Blessed by the Potato

It’s been pretty dingy here on PEI with cold, cloudy days dominating. Finally after the thunderstorm yesterday we got a bit of warmth and sunshine so Wayfare and I took to the beach. There, we engaged in a game that I like to call “annoy the invertebrates”:

After getting back we found across the way a family of 3 small foxes playing with each other, while mommy watched from not too far off.

I used to love Hershey’s Special Crisp: a chocolate bar with peanut butter rice crisps, a thin layer of caramel, covered in milk chocolate. It may just have been the perfect chocolate bar. For whatever reason, they discontinued it many many years ago here in Canada. In the States, that bar has continued as the Whatchamacallit. I was in a Rite Aid store the other day specifically looking for this wonderful chocolate bar, and found to my great pleasure that it was on sale at 3 for a dollar — a better deal even than buying chocolate bars in bulk from Costco back home. I bought 15 bars pretty much cleaning them out, and they are every bit as glorious as I remember Special Crisp being.

Now I’m contemplating going back for more, though according to their website the sale ended yesterday, and it would cost me over $5 to take the trolley down. I kind of wish I had bugged the clerk to get another box for me to really clean them out, but there were like 8 people waiting in line behind me that day. So now I’m going to try to see if someone in the states would be willing to buy a box or three and ship them up to Canada for me (I found a company a few years back that offered to this, specifically selling chocolates and candies not available in Canada, and the cost was like $1.50 per bar; it’s good, but not that good).

In other news, the conference has ended and I won a student presentation award :) The internet is back up after going so long without it. I don’t think I’ve gone 3 days without internet access since the 90’s.

We went tried to go surfing yesterday, but were only so successful. The place we went to offered lessons for something like $75 per person, but of course we didn’t make an appointment so we couldn’t do that. However, the rental place did give us a board and a wetsuit for $17 and let us make fools of ourselves. I think we were almost as successful doing that as we could have been with a short lesson, no matter how professional. Nearly everyone managed to get up on top of the surfboard in a standing position, if only briefly, while I alone seemed to have trouble just riding the wave on my stomach. I kept getting off balance and flipping around, sometimes hitting my head on the surf board as I was plunged underwater. Despite stating repeatedly that there were going to be plans to go out last night, everyone just went to bed after getting back from a day of being thrashed by the waves. I’m trying to figure out what to do with my last bit of time here, and I think I’m going to go to the San Diego zoo. I’ve got 600 MB of space left on my camera, so hopefully that’s enough to get a lot of shots of the wildlife :)

San Diego’s been a bit of a hole. We’re staying at the Town and Country Hotel and the place is like a ghetto of little two-storey motel buildings all together. Our room in particular appears to be the worst of all — there is no sound insulation and the blinds don’t quite close all the way. Combined with the fact that we are under the outdoor stairs to the 2nd level and don’t even have the immaculate parking lot view of the other units but instead stare directly into a noisy ice machine and brightly-lit Pepsi dispensary, it made the night rather hellish.

The conference chose this place purely out of cost considerations, so I was expecting it to be a little shabby, but some things go beyond the pale. Internet is running at $10/day, and for a place that’s charging us $150 per night I would have expected a lot more than this. Especially since the internet was down all day after eating my $10, and it was really starting to wear on a lot of people who, well, really need their internet fix. Ok, the staff have been pretty nice so far, I’ve got to give them that, but even the conference facility is a little lacking: the speakers in one room have a terrible rumbling bass distortion problem so we can’t clearly make out what the speaker is saying.

I’ve only been here like 2 days and I’m done with Mexican food, thanks. It is kind of neat/weird that San Diego is incredibly close to the Mexican border, I had no idea — even the trolley system goes right to the border crossing — but this mexican for lunch and dinner got old by lunchtime day 2 (chips and salsa I’m good with, but I don’t really care for anything else on the mexican menu). I’m going to have to stop eating now for the rest of the trip because everything that’s not deep fried is slathered in butter and served four sizes too large (seriously, I only ate about a third of my lunch and I was stuffed, not hungry again until like 8 pm).

So tonight we tried to take it pretty easy, sitting back in the hot tub… until security kicked us out. Ok, it does close at 11 pm and I can see how, with the really shitty sound proofing in the rooms, allowing people to frolic in the hot tub can lead to issues… but we were really super quiet. Ah, well, back to the room, to find this waiting for us:

Quel Horreur!!! The picture doesn’t even do it justice for how shocking and gross it was. I mean we were facing a cockroach that was fast and nearly 2″ long.

I want to go home now, thanks. (Or, at least to PEI)

Well, conference season is in full swing, and I’ve only got a few days back home here before I’m off again. I’d apologize for not keeping up my usual tri-weekly posting frequency during this madness, except that the site’s traffic and the number of people asking “Oh, do you have any pictures from Victoria?” indicate that no one is reading it any more.

My presentation in Victoria was not as good as it could have been: just as I was getting up on stage, the organizer told me I had to cut my talk down to 6 minutes (from the 9 it had been originally scheduled for) which put me into a bit of a panic. So things were rushed and I sounded nervous and it just wasn’t as smooth as I would have liked.

I don’t recall if I mentioned it in the other post or not, but Victoria is such a home to small cars that it even has half-sized parking spots for Smarts and Minis! The weather was fantastic for the whole week, very mild and partly sunny. For the end of the afternoon on the last day the clouds or haze that had been covering the Olympic mountains in Washington finally cleared, and I got this picture of the snow-capped peaks over the shoulder of the BC legislature.

The Prius wasn’t available, but I did end up renting a car for my day off here in Victoria and took a trip up into the mountains of Vancouver Island along with two of my colleagues from work. We managed to save a bit of money on the rental just by asking nicely for a deal “What do you have available at the government rate?” I asked, and we got a mid-sized car with unlimited mileage for the cost of compact. Upgrades like that are pretty common at Budget, but I felt pretty good about my negotiating, and then we had a bit of conversation about negotiation. My supervisor is skilled in the art, sometimes taking weeks to wear down a salesman to nearly cost. I said that I can usually manage to get 10% off if I work at it, and that’s usually a workable margin for almost any business; he said that he once bought a rug for only 10% of the price (90% off).

We first headed up towards Nanaimo, but it was raining and we didn’t quite want to stop there. Instead, we powered on through to Coombs, and stopped at the old country market with the goats on the roof. Yes, it’s got a living grass roof and goats live up there. It was quite a neat market with a tonne of ice cream (that I somehow managed to pass on), as well as some tourist souvenir type stuff, and a number of unique items that my supervisor says the shopkeeper orders in when something catches his fancy, and usually in large lots. This time, there was a whole pile of bamboo cutting boards. There’s also a restaurant and bakery inside, so we pigged out to fuel up for the next stop.

Then we continued on to our real destination: Cathedral Grove (MacMillan Provincial Park), one of the last standing old growth forests on Vancouver island. Seeing the huge cedar and fir trees was pretty incredible. What was even more incredible is that somehow, there aren’t any mosquitoes on Vancouver Island. I want to live here already.

Here’s a picture of what’s called a nurse tree: an ancient cedar has fallen, and the nutrients in its roots have served to feed a new generation of trees on top of it. What’s neat is that if I aim the camera lens down the length of the fallen tree, the perspective can make it look like it’s a path through a mature forest.

There’s a lot of moss growing on these trees. For that matter, there’s a lot of moss growing on some of the houses on Vancouver Island – they really ought to have steel roofs, or something else other than asphalt shingles. Here’s a branch up high where so much moss has grown around it and sort of merged a few branches to make it look just like a bear licking its paws!

Since I’m a very amateur photographer, I sometimes like to play with the settings on my camera to see what happens. Here’s a close-up shot of a blackberry blossom with and without flash:

My supervisor took the time to educate us on a few of the finer points of forestry as long as we were romping about on the trail. Here’s a stump that shows evidence of improper cutting technique. Ideally, this tree should have had a wedge taken out of one side, and then a cut come across cleanly from the other side to right where the wedge was cut. In this case, the logging was undercut and missed the wedge, so you can plainly see a lot of wood tissue that snapped off due to the forces of the tree put on that small area. It wasn’t a clean cut at all, and apparently that kind of stress break is not only bad for the value of the timber, but is also a dangerous, less controlled cut, and the lumberjack who cut that could face fines.

Here’s another pair of images taken with different camera settings. This time, I was adjusting the ISO and the colour balance (auto vs. cloudy) and you can clearly see how much of the lushness and depth of the greenery was restored by adjusting the colours.

“Imagine,” he says “having to hike through here, that kind of underbrush full of poison oak as you chart or prospect, and then on top of that you have to average 15 miles per day or you miss your float plane back out.” Then, pointing to the reeds below “And as if that wasn’t bad enough, picture how much water must come rushing through here in a big rainforest dump that it’s bent the reeds over like that along the ground.”

From a distance, this splintered tree looked like a mess of mossy boards; I thought someone had tried to build a lean-to type shelter to live out here and the forest was taking it back. As you can probably see, it’s actually just the way a fallen tree trunk has splintered.

This massive tree was at one point blocking the path, and was nearly as tall as I was. You can see where they had to cut through it to open the path up. Even though that tree was never cut standing upright, the loggers put in a neat looking wedge-type cut, like the previous stump should have had. My supervisor wonders if they were just in the habit of cutting their trees like that so they did it anyway, or if they were in the habit of cutting fallen trees like that to hide their bad cuts…

The largest tree in the Cathedral Grove is seen here, with another impressive fallen log in front of it. What’s interesting is that this same fallen log was there at least 50 years ago as my supervisor visited it as a kid. These trees not long live for hundreds of years, they also take hundreds of years to decay after they fall, perhaps due in part to the ability of cedar to resist insects and to a lesser degree, fungus. The bark has been worn to a glass-like finish over the years from all the people climbing on it to get pictures in front of the largest tree.

The weather changed every few minutes on the drive back, with bright, sunny skies very suddenly leading to rain as we ducked into another valley, reminding us that we were in a rain forest. It was something else to see mountains wrapped in clouds, and even one peak that had a bit of snow still. Since it’s so hard to capture the magesty of distant mountains in a picture (since the contrast with the sky is generally poor), I’ve left this one as a fairly high resolution, so you will have to click here to see it.

Finally, we’re back to the hotel, and oddly enough the housekeeping staff has picked up my dirty laundry from the corner to which I banished it until repacking time and folded it neatly. Weird.

The conference begins in earnest at 8 am, so I’m off to bed now.