The little boat engine is now running but rough. Really rough. Plus, of course, it will not idle. And so off comes the carb for the umpteenth time. Into the sonic cleanser. Lots of buzzing. Sometime in the future this little Suzi outboard is gonna run and life will enter another era…the post Suzi-dunking era (PSDE – a close cousin to PTSD).

We will never get to a post Sally dunking era ’cause Sal goes in the chuck more often than the Canadian Forces Submarine division.

Here’s a lesson learned……there is a fuse in the system that I had no idea about. It had popped. Thus the loss of spark. Jus’ sayin’….

Anyway, it is a typical day in the neighbourhood. Light rain. Spurts of sunshine. Sal has to go up YET AGAIN to clear the water intake. Maybe tomorrow. This has been the most demanding intake maintenance year by far. A dozen or so times already. She’ll get wet again, of course. It’s all fun.

I have rekindled my interest in mushrooms and, this time, I have learned more. In fact, I have to start by dropping a few alder/birch trees so as to ‘season’ them for Shiitake implants in the early spring. And I have to get wood pellets and spawn and misters and all sorts of crap which is hard for me…..you see, I walk through little patches of ‘shrooms all over the damn place ’round this neck o’ the woods. All the time. Lots of different kinds. Some of them have to be safe to eat. Mind you, if I am wrong, I might enter the post David era and that would cramp my style considerably.

Almost every mushroom I have ever picked and brought home to the library, I could not identify by the pictures in the book. And the ones I thought I got close on, turned out to be the extra poisonous ones. So, current events and common sense suggests that Mother Nature is fighting back on all fronts and only a fool would roll the dice with her today. I am pretty sure she is really, really ticked with us as a species. I will start by growing my own ‘shrooms.

Speaking of the species……the three dumb Bubbas who killed the student jogger for running-while-black were convicted by a motly-white jury of murder in Georgia. Minimum sentence is life-in-prison. Seems as if the right thing was done…kinda….I mean, I am in no mood to defend the neighbourhood Klan but the story has the father and son McMichael doing the chasing and shooting and a neighbour followed up and took video footage. It just seems a smidge over the top that the third guy goes up for life……jus’ sayin’…

(PS – edit update). Umh…what seeeeeeeemed like the right decision was not, after all, the right decision regarding the Georgia State legal system. Mr. Ahmaud Arbery (the victim) was shot and killed in February. The Ga district attorney BURIED the crime and did not pursue it until the video was released in May. That means that, if you scratch a Bubba state, you will still find a Bubba world in which the law is perverted and corrupted. That means that the verdict may have been right but it was correct IN SPITE of the system.

I guess I am losing patience with the Bubba crowd and the Trumpists (not that I ever had any). I am just kinda fed up seeing that clown’s face all the time. And that includes all the dumb faces of all the Bubbas of which there seems an endless supply. How did mass stupidity become a celebrity? But what about poor Wim and the European hoi polloi? Those folks are getting a double dose – more Covid AND more Covid restrictions complete with restriction protests! It’s like the slow unraveling of sanity being played out everywhere and every day right before our eyes.

On the plus side, the Swift Fox has made a comeback from assumed extinction. That’s good. Problem: they chose southern Alberta in which to debut their return. Dumb fox will likely go extinct again.

In closing……BC burnt in the summer and flooded in the late Fall. Towns razed and highways washed out. Prior to and during that hellish time, we indulged the Covid pandemic and it appears we will continue to do so. Now even the deer carry Covid! Already disrupted supply chains and weak and ineffectual governments prevaricate but prevail as inflation rises. And a number of Conservative MPs lied to remain unvaccinated. The cost of living is going up while the chances of living are going down. Bubbas and Conservatives still make the front page every day in one stupid way or another and division and separation are spreading like another virus.

And the stock market is gangbusters.

Problems? Or opportunities?