August 26th, 2004, 9:52pm

Today I woke up at about 12:30pm or so... My dad & I had headed for Vancouver Tuesday morning, hoping to get some appointments and errands done, and be back down to our place here by a reasonable time in the evening. The trip takes about two hours each way if things go in a decent way. On this occasion they didn't.

Yeah... so we got to the border, North-bound at the truck crossing, and happened to get a fellow who my dad had dealt with on another occasion. See, there have been some issues to be considered and dealt with in regard to where my dad "lives" (Canada or US), where the vehicle is registered (same), and also weighing in there somewhere was the nationality of the driver's license being used. So, the fellow asked some questions, wasn't particularly satisfied with the answers, asked some more questions, and because things weren't resolving too quickly, directed us to park the vehicle over yon. Over the next... oh, hour and a half or so he asked a lot more questions and eventually called an RCMP officer to come explain some related laws and regulations. The RCMP fellow came, explained, removed the (California) license plates (leaving the truck uninsured and undrivable), and had the truck towed to Surrey. The tow-truck fellow, Chris, had been doing that line of work for 17 years, he told us. He likes it a fair amount, and makes a decent living. I asked what he liked about it and he told me he likes pulling cars out of ditches, sometimes they're flipped over so he has to flip them back - all that sort of stuff. He likes meeting people. He said that he's met guys from the Canucks, the Grizzlies (before they moved to ...Memphis or wherever), football players, and people from all over the world. He seemed to focus on those aspects of the job - meeting & helping people. The worst part, he said, accidents where people have died. Right.

So, we spent the rest of that day getting the truck road-legal again. I spent the night at my mom's place, and my dad stayed at my brother & his wife's place. Props to mom & Yvonne for the fine soup & delicious blackberry & peach pie - that really hit the spot! :) Oh, and I picked up the camera that my bro had offered me - awesome...

We spent Wednesday doing our errands, making up for cancelled appointments of the day before, and having more work done on the truck, getting it all inspected and insured. The red tape we had to wade through was really amazing. Anyway... we wound up pulling out of Vancouver, bound for the US border, last night at ~11:00pm. The border was a breeze this time, as I had felt it probably would be - what with us having already gone through just about everything I figured god or the universe could reasonably throw at us in two days. The ride home was actually pretty enjoyable... Mom had made me a nice mocha, and it was raining - at times very lightly, and at times like a mild monsoon. I drove, and we got free popcorn at the gas station we filled up at after crossing the border, and by the time we were driving down the last 10 miles or so, we both agreed that we were feeling a lot better than we had the two days previous. "Quiet" was the way dad had described it I think, and that had sounded about right to me. We arrived back at the ranch (as I call it) at about 1:00am, and like I started out saying, I slept nearly 12 hours.

Today we saw a great big owl fly by our shelter area and land on a branch, so I jumped out there with my new camera, and spent some ~15 minutes creeping up to it until I was but a mere arm's length away, taking pictures all the way. As soon as I get a memory-card reader and somewhere to put pictures, I'll try to link them into my journal. We also finished cleaning up the trimmed branches from the two trees we'd felled on Monday. Oh yeah, I haven't had a chance to write about any of that. Oh well. :) For the record though, we wound up having to fell two fir trees in order to facilitate the building that we're going to be doing. "C" did the cutting - very daring of him as it can be a rather deadly affair, and I walked down the largest of them and measured it at 76.5 feet, and counted the rings at 25 years of age.

Well my dad has just shown up and is interested to check his email and so forth, so the timing's pretty good, I'll sign off. Take care everybody!

* Don's birthday, and fantastic birthday desert