Update

Sorry about not keeping this page updated! It's been a busy few weeks since I last touched this blog and so I'll try to update you as to some of the things that have happened during that time.

First of all, after coming back to Grande Prairie after my brother's wedding, there was a huge mix-up and so I was left in a hotel with some other people with Little Smokey until the rest of the people arrived 4 days later! That was quite a bit of time lost there! Then we headed off to Worsley and that was an interesting place to work! We rented out a ski lodge and stayed there for the next shift and did a heli block! That was fun! I also hit a personal best during that shift, so I was pretty happy about that! I'll include some pictures below.

This is my tent that I stayed in during my stay there. It was raining the first day we were there, so I had to put my tent on wet ground. Consequently, my floor got a little wet and my foam pad was soaked. Luckily I didn't get too wet. I also made myself a hay path which many people seemed to like to use, lol. It worked pretty good and kept most of the mud off.

This is the lodge itself. The part you're seeing right now is the front and is not actually where we stayed, although right to the far left, you can see the window to the kitchen. The lodge was very nice to stay in, had lots of room, had a very slow internet connection, but internet nonetheless, and a real bathroom and shower facility. That part was definitely the highlight of the stay!

This was the main helicopter we were using until it broke down and we had to get another one in to keep working. The heli show was pretty fun, but unfortunately the rides only lasted for about 2-3 minutes at a time. Still, it was an experience that very few get to have, so I felt privileged in that way. Our pilot, Tim, was awesome and very good at his job. He's been working with the company for a few years and is one of the most efficient helicopter pilots in the business.

Next, our crew headed back to Grande Prairie and stayed in the hotel for another 2 nights while doing a field. That was pretty terrible as it had rained and so the entire field was mud, so walking was quite difficult. I didn't do good that day, lol!

After this, we headed back to the Canfor Camp where I was originally at and that's where I'll be until the end of the season (excluding my other brother's wedding, lol)! Here, it has been interesting with 2 crews and a bit of people here, much more than we're used to, so it's been a bit of an adjustment. It has been raining alot, so much so that the river flooded and in doing so, flooded out at least 2 tents! They were completely soaked and the water went pretty deep! In some areas, the water went above my knees and one tent was in that! The other tent was only in 6-8 inches of water, lol! So, since this is everyone's day off, no one was there to pull it out except Kellie and myself, so we put on some shorts and I put on some sandals and we headed off to help clean up the mess that the rain had done and is continuing to do. My tent only has a small puddle by the entrance and my foam pad is soaked on the bottom as well, so I'll see what I can do about that, but it's all pretty trivial when compared to what other people had happen to them!



Shift 2

Well this has been 2 weeks since arriving in Grande Prairie and it has been a great challenge thus far! The snow you saw in the last post was melted away within the next day! I know, it's pretty crazy!

I'm still not up in production right now, but I hope to change that in these next weeks! I'm also looking forward to going to a wedding, so hopefully that'll break things up a little and give me time to recuperate and refocus. Well, I finally felt clean for the first time in 2 weeks! I got a real shower and am totally clean, at least for a few hours until I head back to camp and get dirty once again, lol! I found my MP3 player once the snow melted, but then I lost it 2 yesterday at work! It's probably lost somewhere out on one of the blocks, stuck in the mud somewhere, buried and out of sight. It rained once again yesterday and I am waiting for a nice day to come our way again where it is only 20˚C and has a slight breeze with a few drops of rain to keep me cool while I work. I'm sure that day will come again, but until then I'll be content with whatever weather God allows! This sure is a growing experience and I'm sure I will never forget it, lol! Until next time, I hope that this blog blesses you as I continue to develop it for God's glory and be praying that I'll be motivated to work harder and get better at this treeplanting business!

In Christ,

Richard

The Winter of Summer

Well, yesterday was very interesting! As I was tree planting, it began to slowly drizzle into a slow snow fall. At each bag-up of trees, I had to make it a bit quicker because the longer you sat, the colder you got. It was a very interesting situation. I had to wear all my raingear on top of my hoodie and underarmor just to stay warm enough and that wasn't even quite enough until I was going hard planting trees. Getting back to camp, the snowfall began to pick up pace and before we knew it, there was snow everywhere! I know, right at the beginning of summer! It was crazy and so I did all I could to stay warm that night.

I looked at my tent and it was definitely much too cold to stay in that night, so I began to look at other options that would be warmer. So, I got my sleeping bag, headlamp, and MP3 Player (which I later lost on the way over to the Dry Bus). I had to first take down the tarp that was originally suspended over my tent to protect me from rainfall. My tent was flexing so much that if I hadn't taken the tarp down, my tent would have most likely collapsed.

This is just a picture of me before I headed off to bed in the Dry Bus. 

The Dry Bus is called that precisely because it is used for drying clothes and the like. It has a giant heater in the back and so I thought it would be a great idea to just set up my sleeping bag in there for the night and try to stay warm. Unfortunately, the heater ran low on fuel and so it wasn't keeping up its regular heating cycle and so I had to wake up a few times during the night to turn it on manually to warm up again. I survived though and it was a very unique situation. We'll see if I do it again tonight, lol!

This is what it looked like inside the Dry Bus when I slept there last night. There were wet clothes drying around me all night. Surprisingly, the stench wasn't too bad, lol. It was a very unique situation, one that most people never get to experience.

This is the snowman that Danny, one of my co-workers, made. We originally had a smaller snowman, but he felt that we needed to do it justice and make a proper sized snowman instead, so we ended up with a 5 ft tall snowman! I had to document this to prove how much snow we had up here in Grande Prairie yesterday, lol.

This is the logging road beside our camp. You also can see 2 vehicles and the outhouse in this picture.

This is the vehicles as seen in the morning. The roadway largely stayed full of mud, melting all the snow that fell on it. The van seen there is the one I usually ride in to work each morning. This place definitely has some good scenery! I love taking pictures of all the trees. God certainly is good at His artwork!

Now, the snow is melting away and I can see green again. The weather changes so swiftly here some times. Well, that's it for another day of blogging.

God bless!

Richard

Shift 1

After a tiresome week of monotonous work up in Grande Prairie, I was able to sit back and relax and allow my body and mind to recuperate. This job is definitely not a pushover of a job, but demands that you give your all and it tests your mental limits fairly regularly. I've already had 2 mental blocks and my production suffered both of those days, although the last time was 1/2 a box better than the last mental block! I need to focus on my motivation and work with that in mind. As a Christian, I'm not here to just make money for school. I'm here to be a witness of His great and Holy Name and be a faithful ambassador, content with whatever He has given me. Right now, that is waking up at 5:30am, working  a 10 hr. work day, having supper, conversing with my co-workers, and going to bed to do it all over again! I feel that I'm here to be more than a worker. I've already encountered some people that are Christians and have some interesting views on theology. I am leaning on God for wisdom in those scenarios and am hoping that I'll learn a lot more about apologetics, or I guess it's technically polemics, this summer through these opportunities! There's also some who hold to other religious views and I look forward to conversing more with them. It should be interesting. God is already stretching me in many different ways and I look forward to how God will have changed and grown me by the end of summer!