Stories

Rogers Pass – one of the snowiest places on earth!!!! Just east of Revelstoke, BC Canada. Close to the peaks of the Rocky Mountains. Upon my return to Canada from California in 2007, I was offered a job driving snowplow trucks for Parks Canada at Rogers Pass. I had not driven large vehicles since 1978 […]

Some say that the most precious commodity of all is time ….. However long we have on this planet, we know that the time is finite ……. we are all going to die at some point but we just don’t know when …… so to view the TIME we have in each of our lives […]

The Swastika was the emblem or logo of the German army or the Nazis ….. as their enemies preferred to call them. My Mom, Margaret (maiden name Tickner) grew up in south London, England during the German bombings of London. She emigrated from England in the final months of the war after meeting my Dad, […]

So it goes something like this …… there was a huge snowstorm a-brewin and a snowplow was working clearing a runway in preparation for an incoming flight at the Cranboork BC International Airport. ….. a link follows from Wikipedia that tells the facts as we know them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Western_Airlines_Flight_314 …… but there are other versions of […]

What is the truth? Seems like a simple enough question that might have a simple enough answer. But to a young boy trying to figure out how the world actually works it might take on a somewhat different light. Imagine that you are in the presence of the emissary of God himself (or herself or […]

We were living in San Diego California at our home in Fallbrook CA Ryan, our son, was 3 or 4 years old. We had just started Visus Technology with the folks from Pittsburgh and we were feeling pretty good about the future. We decided to trade our Toyota Camry for a Land Cruiser and therein […]

Sometime the strangest ideas actually come true!!! They can start, blossom and sometimes turn into stories like this one. This story was born in 1979 in Vancouver BC on one of those nights ….. good food ….. good wine ….. maybe a little cannabis. My wife Mona and I were partying with my sister Lynne, […]

My name: Joseph William Henry Harvey ….. I started going by Joseph recently because I like the sound of the word Joseph in French ….. the J is pronounced much softer in French than the hard “JAY” in English Ok …… so what is this story all about …… what’s the big deal! Imagine learning […]

I started learning guitar in 2008-09. Very early I learned a couple of the easiest tunes to learn like House of the Rising Sun, Hallelujah and other tunes like those. It is interesting how some of the best songs use a few basic chords like …… G …… D ……. C !!!! One weekend my […]

Leony and her friend Marie were sitting behind me under the umbrellas of the pub D’Orsay https://www.dorsayrestaurant.com/ under a Quebec City downpour ….. they were kind enough to share their umbrella …. with me! We connected in one of those Canadian kinda downpours ….. one minute SUNSHINE …. the next ….. RAIN!!!!! …… we were […]

This is a story that I wrote and self-published around 2012. It is based on a joke I heard while working up north in Alberta. The idea is that it gets so cold, so fast in Alberta that ducks get frozen into their duck ponds – LOL. In 1992 Mona, my wife, and Ryan our […]

I lived in Quebec City from March to November 2021 and just loved it here. The Saint Lawrence River is a gigantic river that was covered in ice when I arrived. It was amazing to see the ice flowing upstream because of the Atlantic tides that affect the river. I hope that this post is […]

Be careful what you wish for!! We had a roommate named Richard who was a lot of fun and we had many great experiences with him. Richard was an athletic type that did lots of things on his own including going hiking/mountaineering ….. The line between these two activities is not clear to me ….. […]

I suppose we can all imagine a freak accident where a ballet dancer is performing some great feat and slips and falls and breaks their neck ….. such a tragedy ……. they die from their injury …… Well this is not that story!!!!  This is a story about how humans can balance risk and …… […]

This story is not really about the Lady Rose but she played a small part …… a story about how we can go out on one adventure only to find a twist in the story by discovering something totally unexpected. This story is about Floyd Mosier, my ex’s dad and a good friend of mine. […]

New York City wanderings!! In 1999 I was working for FFF Enterprises in Temecula California. I was in New York City doing a presentation to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital. They are a large cancer hospital and they were interested in possibly using our clinical research software. We did the meeting decided we would walk over to […]

========================================= September 12 – 2021 – This is an update to my story – In 2021 we have just experienced another major catastrophe with the Covid pandemic, following on the heals of 4 years of the Donald Trump presidency and the January 6, 2021 insurrection in the United States. Major disruption are usually shocking at […]

Indictment – Who Me!!!!! I have a pewter bowl that I use as a soap dish in my bathroom. It is kind of battered and misshapen from the many moves that I have made but I keep it to remind me of this story, a story that the Washington Post called “the most brazen bribery […]

I guess the bottom line is that there are many ways to die but challenging fate and combining two ways at the same time must qualify for the STUPID award for trying to ride a rail train in the middle of winter. It all started with a friend of mine Bob and I deciding that […]

Have you ever been in one of those moments when everything around you is totally out of control and there is nothing you can do but kinda laugh at the insanity of it all ….. This story is about one of those moments that happened to me many years ago!  The crux of the matter […]

I was the Director of the Berlitz Language Center in Vancouver in the late 1980s …… this story has a few twists and turns explaining how I am now writing this story from the top of the world at Rogers Pass in British Columbia many years after the fact. In the 80s, I had been […]