October 21 not 22nd

It's now 1243 and the temp is 10C and a light rain.
Company overnight and as mentioned before, bowling this morning and we are going to a graduation party later today.
Now that rain has arrived (not just a shower) I guess that means summer and perhaps autumn are finished. Leaves are now in the falling mode and although we have had no frost those that change color are well advanced. The birds are busy at the feeders and Bruce (the hummer) is topping up his stomach several times a day.

Here's some more of 1994.(It's a longer piece than I remember).

March 24.

I was thinking about the theme of what I am doing last night and realized that it is difficult to have any real order in my thoughts because of course what we didn't have at one time were eventually developed or became available in due course.

So you will have to bear with me as to the order or lack of order that I put things into.

Some of the things that have come to be accepted are really modernization of things that we have had for a very long time.  For instance barbecues - I don't remember having a barbecue around until your parents were mostly grown up, yet people have been cooking over open fires and charcoal since the discovery of fire.  I guess what happened is some one eventually got the idea of containment and portability, then eventually came the production of propane and propane tanks and voila we had "a new discovery".

Electricity is not something we always had.  When I was very small and lived in Los Angeles and Vancouver I guess we had it.  When we lived at Lund we were on a power plant that was shut off every night around 11 o'clock.  All the other places we used coal oil lamps and lanterns and sometimes gas lanterns and sometimes candles, I guess that went on until I was about 16 and lived at Ganges.  Do you know that you can make a flashlight out of a candle?  Well you can, we used to call them bugs.  You take a tin can, best a fairly large one like a large tomato tin, lay it on its side and make a handle out of wire attached to the front (open end) and the back (closed end), then take a short candle and wax it to the bottom inside of the tin (the new bottom opposite the handle).  Light your candle.  Yes they will blow out, but you will be very surprised at how much wind it takes and how much light they cast at night.  Remember a candle can cause fires BE CAREFUL!

We did not of course have electric stoves, fridges or all those other electrical appliances.  We used wood stoves or sometimes oil stoves, to keep our fresh food some people had iceboxes but we mostly had a wooden cooler outside on the coolest side of the house.  Many people used root cellars to store such things as potatoes, carrots and other vegetables. All during the war from the time we moved to Canada until about 1947, we never had fresh milk.  We had a choice of powdered or canned milk.  I never did like the powdered stuff but I sure polished off a lot of the canned stuff.  Because we couldn't get butter, we did without, but finally margarine was invented, it didn’t taste very good in those days and it was white like lard.  Eventually they came out with little packets of food coloring, so that we could mix it in by hand and at least make the margarine look like butter.