Sooke Harbour House visit

Went for a drive on December 27, 2009 out to Sooke courtesy of a visiting relative and ended up at Sooke Harbour House where we discovered they were serving lunch. As we'd planned on going to a pub for supper, we decided we couldn't pass up the opportunity. The menu, though brief, was relatively inexpensive, especially since we did not bother with alcohol or dessert.

Here's the view from our table.

Mystery Christmas smoke plume in Washington State

Took a Christmas walk with family along Willows Beach in Oak Bay and spotted a smoke plume in what I believe was Washington State. Here's a highly magnified view of the mystery plume. I've assumed it was from a fire rather than an industrial site such as a pulp mill.

Checked Google News but didn't find anything about it.

December 26, 2009 Update: Checked Google Earth and plotted a path. The line extends through Whidbey Island, Camano Island, Stanwood and possibly Everett, Washington State. There is a waterfront mill operation and an adjacent U.S. naval station  at Everett, so more than likely the smoke plume originated from one of those two sites.



Here is a screen shot of "Mill Town" at Everett, Washington, from Google Maps Street View showing the mill with a thin plume of smoke.

Has this ever happened to you, stringing holiday lights the wrong way?

Has this ever happened to you? Stringing your holiday lights the wrong way? Yes, I did that on the weekend while stringing our Christmas lights. So I though, there has to be a male-male adapter out there so you can fix this without having the relay the entire string. I even sketched out my idea. I went to a local hardware store and was told no, that people would fry themselves if such a thing were available. Hmmm, so I checked The Google and sure enough Georgianna Reid of Kansas City, MO, USA, filed a United States patent in 2005 for just such a device. And the first sentence of the summary as found on FreePatentsOnline states "A double male electrical connector is provided to connect the female end of a string of Christmas lights with the female end of an extension cord suitable for plugging into a wall outlet." Her design, unlike my preliminary sketch, which obviously won't go anywhere, includes a safety feature so that "the apparatus includes a jacket receiving the connector for axially slidable use so that both male plugs cannot both be simultaneously exposed," which would leave the inevitable people-frying mentioned by my local hardware representative.

Top Two Questions Asked of Any Retiree

I wonder if there's ever been a study of the questions that are asked of retirees by their co-workers. I'm sure these would rank among the top two:

1. How do you feel or what does it feel like to be leaving?


2. What are your plans after retirement?

My answers were

1. I felt a combination of nervous excitement, nervous tension, sadness, much happiness and relief. I certainly smiled a lot.


2. I plan on relaxing for at least six weeks and have three writing assignments to complete for Searcher magazine. I have many, many unfinished research and writing projects I've accumulated over the years, the most important of which is to continue and complete as best I can work on my decade-old Web site Camera Workers: The British Columbia, Alaska and Yukon Photographic Directory, 1858-1950 (link to current version and archived version). I will also be looking for either salaried or contracted part-time work.

Highlights of my last three days at the BC Archives, Royal BC Museum

Here are some of my memories of my last three days at work. On December 16, 2009 I served for the last time on the reference (information) desk, fondly known as The Bridge because it was an elevated workspace from which to survey our reference room. My co-workers, current and a couple of past ones, startled me by gathering round in front of where I sat. They presented me with a Stitch doll (Experiment #626 from the Disney animated film set in Hawaii Lilo and Stitch) dressed up in its Elvis outfit and on a surfboard with a ukulele along with a crown decorated with pithy and witty sayings about being retired. I gave a little impromtu speech. I wore the crown all day much to the amusement of some of our researchers and a tour group from a government office.





On December 17 I was invited to partake of a pizza lunch generously provided by my colleagues in Human History of the Royal BC Museum.

On December 18, my last day at work, my boss had organized a morning farewell coffee for another retiree and me. We were, to say the least, stunned by the turnout of museum, archives and past co-workers, chiefly from the records management arena. My wife and I had arranged at the last minute for a small token of our friendship with the other retiree and I presented the Royal BC Museum with my parting gift, a new tradition that I hope will be carried forward in the "pay it forward" manner. It was inspired by a remark a co-worker had made on December 16 that there should be an award of some sort for retirees similar to the joke award we give new hires after they complete their probationary period. Inspired by that thought and also recent episodes of the TV series "Numbers" where Professor Charlie Epps is struggling to write a letter to the next person who will inhabit a research chair office (or something like that), I decided to create a "Push the Envelope" award in the form of a letter to the next retiree, so I pushed my envelope, which had another envelope inside with my letter and gently coerced my former boss to pick it up. I later told him which manager I thought he should give the envelope to.

In the afternoon I went up to the University of Victoria for the launch of four student Web sites, part of Professor John Lutz' course in micro-history and the Internet that he incorporates into a meta-site called Victoria's Victoria. Other content was also refreshed and we raised a glass to toast Leona Taylor for her work on the newspaper index. Then came another surprise, John announced that an archivist from the BC Archives had just finished his last day at work. He gave a succinct and glowing account of my career and I stood to a round of applause. A tremendous gesture on his part and one for which I'm extremely grateful. Thank you John!

Last day at work, British Columbia Archives, Royal BC Museum

My last day at work at the British Columbia Archives, Royal BC Museum, was Friday, December 18, 2009. My working life at the BC Archives, known as the Provincial Archives of British Columbia when I started, will have covered 29 years less a day from when I started in 1981. Here is some of what I wrote in a farewell thank you to my co-workers:

... I've seen too many changes to even begin to recount them all. Of all the activities with which I was associated over those three decades, I'm most proud of having introduced automation to the BC Archives in the form of dedicated word processing equipment, of having championed the introduction of Internet e-mail and of starting the process of converting our hardcopy finding aids to electronic versions.

In case you've been wondering what I was up to the rest of the time, I was hired as an archivist to work in the Sound and Moving Division and then moved from there in 1986 to the Library and Maps Division. In 1992 I made my final move to the Reference Services unit. I worked half-time for six months in the now-dissolved Corporate Information and Management Library, 4000 Seymour Place, managed the implementation of the Voyager library system for the BC Archives Library as part of a Y2K software transition project, served as the Private Records Archivist between 2002-2008 and helped with the implementation of MAMMOTH [an acronym for the Royal BC Museum's new collections management system] over the past two years.

I've been extremely fortunate in my career here to have had the support of managers, supervisors and very dedicated co-workers, all of whom ensured that each day here was something to look forward to as I knew each one would be different and that I would learn something new.

Equally as important to me as significant and long-lasting memories are of experiencing someone else's joy at finding a tiny or a large part of their history in our records and objects.

The day before my retirement from the British Columbia Archives, Royal BC Museum

Today, December 17, 2009, was the day before my last day of work at the British Columbia Archives, Royal BC Museum. Here's a photo taken by Dan Savard who looks after the audio-visual collections in the anthropology/ethnology section of Human History on the Museum side of our operation. This was taken at a pizza lunch. My former boss, Kathryn Bridge, curated the Emily Carr exhibit. Dan and I appreciated the sentiment of the exhibit's subtitle to which I'm pointing.

Vistas: Artists on the Canadian Pacific Railway (2009) book

I received a review copy back in July 2009 of Roger Boulet's book of the same name for the Glenblow Museum's exhibition Vistas: Artists on the Canadian Pacific Railway (June 20 to September 20, 2009). Sadly, this important exhibition, which included historical photographs as well as pieces of art, did not travel beyond Calgary, Alberta, home of the Glenbow Museum. I had provided some research assistance to Roger, chiefly around the Victoria photographer Charles Macmunn (d. 1903) who remains a research interest of ours. My self-published book Camera Workers:  The British Columbia Photographers Directory, 1858-1900 (1985) is listed in the bibliography but not my two Web sites (see the sidebar of this blog for the links to those). The book is a magnificent production. I will provide more coverage of the contents in the months to come once I've had time to thoroughly read it. The book is not available through Amazon.ca or Amazon.com and can be ordered through the Glenbow Museum Shop (offline ordering only).

Slower Than Light Speed at the Truck Light Parade

Here is one of seven photographs on my Flickr site taken at the Truck Light Parade on December 5 from a vantage point along Oak Bay Avenue opposite Municipal Hall. I chose these images because visually they are the more arresting to me. The Truck Light Parade is an annual event organized by the Island Equipment Owners Association of British Columbia, Canada.

Heroes and Ray Bradbury

I was struck while watching the November 30, 2009 episode of the Heroes TV series by the similarities between Ray Bradbury's novel Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) about Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show and his amazing collection of short stories based on tattoes covering the body of The Illustrated Man (1951). The Illustrated Man was also a 1969 Hollywood feature film starring Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom. In the movie, he is searching for the woman who tattoed his body. Sound familiar?

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