Senators squabbling.  Fabulous.  Pigs at the trough.  As if they didn’t have it so good they could keep shut about it all, they had to push the envelope for more and get into a pissing contest.  Beautiful.  Just great.  What geniuses we have running our country!

But let us be clear about it.  We are complicit.  We allow it.  We don’t protest.  We just step out of the way when they run for the buffet.  They should be embarrassed and ashamed and so should we be for having them there.  And allowing them there in the first place.  It is elitism of the worst kind.

You have to give the CBC credit.  The CBC did this exposé .  I think the CBC has decided to put up a fight (for their very survival) against this government in any way they can and good for them!  They found a vein!

Face it!  It was NOT us.  It was NOT the opposition either (The Liberals have been at the trough longer and for more goodies and have just as scandalous a history).  The NDP (now the official opposition) just haven’t had the chance yet.

And I say that because the construct of the senate as an unelected upper chamber is nothing more than a corrupt reward for party hacks doing partisan backroom dealings.  If you get in bed with dogs, you will end up with fleas and even tho the NDP are flealess now, they would be scratching if they showed up at the trough too.  It is the very being there that is wrong.  The senate should be abolished.

Mind you, they can take the Commons and shove it, too……..

Well, I had to say something, didn’t I?  How could I not?  I actually have a final ‘studio-building blog’ ready to publish complete with pics but the studio isn’t quite yet 100% ready so I am putting it off for a day or so.

This little rant is like MUZAK…ya know…while you are waiting?  Barry Manilow?  Elevator muzak?

More breaking news….I’ll be taking a blog break for awhile…………or a change, anyway.  Starting in a week or so – because in a couple of weeks we go to Mexico for my daughter’s wedding.  I’ll blog a bit about that.  But, you know, it is her wedding.  Gotta respect that it is her story, not mine.

Mind you, I will tell you about my part in it…………whatever that turns out to be.  Sal says, “You just have to be there, sweetie.” I hope she is right.

Finally, a word about God, magic, the universe unfolding as it should…………whatever…..I am pretty happy these days and not in just the least bit aware of the many little miracles that seem to be dropping like sugar plums around us.  We are incredibly fortunate.  Life is good,

……………………senators and government notwithstanding.   

It was after dinner.  It was dark.  The fog had rolled in early and was as thick as a Canadian senator’s sense of privilege.   Looking out from the balcony was just a grey blur and we could barely see to the shore below.  About 100 feet.  The dogs were going crazy.  So Sal and I ventured out to stare into the gloom with them.

What could possibly have set them off?

Just as we were about to go in, Sal spied a shape emerging out of the mist.  A big herring skiff with a small aluminum boat tied alongside was slowly approaching the beach.  It was Alvin-the-floating-junk-man.

Alvin and his partner had promised to drop by to pick up the inevitable scrap metal pile consisting mostly of somewhat valuable dead lead batteries and stray steel and aluminum that seems to collect at remote homes like broken glass on the side of a Mexican highway.  We had a ton of metal or close to it and they were making their last stop for the night.

They were pretty late.  But at least they showed up!

I fired up the big yellow iodine floodlight we have on the lower deck so as to cast an eery glow over the shore and they gently bumped up alongside.  We helped them load the stuff aboard the large rectangular skiff piled to the brim with old refrigerators, car parts, batteries, cable and miscellaneous junk.

They climbed across the skiff from the small power boat, scrambling over the junk in sneakers and jeans and torn hoodies like creepy night creatures, to receive our offerings.  Both fellows are older and thin as rails.  Skeletal.  Skin like darkly tanned leather.  They were the very image of the junk collector with the added cachet of looking vaguely pirate-like at the same time.  Arriving late and leaving in the dark thick fog like ghosts of Marley simply added to the bizarre marine Halloween scene.  Scrap collectors? Or trick or treaters?  You be the judge.

It would be hard to make this stuff up.

Book club today.  The coven is meeting.  Almost Halloweén.  But it is a new house this time.  A new cauldron is brewing the tea.  Double, double, toil and trouble. 

The house is new in the sense of hosting book club and pretty new in the sense of existence as well.  Most of the women attending have no idea where exactly the house is but they know which beach to land at.  They’ll be guided from there.  The host family came a couple of years ago and have been building ever since.  They moved in and got comfortable early this summer.  They, too, are part of a group.  A mystery group…….

Well, not that much of a mystery group, I suppose.  But they are interesting, to be sure.  I don’t know the whole story, actually, but I do know that all of these folks can build and they can build fast and well.  They were a group of people who lived up North and built everything from scratch.  The whole community!  Everything.  Stores, barns, houses, schools and churches.

Real hippies, I guess.  Nice folks. But they are also our age and you’d think they would be slowing down.  NOT SO!  One of the guys is building his place up behind where book club is meeting and he just started this summer and it is already to lock-up.  He is 73!  And going like a train.

I am tellin’ ya, there’s something to this kinda lifetsyle.  Lots of people are poor.  Lots of people have little.  But damn near all of ém seem to keep on ticking and are still stepping pretty lively.

I remember well the year before we came up here for good, I attended a town hall meeting.  I wanted to see the community into which I was moving.  I was about 52-ish, in jeans, Gore-Tex and new boots.  A fashion hunk.  I watched the people enter and were struck by their ruddy complexions, lack of body fat and their incredibly disreputable garb.  I looked like an alien.  They were wearing Goodwill third time around.  I was at a meeting of hillbillies!

I fit in pretty well today.

And, of course, what is a clan of hillbillies without a Daisy Mae or two and I couldn’t help but notice the odd one.  One beautifully proportioned woman walked in front me wearing one of those long, thin, hippie dresses from the 70’s.  She positively sashayed.  It was mesmerizing.  I was transported immediately back to 1968, the summer of love.  Haight Ashbury.  Emily Faith Hart (long story).  Hitchhiking.  The Diggers.

Her hair swished from side to side and she had her back to me (which was just fine) and then she turned to say hello to the people around me.  She was still very beautiful but she was 70 if she was a day!  Older now that I think about it.  This woman moved and swayed like a teenager.  She was strong, healthy, full of energy and – did I mention that she had a good figure?

I was stunned.

But I shouldn’t have been.  Looking around the room I could see that a lot of the people up here were pretty fit.  I doubt that they watch what they eat – they take what they can get or what they have on hand.  No restaurants out here.  And there ain’t no gym!  The folks are fit because they move, work and are outdoors trekking on irregular ground all day long.  Or in boats.  Or carrying stuff.  Or building.

Usually all of the above.

For a guy like me who feels that any unnecessary movements are a sign of inefficiency and should be avoided at all costs, who thinks that one of man’s greatest inventions was the remote control and for a guy who now prefers an automatic over a manual transmission, I need the discipline that this environment forces on me.  ‘Course, I will never look good in a thin cotton dress nor will I ever be able to sashay in any way but lumpily, but still I am a lot healthier for being here.  I know that.

Now the first thing you have to know about Emily Faith Hart was that she was studying and residing in a convent in Oakland when we met in Haight Ashbury. She was dressed as a witch………………

We have basically ‘turned the corner’ on the studio.  Almost to ‘lock-up’.  We are having fun!

Since I will put the doors on at the very last (they are glass double French doors and a smidge vulnerable) we will not technically be to lock-up til we are virtually done – even the inside – because shlepping in and out of finishing materials, tools and stuff means passing through the doorway.  A lot!  May as well do that when the opening is wide and not breakable.

Did I mention the doors (that I transport by small boat) are glass?

But the windows are in and the siding will be on within the next few days so we feel as if we are dry and almost home.  The bulk of the work remaining is inside work.  The pressure – such as it was – is almost off.  Whew!

Sally, actually, feels the relief more than I do.  She was the one on the roof.  I built scaffolding so that I could work at eave level and pass Sal ‘cut’ pieces that she calls for as she needs them while sitting astride the roof.  Same kind of process for the inside.  So, for instance, while she was on the cat-walk scaffold in the inside-middle of the building, I was cutting collar-ties and rafters and passing them up to her.  She would then hold them while I got into position (the lower part of the ceiling near the wall) and the two of us would screw or nail in our ends.

Then – when the framing was complete but still skeletal – she would climb up on the very top of the roof outside and I would pass her cut sheet metal that she would screw into place and then she would scramble/slide along to the next section where the process would be repeated.  Since it was only an 8/12 pitch and I had scaffolding three feet down from the eaves (three sides), we were content to simply tie a line from her and to me for safety.  If she fell, my weight alone would save her.

This all sounds good but it is Sally who is at the top looking at the ground twenty feet below.

And sitting astride a metal roof (to put on the cap) is something that I would find quite difficult.  Sal does yoga.  Piece o’ cake.  As Sal says, “You do not need a carpenter for a partner, you need a yoga practitioner!”

Have you noticed that any old carpenters still doing framing are skinny?  Well, I have.

Anyway, the weather is still good and we will soon be able to work inside.  Except for the stovepipe opening our outside work will be over.

And to think you poor folks have to go to a restaurant, the theater or the mall for fun.

Roof’s on.  Soffits are done.  That’s good.  Neigbours houseboat is coming along.  That’s good, too.  Basically life is progressing and I will take some pics to show off today.  It is time for an ‘update’.  But I’ll save that for the next post.

My daughter is getting married in a couple of weeks.  That’s good.  At least 50% of the time, that is good.  Sometimes it isn’t.  Being a mediator for 20 or so years has exposed a lot of marriages to me (I have mediated well over 200 separation agreements) and I have a different view of it all than most people as a result.  But this one looks good.  I like B.  B seems to like me.  That is a good start.  Maybe I can get him to do some of the heavy lifting…?  We’ll see how this pans out.  But, so far, it has all the right ingredients.

But life is changing for young people.  The challenges are new and way more daunting.  We don’t know what they are going to have to deal with.  And how does one or even two deal with climate change and economic turmoil anyway?  Add possible children into the mix and it may be a helluva ride for them.  I wouldn’t want to have to handle that, myself.

It was hard enough when things were easy.  We got started on LIP and OFY grants and be-ins and good music.  We had free love – not free virus-ridden love.  We had The Beatles, The Stones, The Temptations, Otis Redding, Aretha and Janis.  Nowadays, they have rapsters killin’ and bein’ gangstas.  Grunge and crap.  Meth.  They got cartels and Homeland Security and CCTV.  Neither Orwell nor I would want to have to grow up with all that.

If they come to me for help, what can I say?  “Run!  Run for the hills!  Get out!  Get out now!”  Zat sound like experienced wisdom talking?  Zat sound like sage advice?

43% of Spanish youth are unemployed.  23% in Greece.  Over 30 million Americans are unemployed (officially the number is lower but that is because the ‘official’ number is a false one).  Millions more are underemployed.  The richest 400 Americans have a greater net worth than the lowest 155 million Americans combined.  A huge percentage of 24-to-34 year olds still live at home with their parents.  And the US continues to print money and lend it to banks for practically-speaking free in an almost six-year continuing attempt to kick-start the economy.  It is not working.  Not yet, anyway.  That does not make for an ‘easy-entry’ for youth.

But 25 year olds have energy.  They have attitude.  They have dreams.  They have ‘the right stuff’.  So, they may do OK.  They may do great.  Will they ever get to live in paradise and build sheds, tend gardens and be as happy as we are?

I hope so.  But I don’t see it comin’ easy.

We ‘boomers’ may have done a ‘not-so-good’ job with our turn at the helm.  We should have done better.  We still can.  Maybe it is time we collectively did something good for the generations coming up…..waddya think?

Quick survey…..anyone out there?

Numbers are off.  Comments way, way down.  Has the apocolypse happened already and no one bothered to tell us?   Look outside – do you see zombies?  Please tell me.

Admittedly nothing I have written lately is Pulitzer in nature but David J is usually good for a short confirmation of my existence.  And, to be fair, he was there for me when I needed him most (around the whale carving blog).  My new BFF!  But only once! The silence is deafening, the cold in the air more than just arctic air.  Was it sump’n I said?

On the assumption that you are not all suffering early onset zombification (which is quite generous of me when you think about it), is there something you want to say?

Mind you, unemployment is down to 7% so maybe everyone is at work?  Still, I noticed that most comments contributed over the years were from readers who were actually supposed to be at their desk doing their work and so that theory is weak.  Is it because I have held off on the ObamaCare/Boehner issue?  Or is it simply not enough ravens?

Maybe I have not ranted enough about the way life is?  Could that be it?

I do have this to throw in to the mix, “Hey, Dave!  Looks like there are fewer conspiracy theories out there, eh?” 

The old building-supply guy and I often trade cynical comments while exchanging cash for plastic crap and his opinion that fewer conspiracy theories existing currently could only mean one thing, “So, you are saying that because the theories are now out there, exposed and proven to be true?”

“Exactly!  So many skeletons are coming out of the closet these days it feels like it must almost be empty!  That Snowden fella and Julian Aasange are leaking more dirty secrets faster than even our senators can create new ones.  And Harper and Christy are out shilling for corrupt corporate takeovers like due process and public opinion have no part.  It’s all so obvious.  Right out in the open!  The hubris of these people and the ones being exposed is beyond belief.  But the good part is that our suspicions and theories have been confirmed.”

“Did you really need confirmantion?”

“No.  Not really.  But such arrogance usually preceeds serious comeuppance.  So, I am now moving from the conspiracy stage to the hoping for change stage.”

“Y’all sounding downright biblical, ya know that?  Pride commeth before the fall and all that.”

I later shared that conversation with another local guy.  A hermit of sorts.  Nice guy.  Very quiet.  Even more solitary than a lost guru on top of a Himalayan mountain. “Yeah, I agree.  It’s all coming apart.  No doubt.  I feel relief, actually.  Been waiting a long time.  Can’t end soon enough for me!” 

Which, of course, sent me along sharing that sentiment with anyone else who would listen.  And the consensus was shockingly unanimous:  The system is coming apart and we can all ‘feel it’ doing so.   It is overdue.  And there is no fear.  There is only anticipation and curiousity. 

Don’t misunderstand me.  I am not endorsing the End of Days.  My survey group was limited to those I bumped into and half of those were still fully committed to the conspiracy stage and not in the least moving on to the more rosy and cheery end-of-days apocalyptic stage.  And let us not forget the zombie phase – wherever that fits into the plot.  So, it is not like we have consensus or anything.  But I have a confession to make.  After all this talk of the END, I am now feeling much better about the extra beans in the food shed.

…about health care out here.  “What do you do?”

The first thing to admit to is that we do what most people do; we go to the doctor and they cut something off or put some drugs in to us like they always do.  Sometimes both.  We blindly accept what health care has become because, well, we didn’t think of the alternatives so much.  Of course, we have taken vitamins, increased our vegetable-intake and we watch our cholesterol and all that crap – just like they say we should.  And we have visited the health food store a few times just to see………

But, honestly?  Because we are basically healthy, we just went along with the normal process and consulted infrequently and very briefly with overpaid, ADD-addled, degree holding, drug pushers in germ-filled offices –  like everyone else. If we were really sick (which was often the case after visiting the first doctor’s office) we would be referred to a second group of specialists a year or so later (whenever convenient for them) or sent to the hospital where we were then exposed to the new strain of germs that can resist everything and some of them can even eat your leg!  I consider this Health Care by Fire.  Kinda survival of the fittest but with billing.  

In other words, we didn’t think about it much and what we thought wasn’t always good.

But, over the years out here, I have noticed a new pattern emerging.  We tend to address our ailments ourselves much more often.  Any cut of six inches or less is handled at home.  Any burns we treat ourselves.  Basic stomach problems are treated with wormwood or suffered through til it passes (all things pass).

We attend the doctor much less often.  And we are sick a great deal less, if at all.  In fact, with the exception of my cataract surgery which went well (thank God!) and which is NOT sickness or illness, per se, we have been relatively illness free for the last ten years.  NOT swimming amongst schools of people and students in cities helps a great deal, of course.  AND spending a great deal more time outside and being physical probably helps as well.  AND not being stressed by the now abnormal demands of modern living, I suspect, also helps. Simply put: we live more healthily.

So, generally speaking we are just plain healthier and less inclined to ask for help even when we might have otherwise.  I guess we are a smidge more independent of yet another system.  We have a foot, anyway, off the health care grid.

Having said all that, we are still on it.  We have Care Cards.  We occasionally see the doctor still.  But here’s the best part: our local doctor is kind of an OTGér herself.  She hates the office, too.  So she has taken it on herself to come out here.  She does an ‘outpost clinic’ every two weeks.  So here we are….out in the back of beyond…..with almost ‘house call’ service.  And, when she gets here, she is in no hurry to get to the next room or rooms full of patients.  Billing is NOT her primary concern.  More amazing…’Doc’ seems to care!

I dunno……..it is a different world out here.  Doctors caring about patients more than schedules and billing hours?  Service?  Care?  It’s weird.  But I am adjusting.  I may just need a pill for it, tho.  I have already asked for a referral to a counselor.  I think I am am suffering from a rare form of Health Care dissonance.

A reader asked me, “Ya know, if everything goes all to hell, you are in a better position, aren’t you?  You can hang in there.  You must feel more independent?”

“Yeah.  We have food, tools and we are pretty remote.  We feel pretty independent.  We’ll last.”

And it is true.  To a point.  But independence is a state of mind as well as stored dry goods (and enough toilet paper to allow civilization to get started back up again).  But if you really use that state of mind/grey matter then you’d have to conclude that we are just as vulnerable as the next old person in an extended care facility.

One has to face the facts.  If it all goes to hell in a handbasket, my piddly little stored-beans handbasket isn’t going to suffice for very long.  So, our state of mind is not as confident of independence as you might think.  We would not be as independent as I thought we might be, anyway.  Certainly not long term.

I guess what I am saying is this: we are pretty well set up for a short-to-medium term interruption in the way the world generally works.  An earthquake or something.  A ferry strike.  NHL lockout.  Or the walk-out of the Great Canadian Superstore employees.  We could easily go three months and, with a little work, probably six.  In an apocalypse, we are good for say a year.  It would be bleak, of course.  Probably depressing.  No Netflix, for instance.  But doable.

We’d be eating bugs and living off body fat but, in my case anyway, that should give me in excess of an extra six months.  Not bad.  Not really.  Not for me, anyway.  Sal would be toast, tho.  No body fat.  Poor sap!  But that is the extent of it.  Six months easy.  Six months more with hard time.

But by the time a year of Armegeddon is on the books, we are left as bereft and wanting as the rest of the survivors.  If there were any.

And, of course, there would be some.  But then I got to thinking…‘who would they likely be?’ 

A lot of war vets would survive.  Armed PTSD sufferers.  NRA types.  ‘Course all the Homeland Security types, too.  Police.  Hells Angels.  And then there would be those ‘Minutemen’, survivalists, vigilante border patrols, drug cartels and Idaho militia types. Sociopaths would likely do well.  Gun collectors.  Al Queda.  And there might be a lot of your basic, standard run-of-the-mill crazies who already live underground and survive off of pop tarts and pizza as it is.

There’d be the other remote people like us (most of them weird – like us), and young women with big bosoms would make it, of course.  They are the ultimate survivalists.  Old, ugly rich people might last too but, then again, they might be the first to go as a result of chance encounters with the first groupings.  But their wives would likely make it.  The second or third ones, anyway.  Trophy wives are a shoe-in.

You can see where this is going can’t you?  Even a sane, capable, nice guy and his wife with independent means (well, tools, boats and beans, anyway) wouldn’t fit in.  There is very little room in the world today for normal and healthy as it is.  Sane has already left the building.  So, post Armegeddon?  There would be no room for us at all.

Bottom line: we’d last longer but we would not last.  Our best before date is much the same as yours or the old guy’s in the care facilty.

So, you can see why my answer was not as definitive as you might think.

Not much to say.  Things are good.  Days getting shorter.  We are doing what we do.

Well, I am making a whale.  An Orca.

I have no idea why.  Not really.  It was raining and I didn’t wanna work in the rain and so I made a whale.  There’s a kinda logic to that.  Kinda.  I didn’t actually make the whale, I just started to.  Not done yet.  You’d be surprised how complicated a Bologna shape can be.

Anyway, with nothing earth-shattering to say, I’ll just post a few whale-in-the-making pics. I will say that carving a whale from a block of wood should be easy.  I mean, ‘just take off the edges, add a tail and a few fins’ and voila.  Right?’

But the challenge is proportions.  And how do you get proportions of whale things from a whale going by?  Or even a picture of a whale?  Pictures show black whales with black fins and black tails.  Usually set against dark blue backgrounds.  Whale pics are basically Rorschach tests!

The good part?  Only Sea World employees can criticize my whale.

I am gonna do worms next.

We don’t really rely on the barge but it makes life so much easier and we like the guys who crew the boat.  They are coming with a load of lumber and our semi-annual fuel delivery today or tomorrow.  Which is good.  We want to get back to the ‘shop’ construction and, of course, we want to continue our pampered, lush, exceptionally satisfying way of life without having to work too hard to get it.  The barge helps us do that.

The barge is huge.  A bit over 100 feet long, maybe 35-40 feet wide and it sports a hy-ab lifting arm that can drop a ton (literally) of stuff with each lift.  That is important because the company charges by the lift.  It costs about $160 a lift but I have concluded that carrying and schlepping 2000 pounds of lumber (factoring in gas and ferry and not just a little blood and sweat spread over several trips) is well worth that sum.  And schlepping gas and propane is some kind of enclosed-in-the-car hell that I gladly pay to have done by the barge.  In other words, I think the barge is a great deal.

They don’t make any money off of us or any of the local residents.  Not really.  We are break-even at best.  Our average purchase twice (maybe three times) a year is about $12-1500 but most of that sum goes to the fuel companies.  Amongst residents, we are a medium-to-large delivery.  They do a lot of smaller-earning deliveries.  It takes them about half an hour once we are ‘in their sights’ to dock, unload and head off again.  They have three crew and the boat would cost at least $5M to build if it was replaced.  Any kind of simple business math says ‘there is no profit in servicing residents’.  The barge makes a ‘go’ of it servicing the camps, resorts and fish farms along the coast.  We benefit simply by being ‘on the way’ to somewhere else.

By way of explanation: some of the more industrial customers go through $100,000 worth of fuel every month!

And we get the same considerate and prompt service as they do.  The crew doesn’t even really need us to be there when they come.  But we like to see them.  They know where everything is, how to get at it and what to deliver.  We mostly just stand around getting in their way.  But part of that hour spent is cracking a few jokes, catching up on any new neighbours arriving and learning about how busy the season has been for each other.

But the service is now threatened.  For all of us.

It is hard to argue with the threat.  We want the coast to be as pristine and unpolluted as possible.  That is why we are here, after all.  But in order to achieve that, the government has mandated that all such commercial ships be double-hulled.  They want to reduce the risk of oil spills.  And a barge full of fuel is a risk.  No question.  But to double-hull the barge will cost millions and the current customer base simply couldn’t shoulder the cost which the barge compnany would have to pass on.  Plus, they have been plying the same waters serving the same customers for decades.  They are the least likely of ships to hit something and be holed.

Makes no difference.  They will be forced to comply.  Probably.  Or go out of business.  More probably.

The net effect of this ‘better eco’ standard (again: which I find hard to disagree with) is that the service will be less affordable or withdrawn altogether.  And that will impact those who live here greatly.

The overall effect will be to further ‘push’ people from a rural environment into an urban one.  And one more indirect, subtle force will be levied that results in conformity and controlled living as determined by government.  We can’t have the barge but we can get on transit.  And we can no longer walk in the forest but we can go from one little box to another.  Working for the system that put us there.

“Dave, surely you don’t think there is a plot afoot to drive people to urban living?”   

No, I don’t.  Not really.  Not a conscious one, anyway.  But there are decisions being made constantly by Big Brother and the Holding companies that have that effect.  The desire to make things cheaper, to make people conform, to limit freedoms and to concentrate services has the effect of pushing people into concentrations and we call those concentrations cities.

I suppose we could call them camps but concentration camps has a bad connotation.

As for me, I will resist.  I will pay the barge more if they continue their service or I will resign myself to doing the hard work and heavy lifting in a fuel-smelling confined space (the car) if I have to.  It is still worth it.  I will never return to the concentrations.