Remembrance Day 2006

Remembrance Day 2006. Cold rain. Just like most Remembrance Days.

In Flanders Fields
by John McCrae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

On this day, we remember the eternal sacrifices of our relatives and others:

Bill Christopher - virtual memorial - Calgary Highlanders. Circumstances of death unknown. More details can be found in the Remembrance Day 2005 blog entry.

Ron Taylor - virtual memorial - Royal Canadian Artillery. Killed by a mine explosion. Circumstances of Ron's death are documented in the RCHA book "Right of the Line: An Anecdotal History of the Royal Canadian Horse Artillery from 1871" by Mitchell, MC, CD Maj. G.D. (1986).

A tidy garage!

I wrote on Sunday that I put up a shelf and cleaned up the garage. Well - mostly did that on Sunday. Tonight I finished cleaning up the one part of the garage so I can park my car in that spot. There will still be lots of space for the snowblower, etc.

The other single car bay still needs a bit of organizing - that is where we are going to store the patio furniture for the winter.

No show

So I worked at home on Monday, waiting and waiting for nobody to show show up.

This photo was taken at 12:30pm on Monday Nov 6th.

Garage cleanup

Today we cleaned up the garage. It was a mess since it has been the "workshop" whenever the builder's crew or someone else needed to come back to do something. (And as you know, they have had many trips back to correct this and that.) I built a shelf across the front of the garage to store the various gardening bits. I still have about an hour of cleanup to do, but that involves taking my car out of the garage and doing some rearranging, so I left that for another day.

We are expecting more people tomorrow - we don't know who is coming as of yet. We asked Charles to please co-ordinate everyone for one final day. We also also asked Charles to give us a list of who's coming and what are they fixing so we can make sure that there is alignment between our expectations and Charles' plans. As of right now (11:30pm Sunday), we haven't heard if there are any plans.

I brushed Tawny tonight. The pile of hair almost covers an entire tile! What you can't really tell from this 2-D photo is that the pile of hair is about 3" thick at the middle.

Tawny won't sit still for Freda to brush her, but she will sit still for me. She sometimes gets her legs going if I find a particularly spot where she enjoys the brushing.

Beautiful!

This was a panorama photo I put together from 4 others. This was an awesomely beautiful day!


This is Tawny, waiting patiently on the front step of the neighbour's house, hoping that their dog Vasha can come out to play. They run and chase each other like the crazy canines that they are.

Tawny is younger than Vasha (3 1/2 yrs vs 5), but Vasha is a more slender dog (being a mix with Lab and something else). They do play very well together.

Barbecue deck complete

We had snow flurries today, but nothing stayed, thankfully! Unlike Edmonton where these it looks freezing cold (according to tonight's news).

This is the finished barbecue deck. The skirting really finishes it off, but also makes it uninhabitable for critters.

Back pains & the Better Business Bureau

When I was placing the rocks for the steps on the weekend, I twisted  my torso to place a rock and got a twinge in my back.  Ouch!  I spent most of Monday flat on my back on the floor and expect that will be the same thing today.  My observation (and this is not a unique one) is that most daytime tv shows should have vapid or insipid in their titles.  For example, the Vapid Regis and Insipid Kelly Show....

Also, I heard from the Ottawa Better Business Bureau that they have forwarded our complaint to the fireplace company for resolution.

Panoramas

This panorama was created by "autostitch" from seven photos that I took in February last year, when Freda and I took a walk around and over the lake. You can tell it is a composite photo because there are two Tawnys and one of then is sorta hazy/fuzzy.

I didn't crop the photo so you could see how powerful the software is - because it warps the source images if needed to accomodate change in location, camera direction, etc, when combining the photos.

You can download a demo version of the autostitch software from the UBC web site.

A view of the deck

This photo shows the deck from a bit of a distance to show how nice the deck looks with the lattice and boxed in stairs. (I need to do the same thing to the barbecue deck also.) I placed some flat stones at the bottom of the steps to give a nice solid footing when stepping off the stairs. I used stone as it gives a more natural look here in the back yard.

I filled in the cracks between the large stones just to the right of the deck with sand and crushed stone. It has a much cleaner look now.

Changing the vents

Freda found the whiteness of the floor registers too bright and attention getting. So we went and purchased taupe vents to replace the white ones.

This photo shows (a) the taupe register looks much better against the hardwood flooring, and (b) the builder's crew and the various trades left a pile of garbage in every vent. How disappointing.