Berry picking

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One thing I loved about Vancouver was all the berries. From March till September you’d get a gradual progression of different kinds of delicious delicious berries coming into season, ready to be devoured. My summers in Vancouver got so much better once a local showed me all the different edible kinds (thimble berries and huckleberries, raspberries and blue berries, salmon berries, black berries and more)! It turns out the pacific northwest is a feast for people who know when and what kind.

Recently one of my neighbors took me out picking bog berries and lingonberries. Both are a type of cranberry. Lingonberries grow on small bushes right near the ground and bog berries look almost identical to them but grow directly up out of the moss.

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Lingonberries (maybe)
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Bog berry (maybe)

They’re hard to spot at first, but if you find a good patch and bring your eyes to ground level, pretty soon you can see heaps of them.

About an hour of very casual picking while making chit-chat scored me about this many.

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A 45-minute berry-picking haul.

As for the flavour… They range from little delicious explosions of tartness, to little juicy explosions of doesn’t taste like much.

The scale of a polar bear

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The hotel in Yellowknife has a stuffed, full-size polar bear on display.

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Now I’ve often thought to myself—have you thought this too?—that I reckon if I was ready and had a basic weapon and time to prepare, I could probably take any predator that nature could throw at me.

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Of course, you’re never really sure… and on the “probably couldn’t actually actually handle them” list, polar bears are near the top (right behind wolf packs).

Still, it helps to actually see the scale of these real, still alive today beasts that can and would eat you.

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We hope these photos help nurture your polar bear fighting daydreams.

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Pallet Shoe Rack

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While Tulita may be starved of lumber, it is rich in pallets. I assume they arrive on the barges and ice-road trucks, carrying various goods, and are not worth sending back. People’s yards are full of them, the “board walk” near the local playground is made of them (I’ll grab a picture some day and add it to this post) and the “wood” section of the dump is full of them.

My neighbors just moved into a new, bigger house (they’re having a baby soon) and suddenly found themselves needing a shoe rack. Seemed like a good time to experiment with pallet based construction.

The construction went fine. I just cut a couple of dadoes (like grooves, but across the grain) into the support beams, making them are just big enough to slip the slats into, assembled and presto! One shoe rack!

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The tough part, it turns out, is taking the damned pallets apart. Those things are built to stay together! I snapped a hammer in half trying to pry the nails out (lesson learned about cheap hammers…).

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I ended up using a reciprocating saw to cut through the nails. Even that was a challenge, because I still needed to bang the slats off enough (despite no room inside to swing a hammer) to fit the saw in between. Found out a few days later that another neighbour owns a massive oversized crowbar that I can borrow! That’s another thing I should have thought to bring up…