Tag Archives: time

Oh, Canada!

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I start a week in Vancouver, BC.

Washing a BuildingI’m sitting on a plastic chair on the front patio of a ground-floor apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, watching four men wash the apartment building across the street. It looks to be a 24-story building and, like most of the buildings in this area, it’s got a steel and glass facade. The four men are sitting on separate wooden seats — kind of like the seats you’d find on a swing set — hanging from ropes on top of the building, about four stories down. Two of them have long hoses and the other two have brushes on long poles and plastic pails. They’re all wearing shorts and sneakers and are doing a lot of bouncing off the walls as they move back and forth and down.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone wash a building before, but it doesn’t surprise me. This is Vancouver, after all. It’s one of the cleanest, well-kept cities I’ve ever seen. Perfectly manicured grassy islands between sidewalks and curbs, trees and flowers, pedestrians and cars. Everything is clean and well-kept. The only graffiti I’ve seen was painted on the back of a rental truck. And although everyone seems to have dog, I haven’t seen a dog turd anywhere.

I’m here recording the audio and video for the first video in a new MacProVideo training video series. Microsoft Word 101 will be a DVD training video for beginning to intermediate Word users. If it sells well, it’ll be followed up with more advanced titles and coverage of Excel and PowerPoint. The work is a bit frustrating and rather tedious, more so because after each 3 to 6 minute segment, I have to wait 6 to 12 minutes for the newly recorded video to render. So I do about 1/3 work and 2/3 waiting. Because I’m recording each segment at least twice, it’s slow going. But, by week-end, I should be finished.

I’d better be. I leave town mid-afternoon on Friday.

Vancouver, BCIn the meantime, I’m enjoying my non-working hours in a clean, safe, and rather beautiful Canadian city. The weather is beautiful, in the mid 70s and mostly sunny, although a marine layer of clouds seems to be drifting in as I type this. My hotel and the office/apartment I’m working at are right on the water near Stanley Park. The view from my hotel room at the Westin is full of boats and seaplanes and healthy people strolling the waterfront.

One of the strangest things I’ve noticed: most of the buildings — including my hotel — have huge floor-to-ceiling windows that open. At my hotel every evening, everyone slides open their big sliding glass doors. Although most patios are too narrow to accommodate chairs, people step out onto that narrow space and gaze down at the hotel’s pool or the marina or even the city skyline. I’ve never seen so many open windows. But why not? The weather is glorious and there don’t seem to be any bugs. Fresh air beats processed air. And air conditioning, although available in my hotel, is not a common thing in this area.

More another time. Got to get to work.

The Grand Canyon

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Duh.

I’ve spent more time at the Grand Canyon than most people I know. Not only did I work there, flying helicopters over for an entire summer, but it’s less than 40 miles from my place at Howard Mesa. We occasionally go up there — sometimes just for lunch.

The Grand CanyonPhotos of the Grand Canyon do not do it justice. The place is magnificent. The view from every lookout point, from every spot along the trail, is different. Best of all, it can be enjoyed by everyone in whatever dose you’d like to take. Drive up to a spot on the rim for a look. Take a hike all the way to the bottom. Fly over in a helicopter or airplane. Take a raft down the Colorado River.

Reminds me of a story I heard at the grocery store in Tusayan when I worked at the canyon. It was after work and I was picking up a few things to take home. They had some calendars of the Canyon at the checkout counter, a kind of of impulse buy item. The cashier told me that a tourist from Europe was paging through the calendar and suddenly exclaimed, “There’s a river in there?”

Uh, yeah.

If you’ve never been to the Grand Canyon, go. Plan your trip to arrive before sunset and watch the sun set from one of the lookout points. Get a room at a hotel along the rim. Have dinner at El Tovar. Then, when it gets dark, walk on the path along the rim. (Don’t worry; there’s a wall there so you won’t fall in.) If there’s no moon, you’ll experience the odd feeling of walking beside a dark abyss. If there’s a full moon, you’ll see a monochromatic version of what you can see during the day. In the morning, wake before sunrise and watch the sun rise from a different view point. Or the same one. Be sure to take in the art exhibit at the Kolb Gallery and either hike along the rim trail or take a shuttle bus (or your car, in the winter) to Hermit’s Rest.

Grand Canyon, Arizona, photo

The Old Grand Canyon Airport

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I finally find it from the ground.

Two years ago, when I was in training to fly helicopter tours at the Grand Canyon, I made daily trips to the Grand Canyon’s old airport out by Red Butte. I don’t know much about the old airport except how to find it from the air. I don’t think its two runways were ever paved.

Oh, yes. It has the remains of a big old hangar on the west side of where the runways were.

I love exploring ruins and remnants of the past. I remembered the hangar last week when Mike, Jack, and I were doing some back-roading in that area. I think we passed near the end of the main runway while driving out toward the Coconino Rim.

Yesterday, while back-roading with Jack southwest side of Grand Canyon National Park, I remembered the old airport again. And since I had to drive right past that area to get back to Howard Mesa, I figured I’d try again to find it.

Old Grand Canyon AirportI won’t go into details about the roads I tried and the wrong turns I took. Suffice it to say that I finally homed in on it. After driving down a two-track road that cut diagonally across the main runway, I parked my Jeep right in front of the gaping hangar door.

It’s a neat old building with a dirt floor and not much else. The shelves are stripped bare and rooms that could have been living quarters show signs of vandalism, including a burned door. There was a picnic table just inside the main door, offering a shady place to have lunch, surrounded by the ghosts of aviation past.

One room in the back corner had fairly new saddle racks attached to the walls; that same room had a Private Property/No Trespassing sign on it from the outside. (Oops!) I guess someone had used it not long ago to store horse tack. There were other buildings nearby that appeared to be in better condition; all of them had the same Private Property signs on them so Jack and I stayed clear. Still, it didn’t appear as if anyone was living there. Since the old airport is in the Kaibab National Forest, I find it hard to believe that anyone would live there. But who knows? The owners of the buildings could have been grandfathered in when the government bought the land.

The Hangar Door at Old Grand Canyon AirportOne thing is for sure: visiting the old airport and looking up at the faded paint over the door spelling out “Grand Canyon Airlines” has given me a real thirst for knowledge about the place. When I’m finished with my road trip book project and trip to Canada (for work), I might start doing a little research.

It would be great to talk to someone who had actually flown there.

Before leaving, I snagged the coordinates with my GPS. Next time I want to find it, I won’t have to wander around until I stumble into it.

[composed on top of a mesa in the middle of nowhere with ecto]

Yoga?

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Looking for feedback.

I’m thinking about starting a program of yoga for my mental health, physical well-being, and weight loss.

This is a difficult step for me. I keep myself very busy and the program I’ll looking into requires 40 minutes a day. That may not seem like much to you, but to me it’s a lot of time.

I’d love to get feedback from people who are currently using yoga for their health or people who have tried it and have quit for one reason or another. I’d like to learn about successes, failures, and experiences.

Please use the Comment link to share your experiences. I think other people might also be interested in what you have to say.

Thanks.

Howard Mesa

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My windsock.

As I’ve written extensively elsewhere, Mike and I own 40 acres of land at Howard Mesa, which is about halfway between Williams and Valle, Arizona, 5 miles off route 64. If you’ve ever driven from Williams to the Grand Canyon, you’ve passed within 3 miles of it (as the raven flies).

Howard Mesa WindsockThis photo shows my windsock at the top of the property, with a dead tree in the foreground. It was probably taken during the summer; that’s a thundercloud in the making in the distance in the background.

I occasionally land my helicopter not far from the windsock on a gravel pad. It’s a three-hour drive from our house to the property but only an hour by helicopter. We sometimes fly up just for the day — usually to do some work in the shed or check on things.

The dead tree is a whole other story. Here’s the short version.

Imagine a whole lot of land laid out in one square mile sections called…well, sections. The sections are colored on some maps like a checkerboard, with private squares and state land squares. The private squares were owned by cattle ranchers. They contracted with the state to graze their cattle on the state land as well as their private land in what’s known as open range.

Cattle eats grass. The ranchers got the idea that more grass would grow if there were less trees. So they came onto their land (but not the state land) with bulldozers and knocked down all the piñon and juniper pine trees that grew there. The trees died, but since the ranchers didn’t take them away, their carcasses littered the rancher’s land.

The ranchers were wrong. About the same amount of grass grew.

Years passed. New trees grew in place of the old. The ranchers had another brainstorm. They realized that they could make a bunch of money by selling their land to developers. Best of all, with Arizona’s open range laws, they could still graze their cattle on the private property that didn’t fence the cattle out. So they could stay in business without actually owning the land the cattle grazed on.

The developers split up each section of land into 10-, 36-, and 40-acre lots. We bought one of them.

So now you know why we have dead trees like this one on our land.

The good thing about all this: there’s no shortage of firewood.

Howard Mesa, Arizona, photo