Category: Reflections

Writings about life, and usually how beautiful it is.

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Ruby Returns

Ruby Returns!

Isn’t she cute? 🙂
Tamika and I christened her  just now.

Back when I had the wreck, we had gotten the news that she might not be coming back to us, and I was genuinely sad that she had been so reliable and such a part of our family, that I had lamented that we hadn’t named her.

And so Ruby seems like an appropriate name for a red Subaru.

The collision centre replaced the entire front end, very nearly. The only thing left untouched was the right headlight and blinker. Everything else, the grill, the (very expensive) hood, the bumper, even the fog lights, are all shiny and new. The poor thing has never looked better.

The grill was actually surprising, they replaced it with a chrome one from a luxury model (our old one had just been plastic).

She’s still got some problems (need’s a new catalytic converter, needs an engine guard, and has a rust spot near her gas tank that needs help) but she’s ours and we love her, and we’re glad to have her back. God is good.

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Snow

I originally wrote this right before we left Schefferville this past December.

Snow Ridge Panorama

Snow.
That’s all I saw. Just snow.
I watched it from my parents front door, staring out onto the silent town. Silent not just because everyone, save a few die hard insomniac drinkers, had gone to sleep, but silent because of the snow itself.

Make no mistake, this was a storm. Far from the fat gentle puffs in It’s a Wonderful Life or Charlez Shultz’s self-depricating Christmas (don’t get me wrong, I love the show, just wish he would have cheered up on occasion).
No, you stick out your tongue to catch these snowflakes, and in a matter of seconds you’d learn that, yes Virginia, you DO have quite a lot of pain receptors in your mouth.
But these snowflakes were silent.

Movies get it wrong. Whenever they depict snowstorms, it’s always this whipping, howling wind, that screeches and whistles, slamming doors and rattling shutters.
To be transparent, that does happen sometimes, but most storms are like this one. A steady, silent march of sound-absorbing ice crystals, unceasingly falling to a barely perceptible yet maddeningly familiar pattern. They dance and swirl with charisma around lampposts and stony parked snowmobiles, but you’ve never heard a silence like that of a steady strong snowstorm.
And it is quiet.
You can stand out there, bundled up in a parka, and not feel or hear anything, but the gentle constant shove of a million tiny snowflakes across your back.

Standing out in it, at times it seems to suck the cacophonous choir of everyday noise right out of your head.
And I, one of the very few, was grateful for it.

I needed it.

I grabbed the brake above the wristgrip and wrenched the handlebars to the left. The Skidoo, which had been traveling at a great rate of speed, locked it’s tread, and pirouetted in the middle of the vacant midnight road, the loose dry powder kicked up by the twirling skis and tread, revealing the slick smooth compacted ice underneath.
I held on, leaning automatically to counter the force trying to pull me off.
Once. Twice. Three times. Four times I spun around until I was pointed back in the same direction, a spiral snake echoing out behind me made of sleek black ice. I hit the kill switch, the engine hummed to a halt, and I stood.

The ringing in my ear from the roar of the engine subsided, and I was wrapped up in the snowflakes.
The sound of nothing.

The flakes beat against my visor, slamming themselves against the plastic, but making no noise. My eyes welled.

I pulled the killswitch back on. Yanked the cord. The Tundra roared back to life, throttle on.
It sat there and spun on the ice, immobile, until it finally caught and surged forward. I fought the machine up the ridge, holding back tears. I felt my demons clawing at my back, gripping my arms in fervor. Fatherhood. Debt. Marriage. Work. Zerflin. Faith. Courage. Weight.

I prayed.

Through the screeching engine, through the whistling air piercing the gaps in the helmet, I couldn’t hold it back.

And as I stood on the ridge, blanketed, torn, broken… the tears came.

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Computer Career

@BillyFenyes asks: “@benjancewicz: how does one choose a career in computers when one has to take air Inuit to get to one’s birth place.”

Well, there was a pretty specific series of events to make it happen. And honestly, I hadn’t thought about it before now.

My dad got a computer when I was very young (I think it was a Tandy 1000 if I remember right) to use with the translation work he was doing with the Naskapi.


My dad wrote software as he worked for Wycliffe as a Bible Translator, and also designed a font for them. The Naskapi use syllabics to write with, which meant that there weren’t computers made that could write in the language. My dad used the computer to help get that going.

I had my own little desk within my dad’s office in the basement, and I would go down there and draw while he worked, and he taught me how to use the computer.
The computer only had a DOS operating system, not like Windows and Mac’s OS for today. You had to punch in commands to open and run programs, or to see what was in a folder. To run a program, you had to put a floppy disk into the computer to run it (sometimes 2 disks). My dad made a cheat sheet and put it next to the computer to help me learn all the different commands.

We had a couple games with the computer (like DragonWorld), but  one of my favourite programs was one called PC Paint.

As far as I know, it was the first graphic program for computers. Our screen was actually 2 colours, so while the program actually supported 3 colours, I did it in black and white. I spent hours and hours drawing with the mouse. As I recall, our first mouse was actually an optical one, we had a shiny gridded mousepad that we used.

At school on the reservation, they had received a grant and had a bank of 8 3 colour computers. They were IBMs, though, and the computer teacher, David Lewis, didn’t like them very much, because he felt at that time that Apple computers were better. He was able to get a grant for a whole room of Apple computers, and upgraded them every 1 or 2 years. By the time I was midway through high school, I had been learning graphic editing in a program called ClarisWorks (a precursor to Adobe’s InDesign), was learning animation in HyperStudio (a precursor to Adobe Flash), and with my classmates, built my first website using Claris Home Page (a precursor to Dreamweaver). The website we created is actually still up! http://www3.sympatico.ca/jimmysandy/

Going back, I guess it’s kinda ludicrous that I went into engineering as a major when I first started college!

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