Quoted in yesterdays Globe and Mail:



"A mild day in January is a break, a momentary relief, a chance for a man to catch his breath, but when February relaxes for a day or two it is a promise. It warms a man's heart as well as his hands and makes him think of March and April."



-- Hal Borland in Twelve Moons of the Year.

Another beautiful weekend has come and gone. The weather is unreal, warm and relatively dry, although now the clouds are rolling in and last night we had rain.



Yesterday was a day of meeting bloggers. It began early in the morning with Cody Clark, from Houston Texas, who was on Bowen on holiday and who, through a remarkable series of coincidences explained in HIS blog, ended up meeting with me.



Then the family headed down to Cpae Roger Curtis for a walk, but not without inviting Penny along, so she grabbed her two big dogs and we sloshed through mud and stream to picnic at the lighthouse.



And on the way down there, who should we run into but Richard Smith, out with his kids and dogs. He even took a bunch of pictures yesterday of the lighthouse and the point. Meeting on the trail, we both agreed that this was a "bloggable" moment. So we've both blogged it!



The collision of online identities with real people. And they are all just as interesting in real life as their writing makes them out to be.

Ah me. Complaining that Penny isn't blogging enough, and now here I am, a whole week later, challenged right back by her to write.



The truth is, there is something interesting to write about. We are on course for the dryest February on record. Although this comes with a bunch of attendant issues, such as stressful impacts on wildlife and flora, it works out okay for humans who don't like the rain. As I write, we are sitting under a huge pregnant high pressure bubble which is bringing sunshine and fog in equal parts to the coast and deflecting Arctic air down over the rest of the country. There is no wind to speak of so the air sits on top of us, condensing every night into frost and lifting off the ground during the day to form huge fog banks, which today are actually low clouds.



There is no rain in the offing. They say that El Nino is dissapating, and that it wasn't as strong this year as it was in 1997, but the winter has been a delight anyway.

Have I mentioned Penny Scott's new blog? Ah yes, I see that I have. And here I am mentioning it again. Why?



Because it's really, really good. And it's only a weekly thing so far.



So this is my plea to Penny: MORE!



And YOU there, reading away...do YOU have a blog yet?

Bowen Island is a hotbed of ideas, thoughts and innovations. Just look at some of the links on the left, under "noosphere" to see what I mean.



One of the really interesting community wide processes we are engaged in here is around the issue of sustainability. The Bowen Island Sustainability Task Force and the Bowen Island Lifelong Learning Society (BILLS) are working with the Sustainable Development Research Institute at the University of British Columbia to try out a new way of approaching community decision making on these issues.



SDRI has developed a "game" called QUEST which allows people to make choices about a preferred future and then craft these into strategies to initiate sustainability practices today. We have combined QUEST with Open Space Technology to design a "made on Bowen" process. It began on Thanksgiving last year with an Open Space event on the future of Bowen Island in 2042, and then SDRI engaged the community in a couple of QUEST workshops. We will shortly be returning to Open Space to build on everything we have done and move more issues forward into action.



I mention all this only because today QUEST and SDRI was featured in the online version of the Utne Reader. Congrats to the folks at UBC for getting the recognition they deserve. The Utne piece mentions Whistler as a case study in the application of QUEST. I just wish the article might have mentioned the great work we are doing here as well...

I was down at the library on Friday catching up on some local reading when I found myself totally absorbed in map hanging on the wall. This was no ordinary map of Bowen Island, but it was the original map designed, researched and drawn by Dr. Kathy Dunster for the Salish Sea Atlas Project. The Atlas brings together around 30 maps of islands around the Georgia Basin. The maps are created by island artists and represent the values and treasures of each island.



Most of the maps are extraordinary representations of the islands. Our map is hand drawn, coloured and lettered with an inventory of every creek and brook, each lake, the major and minor landmasses and every lot on the island. It is perforated with cut outs of Great Blue Heron and Blacktailed Deer prints, and it contains a text about what we value as islanders.



It didn't take me long to get immersed in copying down the names of the creeks, dozens and dozens of them that I didn't know existed. And while some are named for people and old island families (Collins, Henderson, Davies, Dorman, Malkin), and some have more obvious nomenclature (Hungry Deer, Drinking Cougar), others are named for more whimsical inspirations (Dharma, Dogma, Bang, Clink, Eco, Anarchy, Cartographer's, and my all time favourite Stream of Consciousness).



So I was copying down the names, when who should arrive, but Kathy Dunster herself, and so I had a good half hour conversation with her about the map, the Atlas and other Salish Sea stuff.



She also passed on some interesting news. In the past 10 days Kokanee Salmon have been discovered in Grafton Lake (aka Trout Lake, according to the map!). Kokanee are landlocked sockeye salmon. The live, breed and die in freshwater, unlike their anadromous cousins, who spend their lives at sea, before returning to freshwater to spawn.



Genetic tests are being performed on the fish now to try to link them both with a related sockeye population and to figure out how long them may have been in the lake. Most of the sockeye populations in the Strait of Georgia are gone now, but there are a lot of records about the populations that once bred in the Georgia Basin. Having a little clutch of Kokanee on Bowen is a significant piece of our living natural history. It's also going to mean some changes in order to preserve the population and give it a chance to continue to thrive as it has done for hundreds or possibly thousands of years.

I'm about to pull one of those annoying moves that so endears us coastal dwellers to the rest of Canada. I am about to tell you something that, if you live in a place like Winnipeg where the temperature was -30 on Monday when I was there, will make you swear off reading this blog for a while.



Ready?



My daffodils are coming up.



I know, I know. It's insane really, that on January 22, our daffodils should be poking their heads through the soil, but there you go. That is the kind of winter we have had around here this year. It's El Nino of course, but that's no consolation for everyone in the rest of Canada, because the bubble of warm air that envelopes us is pushing cold air out of the Arctic and all over the rest of the continent. The result is freezing weather everywhere east of here, except Calgary, and huge dumps of snow in Newfoundland.



And flowers on the coast.