Friday and Saturday

Friday
It's a bit chilly out today, but I got to spend some time outside doing an interview with Global News. They were doing a segment on what to do if you're trapped in your car in the cold, so I gave them - Nicole Dube and her cameraman - a CASARA perspective. Unfortunately they edited out my best suggestion, to put a tarp on the roof, but they did show three quotes, and put me in the lead, too. So for twenty five minutes outside, they got about thirty seconds of me. Hardly seems worth the frostbite.
Saturday
We were supposed to fly out to Delta Marsh, where Dr Jill Oakes runs her winter survival course. U of M students, and others, learn about Inuit life, and build igloos on Lake Manitoba, where they spend the night. CASARA flies over to demonstrate what a search airplane would do, and to give the students practice in signalling. Unfortunately, and ironically, it was too cold for us to fly today, so I just worked around the Training Centre all day.

January 2008

Fairly busy week, but aren't they all. My main effort last weekend was removing the engine from my airplane, and boxing it up to go to St Albert AB for a mini-overhaul. One of the drawbacks of flying an ultralight airplane is that the engine has a very short life between overhauls, only 150 flying hours. I've just learned that the $700 cost has ballooned to $2500, because of corrosion and wear on the crank and pistons. The cause is probably the long time the airplane sat before I bought it. It first flew in 2000, but accumulated only 33 hours before I bought it in 2005. The shop owner says the type of wear is typical of engines that don't get much use. Most unfortunate for my bank account. At least I will have a basically brand new engine when it's done.
On Tuesday I went to do my annual military fitness test. It consists of a shuttle run, push-ups, sit-ups, and a grip test. There are three levels, fail, pass, and exempt, which allows you to skip the test the next year. The pass level is set at the 50th percentile, and exempt, I believe, is the 80th percentile. I used to be able to get exempt every time (barely), but then I became a bum. I was a bit worried about my ability to pass the thing, but I did. The shuttle run is 20m, at a gradually increasing pace. Oldsters have to run five minutes to pass, and run for seven minutes to get exempt. I made it to five, anyway, and could have gone on for a bit longer, but if you're not going to get exempt, there's not much incentive to carry on. I also had to do at least fourteen push-ups and seventeen sit-ups (yeah, I know, pathetic), and I forget the standard for the grip test. Well, at least I did more than the minimum.
I'm also slowly getting caught up with my routine jobs. The CASARA newsletter has been sent out, and so has the CAHS meeting notice. I volunteered to write a safety policy for CASARA, so we'll see how that works out.
I started taking a dance class because a) I need help and b) my friend Kathryn, the instructor, had a student who needed a partner, though she was probably hoping for someone better than me.
Last week, on the way back from Oakbank, I saw a car being driven erratically. So after I watched her miss a turn off on the Perimeter, and then just about go off the cloverleaf, I phoned the cops. I wound up ahead of her, so while describing the situation, I pulled over to let her catch up. As I was talking to the police dispatcher, she pulled alongside me, and stopped. I rolled my window down, and she asked "Where's the South Beach Casino?" Boy, was she ever lost. We were on McPhillips St just south of the Perimeter, going south. South Beach is thirty miles north, on Hwy 59.

Pompeii Exhibit, Science Museum of Minnesota

On Wednesday, I attended the monthly CASARA Winnipeg exec meeting, where we got our training plan sorted out for the next year. Just have to make up the schedule now, which shouldn't take too long.
I took Friday off work to go down to see the Pompeii exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota. The exhibit was great, well worth the trip. They had dozens of artifacts from Pompeii, Herculaneum, and a couple of other towns that were affected by the volcano. The artifacts were divided into separate rooms, with each room having a different theme: necropolis items, merchant items, religious artifacts, daily life and residential items, and the body casts.
The most touching items are the body casts, of course. About two thousand people died in Pompeii, and in some cases, the ash buried the bodies, which then decomposed, leaving hollows. Archaeologists poured plaster into the hollows, making recognisable human forms. There are eight body casts in the exhibit, including a dog and a pig. One of the humans, presumable a slave, has shackles around his ankles.
Some of the other highlights are the various religious articles, the furnishings, and the coins and scales in the merchants area.
There was a replica of a shrine, something similar to which would have been in every home, with small statues of various gods called Lares. Besides the normal gods that Romans considered important, they also worshipped ancestors.
Pompeiian houses had no lights, so the atria had open ceilings with pools or fountains. The water drained into a storage tank for domestic use. The atrium was used to greet guests. If you were a friend, you might be invited further into the house, perhaps into the garden. The garden was walled, may have had a partly enclosed roof, and besides plants, also frequently held statues hidden amongst the plants. There were examples of frescoes, lamps, pots, and furniture.
There were several dozen coins on display, made of gold, silver, or bronze. There were also small scales, that merchants would have carried with them. Romans had standard measurements, and there was a defining sample of each measure held in a temple in Rome.
Finally, there was a timeline of the eruption. In 62 and 64, there were earthquakes that damaged some buildings, but apparently no one connected that with Vesuvius. Finally, the volcano blew in August 79. Starting early in the morning, ash buried the town to a depth of several feet. Most of the population evacuated, but many people couldn't get away, or chose to stay. The volcano erupted all day, but around 5 pm, the final blow was struck, with pyroclastic flow that included poison gas. Anyone in its path would have been killed. There was a second pyroclastic flow later in the evening. After the eruption stopped, some people returned to recover belongings or loot the place, but after that it was largely forgotten. Rediscovered in the 1800s, about 2/3 of the town has been excavated.
As well as the Pompeii exhibit, I also saw an IMAX movie on ancient Greece and walked around the other exhibits in the museum.
The movie was good, narrated by Nia Vardolos. It mostly focused on the island of Santorini, which held a city that was destroyed by an eruption sometime around 1500 BC. There was also quite a bit on Athens, with a nice computer recreation of the Parthenon and the forty foot high goddess Diana that it held.
The museum is quite large, at least twice the size of the Manitoba Museum. It's spread across several floors, a bit confusing to get around at first. There is a really good dinosaur and ancient mammal display, that includes a diplodicus and ancient crocodiles. There are quite a few mammals like rhinos, horses, and various cats. Elsewhere, there are also good displays of marshes, weather phenomena, astronomy, and just about anything else.
So pretty good trip. It was a lot of driving - I left at 8 pm Thursday evening, drove until around 2 am, stopped in a rest area and slept for a while, then drove again from about 6 to 9, more or less. The drive back was a little easier, only stopped for customs, and took about eight hours, arriving in Winnipeg just before midnight. The only downside was the bizarre reception by US customs. Americans are just too paranoid. The guy even had me open my trunk (the second time I've had to do that). He checked a military rucksack I have in the trunk, even asked me what was in it. Seriously, what are these guys, the nerd police?

Happy New Year

I didn't do much for New Year's Eve, but slept in anyway. On New Year's Day I wandered down to the Manitoba Museum (the quite uninteresting name for the former alliterative Museum of Man and Nature). Along with several thousand small children, I checked out the Ice Age Mammals temporary exhibit. It was created by the Museum of Civilisation and a couple of other museums. It runs until April.

There is a complete mastodon skeleton (or a replica?), and a lot of skulls of mostly extinct animals. There was a small display of a dig that's being done on Ellesmere Island. They've found a 4 million year old marsh with the remains of beavers, obviously a sign of a much warmer climate. They also have a new display in the museum itself, of first nations' farming near Boissevain, especially interesting for me since my visit to the Moncur Gallery in July 2006 (Moncur is a great museum, pretty small, but a remarkable collection. It's in the basement of the Boissevain library. They have a lot of material relating to the early human history of Manitoba). I spent an hour in the temporary exhibit, and another hour and a half in the museum. Time well spent.

When I went to Rome last month, I didn't make it to Pompeii. So I'm hoping to make it to Minneapolis before Sunday to catch the Pompeii exhibit at the Science Museum of Minnesota. It closes then and moves on to another American museum.