Blessed by the Potato

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.

I made it to Victoria safe and sound, and the flight, even at 5 hours, was pretty decent. I had my worries at first because there was a small baby seated across from me, and I had nightmarish visions of screaming and crying, but she was actually great and didn’t cry at all. She’d even smile when I turned over and waved.

I was starting to drag a fair bit when I got in though because I just couldn’t quite get to sleep on the plane. I completely spaced about the shuttle bus (~$15) from the airport and just grabbed a cab instead which set me back $55. In my defense, I was swayed by the fact that the cab was a bright yellow Prius. In fact, Victoria seems to be something of a hybrid mecca: virtually every cab is either a Prius or a Camry hybrid, and the ones that aren’t are Yarises (how Toyota got such a lock on the Victoria cab market I can’t really say). That is, of course, how it should be given how much of an improvement hybrids make to cab-like driving. The trip in from the airport averaged about 5.8 L/100 km. Even the “regular” cars seem to have a higher proportion of hybrids and smaller cars; hardly any SUVs at all.

I went for a nice long walk when I first got in and the weather was great. After that it was nap time. When I got up, I was surprised to see the sun still shining since they were calling for rain tonight. I went out for another walk in search of dinner, but came up empty-handed. Apparently Victoria closes at 8, even in Chinatown. I spent nearly an hour walking around trying to find an East Side Mario’s that I swear I had seen close to the hotel when I was walking around earlier, but never did find it. After checking the Yellow Pages, it looks like it doesn’t exist, which makes me wonder if I dreamed I saw and East Side Mario’s, and if I’m tireder than I think I am.

I just checked the schedule for the conference, and I don’t have anything until 6 pm tomorrow, so I’m trying to decide what to do. I found a place that rents bikes, but now my legs are hurting after over 2 hours of walking today. It also looks like the car rental place across the street has a Prius, so I might see if I can rent it and go on an extended test drive and trip up into the mountains of Vancouver Island, maybe find a beach and have a pic-nic or something. If you’ve got any suggestions, leave them quickly (I’ll be making up my mind around 12pm Ontario time).

Well, my Nokian WRs were fantastic this winter, with a huge improvement in traction over the all-seasons I was using before. I only had my wheels spin even a little just twice through the whole winter, whereas before wheelspin was at least a weekly occurrence (if only a minor split-second loss of traction at an icy stop) when the weather was particularly nasty. As spring is setting in and the warmer weather returns I’m not finding any issues with the tires being too soft or sloppy, though the real hot weather hasn’t hit yet. As I first reported, they are a bit noisier on the turns, but it doesn’t bother me at all.

In addition to recommending the tire, I’d also recommend Kal Tire, the store that I got them from. Just a few days ago, I hit a bump or pothole or something, and heard a strange bouncing ball type ringing noise from the back of the car. It didn’t happen again, so I didn’t pay it much heed… until today when I found out I had a bulge in my sidewall. Their warranty is going to take care of it, and the experience in dealing with them has been pretty good so far. They didn’t have another Nokian WR in stock in my size, and I said I had to drive to Toronto tomorrow. Rather than let me risk driving on a tire that has a compromised sidewall, they put on a used tire (which is worn down, but still legal and in good shape otherwise) free of charge to get me around until my new Nokian arrives next week. At that point, I’ll have to pay a bit for the replacement since the warranty is pro-rated and I’ve got about 6000 km on the tire now, but it should only be about $10 or so, and they’ll do the mounting for free (I believe — we’ll see for sure next week!).

Wayfare and I were talking about housing and about how it seems like any halfway decent place in Toronto is out of our reach — when we realized we weren’t quite certain what our reach was. We had some very vague ideas based on our savings and estimated income, and some rules of thumb (e.g.: you can afford a house that costs about 3 times your yearly pre-tax income). However, I didn’t think a lot of those were very realistic: what if we had a lot of debt, or liked a lavish lifestyle, or were frugal and wanted to spend more of our income on a house? Plus, as nice as some of the rules of thumb are, they seem to have been largely blown out of the water by the current housing market (which I think may be due for a flatlining or correction, but that’s a topic for another day). So to help us look at our options and lay out a few future scenarios, and also to see where all the figures and calculations were coming from, I made a spreadsheet. It was actually a rather good spreadsheet if I do say so myself, and I took the time to put a bit of formatting into it, so I decided to share it with you here.

[Note for those reading this via a feed: you may need to come to the web site proper at www.holypotato.com/?p=499 to download the excel file]
I am not a financial advisor, nor do I even own my own house. This spreadsheet will likely contain errors and is simply an attempt to share my efforts with you, don’t take it as accurate financial advice. Use it, edit it, redistribute it to your liking. Attribution is appreciated but, in this case, not required.

I am, of course, always interested when a contest open to Canadians features a Prius as the prize. A contest by the National Post is doing that right now, and it’s an essay/video contest to boot, which on the one hand should keep the number of entries fairly low, but on the other, requires merit rather than random chance. With my luck, a merit-based contest is probably a good thing, however, I can’t really think of a way that I’ve helped the environment in my local community, and certainly not one that has earned “attention and support from others.”

Anything I’m overlooking?