Andrew Underwood

So Cass and I are putting in a garden in our back yard to feed ourselfs and trade food with the neighbors.  Maybe even trade food for other goods and services.  If it’s sucessfull enought maybe I’ll just quit my job and become a full time back yard gardener… hmm…

Anyways here’s a pretty picture of Cassy to dull the monotomy of reading this:

We took a trip to Red Deer where I spent the day roaming the city in search of things to do. I bought a kite at the dollar store for $1. No joke. It flew for a while after a few modifications (half the fun) before breaking in the gale force Red Deer winds.

Random ARC goose action shot!

This is the before shot, before we tore up our beautiful backyard for garden space. So long grass!

Riddick stands watching over us while we work

Progress!

Dirty, dirty girl.

Our free sod, which was gone the next day.

Finally, here’s Riddick having fun with his new toy:

Happy Earth Day everyone, I hope you were able to do something nice for mother nature, or at least be less evil than normal. Here in Edmonton it was an event at Ft Edmonton Park. Cass and I rode our bikes down to it and met her dad and Allan. Allan tweeted this photo of the gathering area. Most of the outdoor activities were kid-centric, but there were still a few exhibits for adults. Solar Alberta was there touting a course you could take to learn about setting up your own photovoltaic systems. The recycle-ecostation display was there, but no one was there to answer my question “do you need to pull the plastic out of tissue boxes before recycling them?” Inside there was a trade show type set up where it seems like anyone who wanted to pay could set up, including the anti-nuclear power people… I did score some free radish seeds though.

A few days ago I was trying to buy a compost bin off kijiji but they are quite expensive for what they actually need to be. Those tumbling ones probably don’t work as well as just turning it with a broken stick for mixing, and they are also fairly low capacity. I had plans to build a simple breathable box structure out of pallets. I looked pallets on kijiji and found some that were being given away at a place on my way home from work. Upon stopping there I found not only pallets but wooden crates! So, I just picked up a big crate, some plywood to cover it and a pallet to sit it on! It’s already full of leaves and ready to compost.

The last thing I want to write about on this Earth Day post is the backyard chicken pilot program that will be started here in Edmonton. In case you didn’t know, a few households will be allowed to have a few hens in their backyards to see if it should be legalized for the whole city. Personally, I think this is a good idea for many reasons. Two or three chickens can provide some protien for a family and possibly the neighbors which vastly improves your local food security. Events like the volcano choking off air lines in Europe are a stark reminder that our distribution network is fairly fragile. Redundancy isn’t necessarily built in, and for a city the size of Edmonton, a major event cutting off supply chains could be devastating. People are raising concerns about smells and disease, but these concerns are more apt for large scale scenarios where more than a couple of birds are involved. Surely a few birds in our backyard pose less of a threat than the intensely farmed, very concentrated, antibiotic fed birds in the agricultural industry (which I would expect to be naturally opposed to this idea too). Much more could be said about this topic, but alas I have a dog to walk.

First video is me snowboarding down the Tecumseh mountain bowl:

Second video is the deer in my parent’s back yard:

Haven’t been much for posting this summer, and I’m still not in a writing mood so here’s some photography!

When I am out of town doing field work, this is how I play electric guitar in my hotel room without an amp. Guitar -> Pedal -> Line in to MP3 player -> Line out to headphones.

A nice picture of my car somewhere between Nanton and Chain Lakes.

Labrador Tea flower.

Iced tea, specifically Labrador Tea. From an early morning in Fort McMurray.

A funnel shaped spider web covered in dew.

And early morning sunrise in Whitecourt.

Mushrooms on a stump.

Caterpillar invasion!

Blue Bell flower.

This leaf had the life sucked out of it, now it’s half ghost.

The old man’s beard.

Found at an old hunter’s cabin up north.

And old abandoned church in farmland up north.

Cleo!!!

Dad getting into a dingy up at Window Mountain Lake.

Cute little Pica.

Well a month has gone by since I was in the Birkie and I said that I would talk about it a bit more. First I’ll backtrack to three days before the race when I went out to the the race area for a 30 km practice ski. The starting location for the race isn’t a usual skiing area. It starts on a lake and then the trail goes into Elk Island National Park. The trail wasn’t groomed yet so I had to find where it started coming off the lake via guess and test. I found the trail head and almost immediately I hit the fence that encapsulates the park. It’s the 8 foot high page fence type to keep the elk in. The gate was closed and I was considering taking off my skis and climbing it.

Right then two park rangers came along the inside perimeter on double track skidoos. They stopped on the other side of the gate I was standing at and came to talk to me. I asked if this was the Birkie trail and they confirmed. Then I asked if I was allowed to come in, to which they replied “Sure, here, we’ll open the gate for you but you’ll have to climb the fence to get out.” That was fine with me so they let me through and stayed there to shovel away some snow around the gate. As I was leaving them one ranger shouted up to me “Oh yeah, you might encounter some Wood Bison on the trail!”

Sure enough, about 1 km up the trail there was a handful of Bison standing right on the trail. At this point the trail was straight and followed the fence. I had never had to deal with Bison before and wasn’t too sure about ‘Bison etiquette’ if you will. The only time I’ve seen Bison before was from the safety of a vehicle. I knew the rangers were going to keep going after they finished digging out the gate so I just waited for them to catch up. I didn’t want to climb the fence to get around them and I also didn’t want to go around them on the inside because the snow was deep and I didn’t want to put them in a position where they would be between the fence and myself. Two minutes later the rangers came up from behind and went straight towards the Bison, at which point they just moseyed off the trail. They only moved enough to get out of the way of the snowmobiles, however. The rangers kept going.

I continued with caution, skiing on the trail that went along side the fence to my left and the bison only a few meters to my right. Luckily the Bison took no notice of me and I continued on not encountering any more as I skied up to the 15 km mark. I had to climb the fence to get out of the park and onto the rest of the trail system. Thus on my way back I had to climb it again to get back in.
It was starting to get dark on my way back and the temperature was going down to -25 C. I was pretty cold and tired and just wanted to get back to my vehicle. When I was about 5 km away from completing my ski I came to a turn in the trail and there were more Bison in my way. Except this time there were no park rangers to clear the way for me. This time I had to climb the fence to go around them.

This was especially uncomfortable since I was already cold and didn’t want to slow down, let alone trudge through the deep snow. Still I’d rather do that than be charged and squished through the page fence coming out in cubes on the other side. I knew I was almost back so I took some time to take my camera out and take a couple pictures of them, even though the light was bad and the the bison were obscured by the fence and some trees.

After climbing the fence twice to get around them I had to climb the fence one more time to get out of the park. A total of 5 fence climbs!

So, now on to the actual race day. My Dad was also entering in the special wooden ski category so we both stayed at my uncle’s in Sherwood Park which was closer to the race than Edmonton. The race it’self was what I expected for the most part. I seeded myself to finish in 6 hours among the mass of other skiers. The mass start was quite exhilerating, here’s a couple of pics from that moment I managed to snap with my phone right before the cannon went off. Yes they used a cannon.

I finished in 5:50, which was about what I was aiming for.  There were food and drink stations every 7 km or so and perhaps I did spend a bit too much time at a couple of them than I should have.  It’s hard to resist spending some time a feed station when you’re being offered a cup of noodles by a cute and chatty volunteer.  Next year I’ll be more hardcore and perhaps race to be competitive.

At the finish line I seem to have gotten frostbite on one of my fingernails and it’s in the process of falling off right now .  Also my shoulder was killing my the next day but it was fine the following day.

Sometime in August I was on a walk with my Uncle, Dad, sister and the dogs up along Allison Creek. I crossed the creek and close to the weir on the creek I almost walked through a spider web. I probably would have walked through if it wasn’t for the spinning mass infront of me. Upon further inspection I saw that a huge spider had managed to catch a fair sized dragonfly in it’s web. I borrowed my Dad’s camera and snapped a few shots and made a short video. So if you’re not afraid of spiders, peer behind the fold…
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I was messing around with a program that came with my video card and came up with this. It’s a video of Genghis playing as a puppy.

It’s pretty hard to beat a lion cub and a puppy playing together: pictures of the odd couple.

My car can still drive all the way from Edmonton to the Crowsnest Pass on a single tank of gas without burning any oil. Actually, I checked the oil before the trip, and then after and it had more oil than when I left. Turns out my Dad put some in, but now it’s very full. Mostly I’ve been sleeping in but I’ve also been playing guitar, playing with the dog, organizing and rating all the photos on my computer, and working on transfering some of my old blogger posts. My parents still keep my worms in their basement. I got them back in 2001 as a composting idea for my university residence. Now it’s almost 2006 so that means that it’s housed about 5 generations of worms. They ate all the original bedding so I cut up a bunch of newspaper for them to devour. I think the worm population is porportional to the amount of space they have to live in and if I started splitting them up and making new bins I could have an army of red wigglers to sell. But I don’t think my parents would like that so much, to have their basement covered in worm bins. I’ll also be trying to clean up/work on my car with my Dad’s help so I can take advantage of a warm garage chalk full of tools and jacks and whatnot.

As for plans for the next few days, I’ll be in the Pass for new years and will likely head up to Edmonton about the 5th or so. University doesn’t start until the 9th, so I have some spare time. Yay!

So my roomate Brianne got a daschund puppy for an early Christmas present. She named him Genghis. It’s really really cute and is everything I expected having a puppy would be like. I just finished playing with it for half an hour and he is really tired now. I took him to sit on my lap while I was on the computer and he climbed into my dressing gown and turned around and he’s been sleeping there like this for the last half hour.