It’s been a rough couple of weeks here in the North. South of the border you’ve heard the news of the floods going down the Mississippi River. Up here Manitoba has been battling the same thing. First came the surge along the Red River and fortunately, Winnipeg was well prepared for spring flooding and came through it with little damage. Then the Assiniboine River west of Winnipeg flooded. The trouble is that this is very flat ground. It doesn’t take much water to cover miles of land. They have too much water, too fast and nowhere to put it. Finally they had to cut a hole in a dike upstream to take some of the strain off of the ones further down. It seems to have worked, the crest has passed and waters are receding.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/story/2011/05/14/mb-dike-breach-assiniboine-flood-manitoba.html

It seems that spring flooding has become a regular thing. Some of you may remember that last year it was Saskatchewan that was flooded. Most of the farmers in those areas didn’t get a crop in at all and there’s some fear that the same may happen to Manitoba farmers this year.
http://web.me.com/geoduck/Site/Weekly_Letter/Entries/2010/7/25_Suffering_Saskatchewan.html

But water wasn’t the only disaster this week. The forests of Alberta are very dry and over a hundred wild fires have broken out. Two of them came together this week to make a very large conflagration. Unfortunately they merged on top of the town of Slave Lake in central Alberta. Nearly half of the houses are gone along with Town Hall, the library, the mall, rows of businesses, and other buildings.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2011/05/16/slave-lake-fire-evacuation.html

Here in BC,  things have been a bit quieter but we’ve had some incidents. Yesterday Shaw, a company that provides cable TV, internet access, and landline telephones had an outage. The whole Province of BC lost Shaw telephone service. This impacted some residences, but more importantly they are very big among corporate customers and security services. Where I work we run two call centres that lost telephone service. The agents could still call each other but couldn’t call outside of the building, which cut the productivity down fairly significantly. We personally weren’t impacted because we use cell phones and Skype. Barbara uses a different provider so she didn’t lose her telephone connection.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2011/05/20/bc-shaw-phone-crash.html

The best part of this article (see link above) is near the bottom where they talk to an alarm company.
“Michael Jagger with Provident Security in Vancouver said customers started calling the company Friday morning complaining their home alarms weren't working.”

The front man for Provident Security is Mick Jagger?
I somehow get the feeling that he really really wishes his folks had either named him something else or let him join that band in high school like he wanted to, rather than going to work in the family business.

There was the case this week in BC that proves that some urban legends are true. Just across the water from us on the mainland, an eagle swooped down and grabbed a toy poodle and flew off with it. This might have gone unnoticed except it lost its grip and the poodle fell onto the lawn of the Shorncliff Nursing Home in Sechelt BC. It was injured, but has been cared for and is expected to survive, which as a stray wandering the streets alone it probably wouldn’t have. Some disasters have a happy ending.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2011/05/16/bc-poodle-eagle.html

Then there are the disasters you can see coming. Now understand I’m not a fan of country music. Oh sure there is the occasional song that I don’t mind, but my tastes go more toward Vivaldi than Twain, more Verdi than Paisley. This week I was in the Nanaimo office working on a computer. They had the radio playing and it was a country station. I pretty much just ignored it until a song came on that sliced through my defences. It was a typical twangy hayseed balled but a couple of lines made me stop cold.

“I’d like to kiss you way back in the sticks.
I’d like to walk you through a field of wild flowers
And I’d like to check you for ticks”.

Maybe it was the imagery. Maybe the off-balance meter. Maybe it was the true feeling for the term “Living down to the stereotype” that got to me. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t help feeling that some poor girl will be at her wedding and this song will be played for their First Dance.



But the biggest disaster this week was the predicted apocalypse that was supposed to occur on Saturday. Of course though, if you’re reading this, it obviously didn’t happen.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13468131

That wasn’t the tragedy though. In the article it says
“Bart Centre, is enjoying a boost in business for Eternal Earth-bound Pets, which he set up to look after the pets of those who believe they will be raptured. He has more than 250 clients who are paying up to $135 (£83) to have their pets picked up and cared for after the rapture.”

He’s cleared a cool $33,000 on this plan and he won’t have to do a bloody thing.

The real tragedy is that I didn’t think of this first.

Doug & Marsha

So this week we got a new bed. We liked this one because it has drawers underneath to give us lots of added storage. What we didn't expect was how much taller the bed would be. With mattress and box spring the blankets are over four feet off the ground. Momiji wouldn't go up there. Scared of heights I guess. Geiger on the other hand loved how he could look down on everyone.


I did not know that chive had such pretty flowers.