A Jade Status Update: EEG Confirmation

We're in Vancouver right now for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons was for Jade. It has been a while since her last EEG.

I remember her first EEG well. It was like a little stab at my heart every time I saw the EEG spike. Every spike was a seizure and she was having a lot of seizures. Many of them weren't visible on the outside, but they were happening. My heart got stabbed a lot during that EEG.

The ketogenic diet (and improvements that came with drug weaning and constant tweaking of the diet - including an unbelievable and intolerable couple of rounds at 5:1) has been nothing short of a miracle for Jade. It has been over a year since we witnessed her last seizure, but the worries about the subclinical seizures - the ones we see no evidence of on the outside - remained.

Two days ago, we hooked Jade up for a 24-hour ambulatory EEG.

Yesterday we got the results.

While there is still some minor "slowing" in the background, this is not uncommon for a child with Myoclonic Astatic Epilepsy. The big news was that there were absolutely no spikes. None. She's not having any seizures. Her EEG was remarkable for its normal-ness.

Jade's doctor was thrilled, the keto team was thrilled, and we're thrilled.

Jade has been on a 4.75 ratio for about a year-and-a-half. Based on the excellent results, we'll be reducing her ratio to 4.5. It's the first step in weaning her off the diet. Then, we'll travel to Vancouver in another six months for another EEG to see how things are going with the wean.

All through this experience, I've had what can best be described as a pessimistic optimism - hoping in my heart of hearts that it will work out, but knowing that the worst can happen and mentally preparing for it - but this time I know it's going to work. I can feel it.

Yukon Newsflash: An Editorial

Yukon News, the insanity must stop. You had not one "Carrier of the Month" for April, but two. At the time, I demanded a showdown. I wanted to know who truly earned the title for April's Carrier of the Month.

You didn't respond.

Now, for May, you insulted your carriers again by double-awarding the honour - and you upped the level of insult by placing the announcements right next to each other.


Is this really how you let your star carriers know they're appreciated? Or is it some kind of sick, perverse joke?

Perhaps this is a symptom of why your carrier turnover is so high?

Who is the Carrier of the Month? Your carriers deserve to know, their parents deserve to know, and your readers deserve to know.

Yukon News, your credibility is at stake - and the news business is one that's built on credibility (or incredulity if you're in the business of "shock news"). It's time to be accountable for your actions and own up. We deserve an explanation.


(Oh, and why are your carrier's faces superimposed on a Torah?)

Lorena Bobbit's Preferred Brand.

Insert thoughts, puns, and whatever else springs to mind in the comment box below.

A Happy Father's Day.

Last Saturday, a fellow dad and I loaded our kids onto the sailboat and set sail on Kusawa Lake for an overnight trip.  I was completely unaware that Sunday was Father's Day.  Regardless, with a good steady breeze out of the south carrying us silently most of the way down the lake, and my daughters happy to be out on an adventure, it was a fantastic way spend Father's Day.  Even if I was oblivious to what day it was.

Saturday Night Hoedown

Here's another tune from Allan Benjamin's & Birch Kuch's session yesterday afternoon at the Old Crow Airport. I love the grin on Birch's face when the phone rings and how they both react to it at the end of the song.



If you'd like to hear more Old Crow fiddle music (and some Kate Weekes originals) it behooves you to check out Home Sweet Home, which features Keitha Clark and Allan's nephew Boyd Benjamin playing a whole slew of toe-tapping fiddle tunes from the Old Crow repertoire.

Hey diddle diddle!

Allan Benjamin is a poet, artist, snowshoer, Ranger, and fiddler in Old Crow, Yukon. Yukoners will recognize his "Didee and Didoo" column from What's Up Yukon. The other day, he and Birch Kuch (an amazing clarinetist) got together in the Community Airport Radio Station at the Old Crow Airport to play a couple of tunes.



Old Crow has a long history of fiddling and dancing and the community still turns out every couple of months for a big dance. Every fiddler has their own style and interpretation of the songs. Some of the songs have extra beats that can take other musicians by surprise. This song, Double Jig, is only known by a few fiddlers and Allan hopes that by posting in to youtube, others will be inspired to learn it.

Crow Mountain Revisited

I first walked up Crow Mountain in May 2009. It was a great hike and I have long wanted to repeat the trip. As luck would have it, I'm in Old Crow again for work and had a little time in the evening for a hike. This time I was joined by Heather, who also wanted to hike up the mountain.

Most of the trip takes place along a gravel road that leads up to a quarry on the side of the mountain. The road is popular with Old Crow residents and it's not unusual to run into someone heading up or down the mountain.  On our walk, we were passed by a 4-wheeler.  They were taking their dog for a walk.  And by "walk", I mean that the dog was full-out sprinting up the mountain and loving every minute of it.  At the top, they turned around to head back down and the dog was still sprinting.  When the 4-wheeler stopped to talk with us, the dog ran around excitedly, never flagging for an instant.

Any idea what this verdant little plant is?

Old Crow is a fly-in community.  It is tremendously expensive to build a winter road, so it only gets built every so many years.  It has been seven years now since the last winter road.  The equipment in the quarry is rented.  Believe it or not, so I'm told, it makes more financial sense to pay the daily rental rate on the equipment and have it sitting there for several years than it does to purchase it outright or pay for the cost of the winter road.



It's a short growing season above the tree line and many of the plants are in bloom.  I was really impressed with the blueberry plants, which are already flowering even though the leaves are barely out (not pictured below).


Crow Mountain is on one of the migration routes of the porcupine caribou herd. Caribou antlers litter the slopes.





The scale of the land is difficult to take in. Distant mountains are over a hundred kilometres away. In the picture below, you can see my hiking companion off in the distance.

The wind was powerful on top of the mountain. It wasn't the kind of powerful wind that would allow you to stand at a 45^o angle or the kind of wind that would blow you right over, but it was powerful enough to blow my face into a smiling position.


The problem that I have with hiking in a place like this is that I always want to keep going. I look at Second Mountain and I want to go there in the worst way. Maybe one of these days I will. We'll just have to see.


There's something special about being able to see a panorama that goes on for hundreds of kilometres and knowing that, aside from a few, small, scattered camps, there is nothing but wilderness.  I don't know how to describe it, but it's invigorating.  It's exciting.  It's good for my soul.

A Vulcan in Old Crow

Derrick Kapuschak-Frost is one of the most ingenious furniture makers I've ever met. He uses recycled materials and items from the land to create gorgeous works of unique furniture art. I'm not going to post any pictures of his latest work in progress (a honeybucket "throne" fit for a king) but I will post this picture of his anvil.


A long, long time ago, this Vulcan anvil - which belonged to a man named Olsen - was brought up the west coast by steamer, around Alaska and through the Bering Sea, and then up the Yukon and Porcupine Rivers. It is said that Olsen could make anything. It is the source of inspiration for Derrick's company name, Olsen's WoodCraft, and also its logo.

If you're even in Old Crow, you can find Olsen's Woodcraft behind Yukon College's Alice Frost Campus near the Recycling Depot.  It's really worth a visit just to see what Derrick has dreamed up next.

It's a tie.

Back in April, in the same edition of the Yukon News, they announced their "Carrier of the Month".  Twice.  And it wasn't the same person.



That left me wondering who the "Carrier of the Month" really is.  Is it Eloise?  Ona?

Yukon News, if you're reading this, your readers demand a showdown.  The carrier match of the century.

Bring it on.

To me it says "ALASKA!"

During my brief visit to Anchorage, Alaska, I spent a night in a chain hotel. This particular chain hotel had a theme - but not a theme that I would naturally associate with Alaska.





You can book your meetings in the Safari room or the Kenya room.

Eschew the shoe

I finally downloaded some of the pictures from my iPod. I took this one while walking through a wooded area near my neighbourhood this spring. I'd left the trails and was exploring a boggy area when I came across this shoe. I can only imagine why its owner would have left it behind.

The Neighbourhood Bike Gang

It was too warm for leather jackets.

Cuteness

Most of the sled dogs in Old Crow have been moved to their summer place. It seems like it would be a good place to have puppies.

It's a gas!

I stopped by Chief Zzeh Gittlit school in Old Crow the other night and caught the final race of the CO₂ car rally.  Students and community members made drag racing cars out of blocks of wood.  There is a space at the back of each home-made car for a CO₂ cartridge.  I won't get into how difficult it is to get CO₂ cartridges into a fly-in community (the cartridges are considered dangerous goods).

Here's a picture of the second-place winner.  I didn't get a picture of the first-place winner.  It was too fast.

Drumheller, Horse Thief Canyon, and Coal-mining History

The day started wet, which was hardly ideal for my planned day of hiking around Drumheller.


The drive from Red Deer to Drumheller was pleasant though, especially with my detour to Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park and a brief but enjoyable drive into and out of the Red Deer River valley.


And then I got to Drumheller which - if you don't already know (for some strange reason) - is famous for dinosaurs.


I wasn't planning on going to the Royal Tyrrell Museum.  I'd been there before.  I wanted to go hiking, but the soaked bentonite (clay) made everything so slippery and sloppy that my hikes were mostly restricted to the gravel-covered trails.




In the end, I decided to go into the museum where I spent a few hours learning some amazing things about plants and creatures of old.

After the museum, I went exploring and came to the interpretive signage for Horsethief Canyon.  The canyon got its name because - according to the interpretive signage - horses would wander in, only to come out a week later bearing a new brand.  According to the traveldrumheller website, however, the canyon got its name for American horse thieves who used the canyon en route to horse buyers in Alberta.

Oh, how I wanted to hike down into the valley.  Even though the sun had come out, the ground was still so slippery that walking was a precarious venture.




After my failed attempt to hike down into Horsethief Canyon I made my way back to Drumheller.  I couldn't help but notice some bright red rock just off the side of the road.  I pulled into a parking lot for an interpreted trail for an old coal mine.  Walking the trail, I learned that the red rock is created by underground coal fires.


I took a different route back to Drumheller by way of the Bleriot Ferry.

I drove back to Red Deer in the glow of the evening sun. The overcast cloud had long been replaced by large tunderheads and scattered showers. I'd crammed as much sight-seeing as I could in one day - and it was a day well spent.

Dry Island Buffalo Jump

At the end of a modest 20km gravel road in Central Alberta is, perhaps, one of the most incredible but little-known places in the world! The place has so many amazing aspects about it that it baffles me why there aren't streams of tour busses into the area.

Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park. Long ago, the Cree used to herd bison over the cliffs where they would then butcher the carcasses for food, hides, and tools.  It is the most northerly known buffalo jump.

If we travel farther back in time, the area was riddled with dinosaurs.  In fact, Dry Island Provincial Park contains the most important Albertosaurus bone bed in the world.  Of course, the living dinosaurs are long-gone, but 150 different types of their winged ancestors have been spotted in the area.

Here's one of them.


The Red Deer River winds through the park, slowly cutting through epochs of earth.  Exposed by the river and subsequent erosion are layers of river sediment from distant mountains, ancient bogs, volcanic ash, and ocean.


The park gets its name from a mesa - a large plateau of land 220m above the Red Deer River.  It's called a "dry island" because it has never been surrounded by river.  It was formed by a slow erosion process.  The top of the mesa is unusual in that it retains virgin prairie grasses because it has never been developed by humans or used by livestock.  They contain unique flora and fauna not otherwise found so far east of the Rocky Mountains in such large numbers.



Bentonite, ancient volcanic clay ash, is prolific - and when it gets wet it gets very, very slippery.  This artistic patch of ground had a little more traction, fortunately, so I didn't wipe out as I was exploring its nooks and crannies.






I love badlands-type country.  I love the sculptures created by wind and water moving over the earth.


And I love the little surprises - like this strange plant?  fungus? growing in a juniper? plant.  I saw several of these, always growing in the same type of plant.  They seem to have some sort of symbiotic or parasitic relationship. Can anybody tell me what it is?


I walked down into the valley and strolled along the base of a cliff.  A buffalo jump, perhaps?  There are many locations in the area that could have worked for that purpose.




Working my way through one valley and up another, I was struck by how many bones there were - likely of a newer vintage than the days of the buffalo jumps and certainly of a newer vintage than the dinosaurs.



And then there were the bones of a more modern age...


Climbing a steep slope out of the valley, I looked back.  People say the prairies are flat.  The prairies aren't flat.  Sure, the tops have been worn smooth by the glaciers of ice ages long past, but the prairies are anything but flat.

Back at the rental car, I made my way back down the gravel road and on to my next destination: Drumheller and all of its dinosaury awesomeness. At the end of the day though, I couldn't help but look back and think that I should have spent more time at Dry Island.

Such a cool place.