pointed at BC. That’s what it’s been like with wave after wave of heavy warm drenching rain falling day after day. Officially many places have been getting 15-30mm on most days (3/4-1 inch or more). Because it’s a tropical flow the freezing level has been very high. OK, those of you living in the Prairies don’t think about a freezing level much but here, where we have mountains it’s very important. Knowing where the freezing level is lets us know if the pass will be snow packed and if we can expect snow for next summers water supply. With the high freezing level, snow is melting off of all but the highest peaks. Most ski resorts are hurting because their runs are brown or even turning green. A couple of resorts have even announced they are giving up and closing for the season, and it’s only February. The one exception is in the the Okanagan, which is just north of the US border but quite high and far inland. They still have a good amount of snow. They are reporting lots of US skiers coming up because many of the western US ski areas also have little or no snow this year. My friends who ski are not happy with this turn of events. We on the other hand are quite happy with this winter. We try to avoid slipping on ice and snow whenever possible. The idea of going somewhere and paying a lot of money to get cold and wet really doesn’t appeal to us.  Over the last few months we’ve seen ads for some contest where the prize was a vacation in the Swiss Alps or the Bahamas. For us we wouldn’t even need to discuss it. Bahamas.

In Northern BC however, it’s colder and they ARE getting snow. Lots of snow. Feet of snow, even though we’re officially metric in Canada. The colder temperatures and snow were part of the reasons we didn’t move to northern BC eight years ago. It is though, still rainy old BC. This morning on the CBC the forecast for the North was “Wet snow and flurries near the coast. Dry snow and flurries inland”. Only in BC would snow be classified by how much rain it contained. 
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/terrace-kitimat-digging-out-from-record-breaking-snowfall-1.2949270

Now it’s not like we don’t have anything to do on this suddenly free weekend. It is tax time and we are studiously gathering all the records and forms and documents to file. Mind you by “we” I mean Marsha. We decided a long time Okanagan that it’s better for all concerned for her to handle the taxes, and for that matter anything to do with money. Between my creative accounting (what do you mean that accounting does not use Standard Deviation or Fourier Analyses) and my tendency to assume the worst (I can’t find this 10 cents, I’m going to jail), it’s just for the best. I did find it amusing that the company I work for sent out their T-4 forms (the Canadian equivalent of the W-2 form in the US) before Marsha’s company. Amusing because my company builds robots. We all try to have as little to do with accounting or paperwork as possible.  On the other hand, Marsha works for a company who’s business is specifically to prepare tax forms as quickly and efficiently as possible. (Oh - yeah he received his T4 one day before me)

I did finally get the slide show from Ethan Claymore done. It took longer than expected, both because of the music licensing issue I mentioned last week, as well as a bit of balky software. Just a hint, the current iPhoto software is not good for this sort of thing. I found out how to create a slide show film within iMovie and got much better results. It doesn’t try to impose what it thinks would be best, rather it lets you do what you want so you have much better control over the result. I’m reasonably happy with how this came out. It’s also pushed me to start working on a few other video projects that I’ve had on the back burner. More about that later, if it comes together the way I want.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTojgYXRSEE&list=UUqVFTqDkWGdzLKW7GOpgTgQ

I will have a bit of time to get started on it too. This is a three day weekend, Monday is Family Day here in BC. Mostly I think it was just an excuse to add a holiday to fill the long gap between New Years and Easter. Now most stat holidays are a Province by Province thing, in fact some haven’t added a February stat holiday at all. The others have it next week though it’s called different things in different Provinces. The sixteenth is Family Day in Alberta, Ontario, and Saskatchewan, but it’s called Louis Riel Day in Manitoba. On Prince Edward Island it’s Islander Day, and in Nova Scotia it’s Viola Desmond Day. Who was Viola Desmond? She was a Nova Scotian business woman who took a strong stand against discrimination nine years before Rosa Parks. As this is Black History Month, and there is a long history of African Americans migrating to Nova Scotia starting at the time of the Revolutionary War it makes sense to name the February holiday after her.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola_Desmond

Cheers.

PIX: We took a walk on the beach today. Even in winter you see all sorts of beautiful things. The surf, the driftwood, early blooming rhododendrons, Marsha. Even the sound of the waves is nice.

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