User Coordinate Systems and fat pixels

I am trying to plot out a graph where my x-axis is something very wide 
like years where I am only showing perhaps ten years across the graph 
and my y-axis is something very short like grains of sand where I am 
only showing the range of 8000 to 10000 from top to bottom of the 
graph.  I have figured out the proper translation but when I start 
drawing I get very fat pixels that are one year wide and one grain of 
sand tall.

Can someone tell me a better way to map this out?  Do I have to leave 
my pixels square and do the translations before I get to my SVG 
document?  If that is so it seems the translations portion of SVG has 
missed the boat (other than that I SVG seems pretty cool :).

Help appreciated
Dwayne