We spent this past weekend building a deck and set of steps onto our son's house just out of Winnipeg. You wouldn't believe the mosquito population there is on the prairies at the moment - and Winnipeg is widely accepted as the mosquito capital of Canada. Trying to work outdoors with hordes of blood-sucking insects decending on any exposed flesh was an ugly experience! And the weather! It was so hot ... and so humid ... we prairie dwellers just aren't built for humidex factors. Wind chill in the winter time we understand, humidex in the summer is like speaking Greek. What I do know is that I never want to go through that again. At night we set their big portable fan so that it blew directly on the bed and threw the covers on the floor.
The mosquitos and the humidity are both due to all the rain we've been having. Who ever is in control of the tap up there just can't seem to get it turned off. There is STILL water laying in the yard. I can't cut almost half of what I normally do in our yard, and everywhere that water sits still mosquitos thrive and multiply. I was talking to my sister in Calgary this morning, and even they are complaining about the mosquitos this summer. Calgary is usually pretty well bug free.
There is another population that is much higher than it used to be. On the trip in to the city, and again on the way out, I was struck with how many cattle there are these days. I have read somewhere how much the Canadian herd has increased by since BSE - I can't remember the percentage but it was impressive. Even knowing that, seeing the countless animals in fields along the road we travelled was still thought provoking. You have to wonder where we are headed? I firmly believe that Canada will come out of BSE ahead. Absolutely ahead of where we were before BSE, and I'm betting ahead of the USA when all the dust settles.
True, we've been unable to sell our cattle into the states, but that has forced us to finish our own animals, butcher our own animals, improve the testing we do, be ready to show our results to demanding markets, and step up production on all fronts. It has involved a lot of growing pains but we are way ahead of the game now. No one on this side of the border believes that the recent proven case of BSE found in Texas was their first, it's just the first one they couldn't deny. It leaves them looking like they're playing a defensive game - I think Canada has building a good solid offence for two years now.
3 comments:
Did you see any hardball sized hail, Or was Bellegarde the only vicim to that? I have some pics of the ice balls on my blog (scroll down a few pages), and the damage to some of the nighbor's stuff. Lucky no one got it in the head! Enjoy your stuff!
That was quite the storm last Thursday! We didn't get the humungus hail stones - in fact we were just on the western edge of it and barely got any rain. Not that we're going to complain about that! Everything is so wet already. Lots of people saw the tornado touch down and there were more at Tilston and Peirson and then further east. All I could see from here was black skies to the east. Glen was running cat and trying to move a rig over in "Little Kuwayt" north of Sinclair. He came home drenched just from running from his cat to his truck. We drove into Wpg. the next day expecting to see hail and wind damage, but there was nothing visible from the highway. There are more storm warning for this afternoon and evening - it's been a rocking old time in this neck of the woods this summer!
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