Doing Things

As the title suggests, I've been doing things the past few days.  First, Jen and I went hiking in Tumbler Ridge.  Even though she's not quite two months past her accident and as such still a bit out of shape, Jen insisted on doing and alpine hike.  She chose a 5.5 km trail that went right up the side of Cowmoose Mountain.  For those of you who live in the Rockies, it's only a foothill, but it was plenty big for around here.  It took us a few hours to make it to the top and then we made it to about 500 metres from the summit.  Why stop you ask?  Well it was an extremely steep scramble to the top and while I liked my wife's chances of getting to the top, I wouldn't have bet on her making it back down in one piece on her bumb leg.  So, we decided discretion was the better part of valour and took a couple of pics from almost the top and headed back down.

We had some interesting experiences with wildlife, both those we saw and the one we didn't.  We happened upon a village of marmots.  They were living in an old rock slide and they were everywhere.  The little buggers were far braver than they should have been if they wish to avoid becoming someone's hat.  The would sit a few feet away from us and watch us watch them.  The other animal was a bear.  We saw a couple of piles of his berry filled splat and on the way back down we saw a print in the mud that hadn't been there on the way up.  Now, I come from Southern Ontario, where seeing a deer is a wildlife sighting.  My wife is constantly telling me that you have to watch out for wildlife that will eat your face off when you are in the woods in BC.  With Jen's constant warnings in my head, when we saw those prints, I almost added my own pile to that of the bear.  It turns out we didn't see him in the end (and in truth the print wasn't that large), but it gave me the willies all the same.

Today, we went out to Upper Pine to work on our classrooms.  I must admit that I didn't work too hard.  I took a picture of the before, but there isn't an after yet because I'm not really finished.  I just shuffled some furniture around.  Jen and her helper worked their butts off cleaning a disgusting classroom.  The previous teacher left all the cupboards full of junk and garbage and covered in various pools of sticky stuff.  Some people are pretty inconsiderate, especially when you think that she is still at the school and will have to work with Jen this year.  Give your head a shake!

My new school!