A lot of people have expressed a desire to live off the grid.  ‘What an adventure!’  And, of course, I encourage that (some of us have to repopulate the planet after the BIG fan gets clogged up with crap!).  Not only is it interesting, challenging, healthy, beautiful and a great experience, it is also a lot of fun.

I am surprised more people aren’t doing it.

Yesterday Sal went to greet a bunch of local First Nations elders to convey them to a meet-and-greet up at the community hall.  And Sal was older than a couple of them.  But a good time was had by all and the guests stayed all day.  It was a good thing.  The irony?  They told Sal that ‘This is such an adventure.  We never get out this far.  It is so remote!’ 

First Nations….never get out this far…?

But that visit was fun.  For the elders, anyway.  Not my kind of fun but others love that kind of stuff.  And I do find it fun that others are enjoying themselves.  So, fun vicariously – for me.

My lumber came so I carted stuff around instead of hobnobbing, eating sandwiches and smiling.  Small talk ain’t my thing.  Monologues, maybe.  I prefer to schlep lumber around.  And, when I finish with that, I can go back to building.  So that’s good, too.

Some German tourists in a renta-boat broke down and our neighbour gave them shelter for the night and food and arranged for repairs.  They then had breakfast.  Broken English and broken boats.  But friendships welded.  More good stuff.

It is a veritable whirlwind of activities in the summer and even tho some of it is exhausting at times, most of it is good and the rest of it is very good.  We are always busy.  It is a good life.

But I think you know that……

I just read a blog by Victoria Gazely, a homesteader on the Sunshine Coast.  She’s kinda into this sort of thing.  My friend’s sister has a blog and they are on Texada.  Same-ish.  And another friend of mine just bought a lovely place not far from here.  Learning is the common theme for all of them.  And learning there shall be!

Every summer some new folks arrive.  And I admit that this summer had an increase in tourism, which I tend to think of as ‘seeding’.  The people who come here to stay had to start with visiting first.  It sometimes feels like this off-the-gridding thing seems to be catching on. There is so much going on out here.

In the summer.

But every winter it all slows down.  Way down.  And someone leaves.  Or dies.  Or gets so old that they are caught in between. It is then that it doesn’t seem so much like a movement.  It is not a sustained current of change.  It is not a trend.  Some people come.  Some go.  Some are learning and others are taking their knowledge with them.  It is a tide of change – in and out.  There may be a smidge of growth for awhile and that seems to be followed by an exodus of one kind or another.

Bottom line: we are like the currents we live amongst, we flow and we ebb and yet we remain much the same.

And I wonder…….  Are we learning anything?

I am reading a well written book.  Country Driving.  About China.  By Peter Hessler. Sal recommended it and said, “He is good. Seems to tell a great story but doesn’t insert himself into it too much at all.”

Which – for those of you still uninitiated into the world of fem-speak means: “Your blog is too self centered!”

Hmmmm….if minimizing my self is the definition of good writing, I am doomed.

Off the Grid is all about me.

Mostly.

I suppose I could write more about building, living and just experiencing living off the grid…in the forest….somewhat remote…..trees….birds…whales. But, like, without the subjective side, is there anything you don’t already know? Do people/readers really want more about building? Planning? Logistics? Do you need to read more about wildlife? Dirt?

Or is it the subjective experience of this kind of living that is of interest?

To be fair, I am not even that well equipped to write about that. Not anymore. Jump out of the frying pan and into the fire and it is not long before you have forgotten the frying pan. There is enough new stuff to keep you focused on that in which you are now immersed. So completely. Comparing one’s life to the other past one gets increasingly difficult the further in time you are into the new one. I have forgotten the cul de sac to a large extent and, even if I haven’t, the cul de sac has also moved on. My view of urban life is now ten years old. I am no longer hip.

Evidence of life passing me by is also painfully undeniable. I don’t even have a smart phone. I am spending very little time in front of a computer screen and all the new music on the radio sounds the same – bad. I guess it is true: The mountains are high and the emperor lives far away (Chinese saying). And I don’t work and contribute to the system. It all serves to keep me in the margins. Of everything.

Or does it? Maybe I am just seeing more……..?

I don’t care. Not very much. I should. Maybe. Sometimes the news will flip me out. I am getting increasingly exercised by the frequency of police-caused deaths, for instance. And our collective acceptance of that. There is something very wrong with that.

I do care about that.

And I am appalled at how insulated and isolated the average person seems to be from what is happening in the hinterlands. It is environmental annihilation on a grand scale in my mostly uninformed opinion. We are killing ourselves and doing it gladly and unconsciously. ‘What we don’t see can’t hurt us, eh?’

You should see Weibo’s War (a documentary that is so hard to watch that I could only see the first, easy half. The burial of his dead grandchild made me turn it off). Living remote isn’t enough to escape Big Brother it seems. Certainly not if you are near a gas and oil field. But living urban seems to make it easier. You know….out of sight…..?

Sounds Machiavellian cum Orwellian-Nazi to me.

I know, I know….this is verging on a rant. And I try not to do that. I am trying to keep it light. Hah ha. You know. People like light. And there is no doubt that I have more light in my life than anyone else I know. Especially now that Sal is back.

So……………..at 6:45 a.m. the barge showed up with my required lumber. That was fun. Soon I will be back being a contractor-guy, hammering and sawing. Bleeding. Breaking stuff. Making mistakes. You know? The ‘light stuff’. And it is fun. It is. Truly. And, while I am doing that, Sal will help and we’ll have fun. And tea. And we’ll stop to watch the whales go by. Throw a stick for the dogs. It will be good.

And somewhere in Canada some kid will be tasered to death. Some dark-skinned person shot nine times. Some vast area of the country will suffer an oil spill. A salmon run will be wiped out. A species will go extinct. And some nut-bar will slaughter a dozen people at a fast food restaurant. Politicians will continue to revel at the trough and the BIG lie will continue to get bigger.

And I will do light.

It is starting to feel as if there is something very wrong with that…………………………

Yeah.  That’s me.  Not completely but definitely slow-like.  Without Atilla-the-honey here to keep motivating me and supervising, I slow down to a crawl.  Or don’t start up at all.  Woke up at 7:15 this am.  Got out of bed at 8:45.  That hour and a half just went by so blissfully, ya know?  Thinking about stuff, planning stuff, imagining stuff, day-dreamin’….

But that’s done!  Time to clean up, smarten up and put on a clean shirt.  Do all the dishes.  Might even pick up a few towels off the floor.  Sal’s coming back today.

(Can’t do too much cleaning or else she wouldn’t feel at home.)

I haven’t yet told the dogs.  They can’t handle it.  Not in advance, anyway.  When she gets here they’ll be hysterical but we can all wait for that.  No need for them to exhaust themselves in anticipation.  (altho a little dog torture might inadvertently slip out now and then…….”where’s Sally?  WHERE’S Sally?  WHERE’S SALLY?????”)

Total hysteria.

‘Course, I can handle it.  Being mature and all.  No big deal.  Wife goes away.  Wife comes back.  Ho hum.  What else is new?  Nothing to see here, folks.  Just move along.  Go about your business.

But I can already feel the sloth-pace quickening.  I will admit to that!  But, hey!  Waddya expect?  I got a lot of dishes to do!  A man’s gotta do…….

Which reminds me: a 3 kayak flotilla went by yesterday, two parents and a kid.  The kid was about ten or so.  They waved.  I waved. The kid yelled out, “Hey!  Nice cabin ya got…or…house…whatever…..”

“Thanks.  I think of it as heaven.”

“Yeah.  Looks that way to me!”

Kid is ten!  OK, maybe twelve.  Maybe he has pressures.  I don’t know.  But a kid?  Thinkin’ this is heaven?  Zat a sign of the times, or what?  That kids kayaking with their parents have enough stress in their little smart-phone lives that they can relate to this?  To me?  I could almost hear the kid sigh!

Hey!  I got pressures, too!

And….well, I gotta go………..things to do………..towels to pick up……..you know…………..pressures…

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Wrote a blog entry yesterday but WordPress (the host) ‘zapped’ a glitch or something and it went into ether-space.  Gone.

Tried my new NetFlix connection last night but the download kept ‘freezing up’.  Couldn’t watch Thor.

Read a column by a guy who thinks outside the box and makes good arguments for why all the techie experts on OTG (solar, etc) power are wrong.  I think he is right.

Sheesh, you would think that with all the modern progress and all, we would be past this kinda stuff, wouldn’t you?  I mean, really?  Blogs shouldn’t disappear. NetFlix should work, and batteries and charging them………that should be old hat, well-established procedure.  Right?

Well, you may as well face the truth, butterfly……….a lot of this modern convenience stuff is still a crapshoot if not just plain old crap.  Machines break and electronically digital machines seem to break more often than steam engines ever did.  It is a bloody marvel when they work.

And sometimes I have to wonder what they are working at?  Mass drivel distribution?  Monumental non-news nonsense?  What could possibly require a smartphone-in-your-face all day long?  Gotta tweet or die?  And to whom are they sending that mind-numbing tweeting drivel…some vocabulary-starved, spelling-challenged, TV-watching doofus just learning to sext?

“Dave………..?  You are…..ranting…………chill, man………….” 

Right.  Sorry.   I could be losing it a bit.  Sal is gone.  Went to a wedding up the coast.  Been gone a couple of days now.  My perspective on things is deteriorating.  She knew it would.  “Tell them about the time you were naked on a bucket…..that’ll help.  Not them but maybe you!”

It was when we were building.  I was alone.  Sal was back in the city.  It was really hot and I tend not to be aware of taking care of myself.  I forget to drink and eat and that sort of thing.  By the time I took my first break, I was pretty goofy.  I ate a banana and drank a coke and felt better enough to go back to work.  A few hours later I was pretty crazy.  Really crazy.  I staggered back into the shed and sat for awhile thinking I should drink something and eat something.  So, I took another banana and had another coke.  Felt good enough to go back outside to work.

That’s when things started to get a little fuzzy………….

Late in the day I decided that bananas and coke weren’t quite right for me.  By then I was naked.  It was hot!  I was working out on the deck starkers and things were starting to get red.  I really need to get out of the sun.  So I went in and sat on a bucket.  I thought I should cook something and the Coleman was just at head height so I turned it on and reached into the cooler for something to cook.  I found eggs, onions and small tomatoes.  Seemed like an omelette just asking for it, you know?

But I didn’t want to get up.  And cleaning stuff first seemed silly at the time.  So I just cracked the eggs and threw the rest in whole and didn’t even get up to look.  I figured if it burned a little it would still be fine.  And really?  Stirring?  Needed or not?  And so it cooked.  And it did burn a little.  So what?  I was burned more than a little myself.

When it was done enough that I could smell it burning, I got up and dumped the contents on a plate – like any civilized man would.  It was then I discovered that the frying pan hadn’t been cleaned from the day before and it was quite full of lamb chop grease.  So I was looking at lamb-grease covered burnt eggs with tomatoes and onions in a pile on the side.

With a coke, it wasn’t all bad!

But clearly I was a little off my head so I slipped into the orange inflatable and headed ’round the corner to the beach in the cove.  I need to cool off but where I was was freezing.  The water is warmer in the bay.  When I got to the beach, I slipped over the side.  I was still naked so there was no pre-dipping ritual needed.  But I should have looked where I was dipping.  Seems the oysters were breeding and the bay had a thick skim of oyster spat floating on the top like cream on the top of a milk bottle.  Or, for those of you more literally minded, like a tanker spill of ejaculate.  I was aslop in oyster cum!

Try getting back into an inflatable boat covered in that kinda slime………..NOT easy………….

But I was cooler.  No saner, mind you, but cooler.  Sanity would come after I got back to the work site.  I hoped.  As I headed back to the site naked in an orange boat covered in oyster slime, I wondered…………‘would I see a new neighbour….?

‘Should I seek help?’

‘Why am I naked?’

The answer dawned on me:  I should simply not be left alone for any length of time.  It is not safe.  Not for anybody.    And I have tried to convince Sally of that but sadly, the main argument for that conclusion only makes her want to leave me all the more.

And now she is gone.  And things are deteriorating fast.

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I have an old Klinge reefer unit genset.  Diesel.  We call it the Klingon Warbird.  That is because it is so black, bad and macho, like Lt. Warf on Star Trek.  And, like poor ol’ Warf, it is always going wrong (did you not notice how Warf always suggested using a photon torpedo and Jean Luc would always ‘hold that’ and decide to talk with the enemy first?  Warf represented macho men in general.  Picard was the enlightened new age sensitive man and Warf was made to look like doofus every time).

My genset is not as bad as Warf.  But it is powerful, dirty, mean and cantankerous.  Like Lt. Warf.  And, like Picard, I try to reason with it.  But I am considering a photon torpedo right now.  I have a streak of doofus still.  Last resort, mind you.

I’m macho (read: stupid) but with a sensitive, new age side to me.

But this is not about me.  It is about diesel mechanics.  I have come to the conclusion that diesel mechanics are the last of a dying breed of gentlemen warriors.  These guys seem like good eggs.  Mind you, my survey is small – only two or three – but, in each case the guy was a mensch of a man and a brilliant mechanic.

My warbird is down.  Couldn’t get the fuel control solenoid to stay in the ‘on’ position.  This is NOT a major problem.  It is just electrical.  But ‘electrical’ is a major mystery for me and so the problem is more difficult than it would be for most people.  But I persisted.  And, of course, got nowhere.  The solution so often employed nowadays is just replace everything.  No fixing required.  No understanding.  Just installation.  And that was likely the route for me.  I decided that I had better start the process of looking for parts for an old Klingon Warbird.  They can’t be easy to find.

I contacted Klassen Diesel in Delta.  Talked to ‘Norm’.  Explained the symptoms and asked if they could get parts.  Norm answered in five short sentences.  Said it was likely the switch.  How the hell he could conclude that from the briefest of descriptions I sent him was beyond me but I decided to go back and check my switches.  Lo and behold, my temperature breaker switch was cutting out now and then.  It was the switch!!

I’ll get a new one.

But here’s the deal…..big ol’ diesels are heavy.  The KW weighs 2000 pounds.  You don’t just ‘bring ’em in’ like a car or a washing machine.  And living remote means that the mechanic can’t or won’t come out.  And, if they do, they have to charge a gazillion dollars.  So, the old gentlemen mechanics often trouble-shoot by phone or e-mail.  They don’t get paid.  They are like doctors – only better.  They seem to care.

Four years ago I was looking for parts for the Warbird and some nice guy at a diesel shop did the same thing as Norm.  I fixed it from his notes.

To be fair, they aren’t Anne Landers-in-overalls, either.  Ya don’t get a lot of conversation.  “HI.  If you are pushing the button and the unit stays running than the problem is not the solenoid. It is the temp or the oil switches. They are not functioning. Also on this system if a wire has come off the switches you will have the same problem. I would get a new oil and temp switch”. Cheers, Norm.

Unsaid is the following: “If you are not a doofus, that should help”.

I am a doofus but it does help.  Thanks, Norm.

….for an update…. and it ain’t all rosy….

Everyone’s gone.  Clean-up now.  Replenishing, repairing, sorting – for a few days, anyway.  Usually that is just the prelude to getting our life back together but Sal leaves in a few days to attend a wedding up North.  Gone a week, almost.  It’ll feel like hell.  I generally say, “I live in heaven with an angel.”  But, really, no Sal is hell.  I may have to attend to my own needs.  Damn!  I hate it when that happens.

“Oh, sweetie!  I’ll show where everyting is.  You can make sandwiches and stuff.  I am sure we have some leftovers frozen.  You’ll be fine.”  

And, in a way, she is right.  I’ll be fine.  Of course.  In a way.  I know where everyting is already.  Just have no inclination to go do anything with it.  When Sal leaves, I live on bananas, PB & J (toasted, tho) and tea and scotch.  Sometimes a little licorice.  I pretend that I will cook something but I never do.  So far I have managed to finagle an invitation from a neighbour at least once and that basically tides me over.  In the good ol’ days, I’d just phone for pizza.  So long as Sal was not gone for longer than a week, I was OK.

But I am older now.  My needs are less in some areas, more in others.  So, I’ll get in larger stocks of scotch and bananas, I guess.  Buy green.  And we just signed up for NetFlix and there must be a plethora of cheap B shoot-’em-ups that I can watch without guilt.  It isn’t all bad.

But, honestly…………..I’ll miss her.  We get along pretty well.  We have fun.  It is good, all good.  All very, very good.  Too bad it is all on the heels of a just-finished category 5 visitor storm.  It will feel like an open air mausoleum when she goes.  ‘Course, I got the dogs….

It’ll be hell!

July looks like it may be a record breaker this year.  Virtually no rain at all.  When we are out of the cool breeze we enjoy on our deck, the temperature can climb pretty quickly.  It can get pretty hot for us – pushing 30C.

Our guests sometimes don sweaters.  A blessing and a curse.

Seems 30C with a cool breeze is considered ‘very cool’ in Hong Kong.  This global warming thing may work out just fine for the Chinese.  For me?  Not so much.

I am warm.  Naturally.  T-shirt in 12C (56F), shirt-with sleeves at 6C (44F) and a light jacket – maybe at 4C (40F).  It has to be freezing and raining before I feel the cold very much at all.  I am a bit warm at 60 degrees and too hot at 72.  After 80 degrees F I am in a torpid stupor.  Global cooling would be preferable.  A mini ice age might be a bit much.  Maybe, maybe not.

It is partly an outdoors thing.  Sal used to feel the so-called cold at 72 degreesF.  Now she feels warm at that temperature.  Her comfort zone has dropped maybe by 6 or so degrees simply by living more and more outside.

The dogs have managed to cope pretty well.  They get shorn now and then and so that helps them deal with the heat but their main way of adjustment is to go swimming.  Well, they ‘dip’, actually.  Several times a day, you’ll see the dogs go down to the beach and just half submerge for a few seconds and then come back.  They have come to know temperature control by body placement.  They follow the sun when it is chilly and they follow the shade when it is warm.  And they submerge when it is really hot.

I think there is a primal instinct to seek a protected placement for one’s house.  It is natural.  I tend to have a similar instinct but, for me, the protection comes from a cool breeze.  I am seeking cool rather than warm.  As a consequence, we have our house out and exposed on a prominatory and it seems to work better for me than being tucked away.  We get the warmth of the sun but it is tempered by the breeze.  And, of course, anyone seeking greater warmth can tuck in the lee of the house.  I guess what I am saying is this: we seem to be ideally placed.

More by accident than conscious choice.

Choosing a cabin site is much more important than just the view or some of the more obvious considerations.  The constant breeze means virtually no bugs, for instance.  And I’m good with that.  I really should analyze how the site ‘works’ for us because there are all sorts of issues that have only arisen in our consciousness after having lived here for years.  The garden placement, the solar panel placement, the shadows of the trees and where they fall…all of this comes into play and into consciousness – over time.  It is quite fascinating really.  I am still learning about where we live and I am only talking about our site.

And just when I thought I was getting a handle on it, they are going to change the climate.

I am living the Chinese blessing and curse: ‘May you live in interesting times’.

Two new guests today.  S&W.  They, too, were former students who met when here five years ago and subsequently fell in love and married.  So, they came back.  Second honey-moon-ish sorta thing.   It’s kinda romantic, really.

They are here now with four ‘current’ students and the five years of age and life difference is quite marked.  It is so odd to see your own life pass by watching the same process in others.  Especially those who you don’t see for a few years.  Think Dorian Gray.  Or, rather Dorian Wong in this case.

Everyone is off for a big hike up a small mountain but I am exempt.  One of the few privileges extended to those old and heavy.  I claim the exemption privilege, anyway.  I’ll clean up the house and be ‘good’ instead.

I am not so sure how much longer I can keep up this pleasant, polite, considerate and, of course, charming facade.  I am not really as nice in real life as I try to be when we have guests.  And, after a few days, the charade wears thin.  Drinking scotch and mumbling to myself as I amble around the house in my not-quite-closed-enough housecoat is the first sign of a dark side.  Second sign is when Sal starts locking me in our room.

I don’t think I can confess to much more.  I could be reported.  Suffice to say, people start looking sideways at me and scurrying out of the way.  But, it’s OK.  The bulk of them leave tomorrow.

Two more come the next day.

I hope they bring more scotch.

We have ten guests today.  We’ll eventually get down to six over the next few days.  Then, by the end of month we’ll be guest free til August begins…..the next day.  And then………?

………………I’ll probably be incarcerated (or under observation) by then so August should be easy for me.  Sal on the other hand, will have guests and visits to the detention centre to deal with.

Summer isn’t so easy for Sal.

Girls/women (they are over 19, after all) got up early this morning, hiked to the beach and had some raw oysters for breakfast.  On the spot dining.

I dunno…………..?

This is the kinda thing that makes their visit so interesting.  Yesterday afternoon, I taught them to chop wood.  They loved it!  First request: “Can you give us more wood to chop?”  So, today I will get another log.  Bigger this time.

Bear in mind that the splitting maul weighs ten percent of their individual body weight.  Just lifting it is a strain.  And swinging it is enough to send them reeling off in all directions.  It usually takes a few minutes of concentrated focus just to get the maul landing anywhere near the target round and the first ‘hit’ invariably just bounces inneffectively off leaving the wood completely unharmed.  Bystanders, on the other hand, have to dance around to keep out of the way!  Average elapsed time to splitting a small piece of wood specially chosen for ease of destruction is 30 to 40 minutes.  Six small 6-inch rounds provided entertainment for several hours.

Who needs TV?

Weather is great.  Young people are having fun.  The days are racing by.  And Sal and I are exhausted!  There is no substitute for youth, of course, and we are not expected to keep up but our guests are used to napping at the oddest of times.  And so they keep recharging!!

Because each one of them commutes for at least an hour every day on the subway alone, they have learned to ‘kip’ out and snatch moments of rest in an otherwise incredibly busy Hong Kong lifestyle.  It does not sound like they are used to sleeping for eight hours at a time, instead snatching one, two and four hours stretches more commonly.

Out here they go like mad for a few hours, conk out for one and then go like mad again.  Just watching is tiring for me.  Leading them in various activities is a major challenge and only handled by sharing the chores.  Yesterday a neighbour came by and took them sightseeing by boat for a few hours.  The day before another took them for two hours of yoga.  And we have my daughter and her fiancé as well.

It is barely enough!

Mind you, that is more a statement about us than them.  We are slowing down some, living easier, out of the madding crowd.  We are half-speed compared to ten years ago.  Maybe slower.  And I have written of that before.  But usually I am comparing our pace with that of our previous one – when we were working and raising a family in the city.  But their’s is a pace several times faster than our busiest of times.  Hong Kong makes the Canadian pace of life look like a vacation.

Different generations, different cultures, different everything…………..our only real commonality is a wonderful curiousity of each other.  And it is enough to keep us all royally entertained.            

‘Member that last post?  That Cantonese word for serendipity?

OK….so Sal and I are in the town ten days or so ago doing some shopping.  We are in the grocery store and Sal is looking at Bok Choy trying to figure out what is good and what is not so good.  An Asian woman was standing next to her (about our age) and Sal asked for her recommendation.  Seems she was from Edmonton and on vacation on the island next door to us.  She was with her husband who was pretty ill.  We didn’t have much to say to that but it was clear that ‘ill’ meant soon-departing.  Maybe.  That is what it felt like.  I gave her our address.  “Hey, if you are bored give us a call and we’ll pick you up, give you a boat ride and it might be a nice outing for you.”

A bit of an odd response to a casual chat about Bok Choy with a stranger, don’t you think? 

And today, they did!  They called!  So I picked them up, brought them over and introduced them to the kids.  Everyone had lunch, talked a mile a minute (much of it in Cantonese) and a few hours later, I dropped them back on the other side.  It had, indeed, been a nice outing.  And the husband explained that he may indeed be soon departing.  Lots of bad stuff going on healthwise for him.

It was sad but somehow still a pleasant day.

Before they left, they said something that sounded like, ‘Yow Yoon’.  I think it might be spelled ‘yau yuen’.  We all looked at them!!  That was the name of the tea we had.  That was the word that meant serendipity or fate or destiny or fortuitous meeting or something.  That was the word that we had all discussed the day before.  That was the word that prompted yesterdays blog!

And, most weirdly, little butterfly, we had given that spontaneous invitation ten days before!

I dunno….maybe you had to be there.  But it felt like a circle closing, a point being made, some sort of weird thing just happened.  Fate was playing a small joke.  And, funnily enough, everyone got the joke.  We all laughed as if we understood what had just happened.  We hadn’t.  But it kinda felt like we did.

Yau Yuen, eh?  Go figure.