October 23

11C and sunny, up a bit late and so it has warmed up a bit.
Looks like I better fill the bird feeders again.
Trimmed the shrubs out front yesterday, if it dries up enough I'll mulch all the leaves, otherwise they'll be there for the first windstorm to blow down the street.
Today is the AGM at our bowling club, I have a feeling there may be some interesting developments.
Three more days until our trip to Arizona, morning or afternoon Barry?
Hello to C in Germany, I told Karen that you visited the site.

Well here's some more of that stuff I did seven years ago. I know some of it may not be of interest to all but once again this was something I wrote for the grandchildren. I read ahead a bit yesterday and I see I better do some editing as some of my thoughts/statements would not be well received by some readers.

Paved highways were almost unheard of when I was a boy and even up till I was in my teens and 20's there was more gravel road than paved.  To go to Prince George from Vancouver in 1954 it took from between 18 and 20 hours, some of the bridges through the Fraser Canyon were wooden and I remember one that was built on a corner and a bus would have to stop, back up and work its way around the corner!

There were no city buses when I was a boy in Vancouver we road on street cars which ran on rails and were powered by electricity that they obtained from overhead wires connected to the car by a rod and a roller that ran along the wires.

Even when I first arrived in the Prince George country there were still steam engines on the railroad although they were retired soon after my arrival.  Of course they could only really perform going in a forward direction, so the railroad had "roundhouses" in which the engine could be turned around on a set of rails that turned 180 degrees.  There was one of these in McBride.

I don't remember when I saw my first helicopter, the theory of them is not new, I believe even Jules Verne had "gyro flyers" in his stories.  The first year we used them in the forest service was in 1958.  Of course they were gasoline piston engines and consequently could not fly very high and did not have near the power of the machines of today. 7000 feet was about as high as we could fly - compare that to when we were in Mexico off loading at hover exit a full fire crew of 8 men at 12000 feet!

Many of the things we have in our world today has come unfortunately through the demands of wars.  Although usually these demands are initially more ways to kill each other, there are fortunately, people amongst us (often the inventors) who see the peaceful use of these inventions.  I guess it is like the proverbial two-edged sword.  The rapid development of air travel was pushed along by two world wars without those wars we could conceivably still be putting along at 100/200 miles an hour.  We could still be earth bound instead of knocking on the door of space travel.  It is not a question of whether it was worth it or not, it happened and we are where we are.  Its like I said in the very beginning, those were the roads mankind took, to not profit and learn from those courses would he an even greater crime.