Sal is on yet another quilt!  Even traveled to another island today so as to visit other quilters.  A quilting bee.  This is getting out of hand.  I am a quilting widower.  It’s golf pay-back, I am sure.

Funicular cart almost complete.  Bloody marvel, it is.  Steel may be the new wood for me. I am getting better at welding – things actually stick together now.  Not always the first time but, according to my mentor – “Just beat the snot out of it with a big hammer.  If it stays together, you did good.”  Those are the kind of instructions even I can follow.

Near-death experience with ‘head-cold-from-hell’ is almost over three weeks from whence it started.  I am pretty sure it was MERS.  Middle Eastern Respiratory disease.  Comes from humping camels.  What can I say – it’s a fetish.  But there’s nothing wrong with that. Like some flues come from pigs and birds, I guess.  Perverts!

MERs is just another thing to blame on Muslims, eh?  Man, those guys can’t catch a break.  Seems hate crimes are down in Canada by a whopping 17% (who measures this nonsense?) but not for Muslims.  They are still seen as the bad guys.  I think we can thank Harper for a bit of that.

OK, ISIL, mostly but still….you know how I feel about Harper.  He can’t catch a break from me, either.

Not QUITE true.  Harper pledged to recognize climate change before 2050 and even to eliminate the use of carbon-based fuels by the end of the century.  What a visionary, eh?That has to count for something.  I mean…he SHOULD be dead by 2050, shouldn’t he? But he is willing to concede climate change from his grave.  And clearly he won’t be driving by the end of the century.  It’s a start.

We are in our 11th year here.  And we are starting to have to replace a few deck boards. Not a lot.  A few. Maybe 5%.  But, by next year maybe another 5% and then it will escalate.  In five years time we may have replaced most of it.  Wood doesn’t last.  Still, we should be able to keep up.  But it is getting harder. Not so much because of us (but that, too) but also because the thriving, manly sport of milling your own wood is dying out as the wood-millers finish their own building, their machines get old and as they tire of the chore. The local wood-mizer is hanging up his peavey.  Damn!

2100 watts of solar panels are out-putting up a veritable superpower.  We are a-hummin’ with juice.  The new freezer (small) didn’t faze it.  We added a little ‘cooler’ we had and it is relatively inefficient and it didn’t make a dent either. Batteries are full and have been for the last two months.  Bloody marvelous!

All neighbours in and accounted for.  Summer ones.  Seasonal ones.  Full-timers.  All here.  BBQ’ing like mad.  Hammering.  Sawing.  Watering gardens.  Guests here.  Visitors there.  Tourists all over the place.  Sum-sum-summetime.

There you go…..news update.