Random Tuesday: Avian Fecal Matter And The Olympics

Crocuses. Pretty, right? Except that the WINTER Olympics are only ten days away. Oops.

Cypress Mountain, which is just north of Vancouver and is hosting free style skiing and snowboarding only had patches of snow left last week. They're trucking snow from the other side of the mountain and then pushing it up the hill with snow cats so they'll have a base for the snowmaking machines to work with. There had been talk of using helicopters to ship the snow in if they had too. I'm sure that won't affect my taxes next year.

Whatever, I love the Olympics and the fact that they're happening right here in my own city? Sweeeeeeet. Not that you'd know that it was happening in my city since it's not being called the Vancouver/Whistler/Richmond 2010 Olympics, but whatever, we have the speed skating oval, and more importantly, Holland House. Every Olympic games since Barcelona in '92, the Dutch Olympic Committee and Heineken have sponsored Holland House, a home away from home for Dutch athletes, families, the media and Dutch citizens. In real life it's a meeting place to drink copious amounts of beer. You don't have to be Dutch to get in, but a passport gets you to the front of the line.

You know what else we've got? A six story high inukshuk built out of cargo containers, that's what.

To all of you who don't live in Canada, an inukshuk is a stone marker used by the Inuit in northern Canada as a navigation marker

Wonder what they're going to do with it after the games? Bet it would look great on my front lawn.

Another cool thing being built here, right in front of the Oval and not so trailer park, is a giant floating sculpture of the Olympic rings. Built of steel reinforced fiberglass beams and filled with foam, it will be anchored in the river in front of the skating rink and filled with 30,000 pounds of cranberries. What? We grow cranberries here.

What else have we got? Goose shit. Snow goose shit to be precise. Approximately 100,000 snow geese stop by here twice a year to eat everything in site like a plague of white feathered locusts on their 4000 kilometre (2485 mile) journey from Russia to the Skagit delta in Washington State. Eat and shit. Everywhere. Geese are big birds.

And so I leave you with shit. Off to Keely's with you.

DUCK!

Ok, so they're not ducks, they're Snow Geese but SNOW GEESE! just doesn't work. Before leaving for my bike ride yesterday morning I told Supreme Leader that I'd better take the camera because if I didn't then an eagle would land on my handle bars or something. No eagles, but I did get about ten thousand geese. The video is a little choppy and you might want to turn down the sound a little because it was windy.



I can't believe I came out of that clean.

**PICTURE ALERT**

Last weeks Fall picture post went over pretty well, I think, so I decided to do another for this Friday but give everyone a little more time to send them in. So this week, how about pumpkin patch pictures? Send me pics of your little ones in the pumpkin patch. If you don't have little ones, send nieces or nephews, friends, whatever. If your little ones are now big ones, send old pictures. If you have none of the above, take a picture of a pumpkin. This is open to everyone, including the lurkers. Come on, don't be shy! Once again, the email is:

ctordoff@yahoo.ca

I was thinking of doing Halloween pictures, but since it's not until Friday I figured it would be easier to let everybody take their pictures Friday and then send them in next week. What do you think? Guess we'll see how this one goes.