I can’t begin to tell you how much I dislike government. Sadly, it seems, this feeling extends to all governments. They all fall into my reject-file although I must confess to knowing and understanding my own governments better and in more detail than say, Myanmar or Senegal. Regardless of my knowledge level, tho, I hate ’em all.

There is a principle involved, I think.

Part of it, of course, is simply a character flaw in me. I have never fully accepted authority figures of any kind, starting with good ol’-but- sometimes-tyranical-about-bedtime-and-eating-vegetables-mom, moving to stupid-beyond-belief-but-dictatorial teachers and then progressing to anyone who thinks s/he might be the boss of me…….even when I signed on for that as an employee.

I am not always rational in my feelings.

But some authorities are way over-the-top. Homeland Security, Canada Customs, Revenue Canada – just to name a few. The RCMP, the passport office, ICBC – just to name a few more. Don’t even get me started on airport security! And, what little tolerance I have ever had for the police has completely disappeared with their employment of the phrase-cum-order: ‘GET ON THE GROUND NOW!!!‘ and their latest instrument in public relations, the Taser.

Call me crazy but I don’t expect our relations with Poland are too good these days. Nor with 11 year-olds. We don’t let kids run with scissors or babies play with matches. We even ‘plug’ up outlets in case some kid squeezes two fingers into a socket (virtually impossible). And we label packages of nuts as ‘Warning! May contain nuts!’. But we give idiots-in-uniform Tasers and guns?

Just so you know, I don’t feel that particular way about any individual cop. I feel sorry for the poor bastards. They are victims of the system, too. They think they are trying to follow the rules and save us from the bad guys. I have no problem with those intentions. It is the governments’ identification of just about everyone as a ‘potential bad guy’ that bothers me. It is the application of government ‘procedure’ over humanity that bothers me. It is the fact that so many of them are seemingly committed to fighting crime and evil by enforcing seat-belt laws and other ‘income streams’ for government that drives me crazy. The police don’t see themselves as they really are – income enforcement.

All this is my way of introducing my own recent criminal faux pas. Seems I caught a prawn or two without a license these past few weeks (mind you, I ate the evidence so I am safe). DFO Is welcome to come and do a forensic analysis of the remains any time.

Mea culpa. My bad. I ate a prawn without a license!

Don’t shoot!

To be fair, I buy a license every year and have done so for maybe twenty five years out of the last 40 on the basis that I ‘might’ go fishin’. ‘Course, I hate fishin’ and so I never go. But there was always the chance that I would and I rationalized it by saying, “I read that all the money goes to hatcheries and replenishing stocks, so it is money well spent.”

Man, I am gullible sometimes.

Just so you know: it all goes to General Revenues and the fish be damned.

But that kind of theft and negligence is not my crime. That is their crime. MY crime is to always buy my license around May 1st. I don’t know why that is the anniversary date, but it is. Maybe because it used to coincide with the first official day of the yachting season and I had visions of grandeur back then. I really can’t remember. But I buy my license around May 1st.

Not last year, tho. For some reason, I bought it in April. It expired two weeks ago.

I also rarely go prawning. In fact, I have gone maybe a dozen times in 7 years. Not this year. This year, I have prawned a dozen times already.

You guessed it. I was doing so with an expired license.

Fortunately, I was not caught. My boat was not confiscated. I was not fined thousands of dollars. And I escaped having a criminal record, being tasered and made bankrupt by the whole process. I even got away with some prawns. Lucky me.

This story, of course, is not actually or factually true. I deny every aspect of it and ascribe the fabrication to artistic license. I made it up. It’s called ‘fiction’. Try and believe that – I may need you for a character reference.

Maybe next blog I’ll make up a recipe for prawns and include a fictional prawn feast. But it’s not true you understand. Just kidding around.

“Why say it is just a fiction, Dave?”

Because the government also monitors all e-mails. They have given up on taking care of the fish and have, instead concentrated on carefully monitoring the sheep.

And that, my poor, voting, innocent wooly-headed reader is us. Baah!

It is unlike me to give my loyal following (all 13 of you, many of whom I know only check in to the blog monthly or so) a reprieve from the relentless reporting on our navels-in-the-woods. But this week conspired against my ‘creative side’ and I was forced to deal with a few other things. Most notably; exhaustion. I am sorry. I have been keeping things from you.

Seems I have sleep apnea, a condition whereby the afflicted suffers from their breathing tubes collapsing when they sleep. So then they suffocate themselves until their brain shoots an adrenaline-laced message of urgency to the heart which then ‘kickstarts’ the sufferer back to life. Makes for a less-than-restful sleep and it seems it is somewhat ‘hard‘ on your internal systems.

I’ve had this condition for years but it has been getting worse and has only been diagnosed in the last few months and, of course, the treatment is a bear to come to grips with. Well, actually, it is more like a monkey.

Treatment involves employing a small breathing machine (the price of a good used car) that increases the air pressure so that one’s pipes remain open. The air pressure is applied by way of a long tube and a small mask designed by the Darth Vader company complete with similar sound effects. It clings to the face like a small primate seeking to pick nits or otherwise irritate the hell out of you. And, with that, you are to bid a goodnight to all and sleep like a baby. I have been having some difficulty adjusting, I am afraid.

Seems I leak. Air, that is. The mask does not stay sealed as I flail about fighting the cloying, clinging primates of my semi-conscious dreams throughout the night. I’ve been having a lot of set-in-the-jungle-type dreams lately, complete with vines, monkeys and spiders webs that are sticking to my face and require immediate removal. The mask seal suffers in the process.

To be fair, I have also had a few strange-woman-kisses-me-in-a-greenhouse-type dreams, too. Those aren’t so bad.

Which brings us to Sal.

Poor ol’ Sal suffers along with me. When we learned of this condition, we also learned that the choke/breathe rhythm I was employing 36 times an hour was considered severe. So Sal put herself on unconscious ‘monitor Dave’ mode and so now, if I hiccup, she wakens. I currently go through the night wakening only a dozen times or so now but she is ‘freaked’ at least twice that number of times. So Sal is tired too. Who knew? Sleep apnea is contagious!

We also received two Woofer’s for a week. They were to come during wood-getting-in time but, wouldn’t you know? The logging winch, so crucial to the task, gave up the ghost. Can’t get the logs up the hill. So we are feeding two nice young Dutch men copious amounts of food and wine and NOT getting the major task of the season handled. I am not pleased.

However, we have had the benefit of their efforts in the community. As you know, we have embarked on a renovation/addition to the bunkhouse and, of course, there is the ongoing saga of the Q-hut restoration and so I have ‘donated’ the energy of two 26 year-olds to that task. They are a great help and things are moving along nicely.

Wood gathering is another matter.

To solve the wood-getting dilemma, I have several alternative routes to consider: I could fix the winch which requires the services of an expert as it is not fixable by handyman alone. I could rebuild and install an old salvaged boat winch made of wood and cobbled together bits and pieces but which has never run in my lifetime. Nor does it inspire confidence. I could splurge on a new winch which is prohibitively expensive or I could procrastinate until God intervenes. So far, I have been employing the latter strategy. We’ll see.

Part of the winch problem for me is that the design parameters I desire are not, it seems, universally available. I want a 3-4-5000 pound winch capability that runs off of 120AC current (1.0-1.5 hp will give that with the right gear ratios) and a spool that will wind up 150 feet of 5/16 cable at a rate satisfactory to my level of patience – say 25 feet per minute or more. The closest ‘off-the-shelf’ model is the Warn AC3000 that is slower and has capacity for 100 feet (that I could likely squeeze an extra 25 feet on). $1200 if you can find one. I haven’t looked yet.

The real answer is an old one from a garage sale. Some old Beebe or Marpole or Tulsa winch that has a 1.0hp AC motor attached and I can install my own cable. These are not too hard to find in garage-type sales but we are lacking garages out here. I almost have to come to Vancouver to scrounge around for a suitable ‘rural’ winch. Weird, eh?

Well, that is not a complete update of the last few days but it is the bulk of it. Got some good prawn hauls (not great, but good). Visitors, of course. Satellite went ‘down‘ for a day. Projects being conceived…………….

More later.

……Bill!

What a guy! Ol’ Bill was and is a friend from the city. He’s a techie. Right ‘out there’ with all the scientific instruments, multi-meters, soldering gear, bits and pieces of salvage from submarines, satellites and alien space probes. He’s got boxes and drawers full of transistors, diodes, motherboards and God-knows-what-all. He even has pocket protectors for all his pens and pencils. If it is any kind of weird science, Bill knows something about it.

He’s not just a little eccentric himself, of course. Health food nut, conspiracy theorist and with more than his share of absent-minded-professor-ness, he is a character writ large.

We are close friends.

The reason we are close is simple: he is a good guy. When I would get in trouble, maybe biting off more than I could chew (this is especially true when it comes to electricity), Bill was there electrocuting the both of us. It was at least comforting to ‘fry’ together.

One time I was in dire straits up the coast in the middle of the night facing an impossible deadline and working hard physically for over 24 hours straight when, out of the fog, at four in the morning, Bill arrived by Shanghaied water taxi to the rescue. Some things I will never forget. He’s better than Mastercard.

But that is not the story. The story is that Bill has kind of found the same path to the forest. He didn’t follow me, of course. Too independent for that. But he did come visit a few times (more than a few, actually. He was a big help many times) and he went from being ‘unfamiliar’ to ‘very comfortable’ with off-the-grid living. A couple of years back, he sold his huge Burnaby home and bought a small place on one of the southern Gulf Islands.

Then he met a gal. As eccentric as he is, L and he have ‘hit it off’. Things are looking good for them.

They met this way: he went to a local dance at the community centre. The idea was to meet a few folks, make an acquaintance or two. Tragically, he thinks he can dance but that did help get him to mingling.

He asked this strange woman to dance. Amazingly, she said yes.

So far in the story, the odds have been defied considerably. The stars must have been aligned perfectly and all the Gods were looking elsewhere. A rift in the time/dance/space continuum. There is no other explanation. By all rights, someone should have intervened.

She said, “I really should warn you. I am a bit odd. Peculiar, it seems. People say I am a bit ‘out there’.”

“Really!? Me, too! I’m really weird. I’m a nut!”

“Wow! What a coincidence!”

They’ve been together ever since.

And, for the record: they are both right.

I’ve written about MEN before but it was over a year ago and so I thought I’d touch on it again. It touched on me so much, it’s only fair.

For some reason I was thinking ‘back to the land’ at the time I tapped into MEN and their forums. I know that feeling started in 1999 when Sal and I and the kids went on a long driving vacation that included a jump overseas to Europe. We were gone over four months. When I came back, I was more than just reluctant to get back on the merry-go-round and race with more rats, I was actually beginning the first unconscious steps of getting off for good. Just didn’t know it. It was a confusing time.

I just remember being interested in going to salvage yards for no legitimate or even discernible reason except growing curiosity about what I might find there. The fact that my darling wife would come along with me, shaking her head and mumbling about early onset dementia just proves her patience and devotion (or her early onset dementia).

But I did remember that the last time I had thought in this ‘hippy’ way, I had read ‘Mother’ and, tho I eventually dropped it for Yuppy Today, I never forgot it.

So, I Googled it, found it and entered their forums.

MEN has gone ‘mainstream’, of course, since the 70’s when I last read it. Ads for Ford tractors, John Deere and alternative energy products are large and glossy and fill most of the pages. The articles are all ‘organic’ or ‘buy-this’ oriented. They went Maddison Avenue to survive but there was still a lot of ‘basic’ information in there if you looked. And Mother had archives. There was real wealth in those records.

The forums at MEN used to be great! They did some kind of design makeover around 2005 and it took too long, people left and it never caught on again with the ‘crowd’ after that. But, for me, it was a wealth of characters and a virtual living library of knowledge before that. I became a ‘regular’ on the ‘Open’ forum (discussing anything) and a frequent asker-of-questions on the more technically oriented ‘rooms’.

These people were incredibly knowledgeable. As a group. One guy might know everything you could throw at him about electricity (DavisonO) and another may know all the homesteading ‘basics’ (Sarah/Majere at the OOM Librum). They all had areas of expertise but, of course, they couldn’t be experts in everything. So we needed each other.

Well, they didn’t need me so much. I was a ‘newbie’ for a long time.

The exception to the rule of specialization was Majere. He was the patriarch of an OOM enclave in Virginia. He knew everything. In fact, you can purchase OOM wisdom from their Librum on DVDs!

This group of Amish-types were eccentric in the extreme (“Now you can come visit anytime but we have to meet in town first because folks out here shoot first and ask questions after. It just isn’t safe to drop in on anyone out these parts!”)

The magic of the forums was, of course, the various people, their circumstances, their dreams, their experiences and their opinions. We had neo-con-NRA-type ranchers and ex-soldiers, Acid-dropping freaks and neér-do-wells who still loosely pursued old hippy dreams. We had single moms wanting to be ‘in a little house on the prairie with Little Joe’ and reclusive, isolationists whose participation in the forums was likely their only contact with society.

We even had some regular Canadians!

And we had the urban-cum-homesteader dreamer in all regions of the continent who wanted to ‘learn’ how to get off-the-grid and reclaim themselves. I related to them all.

But I eventually became ‘close’ to the group of (Old Order Mennonites) OOMs, SteveS, DavidsonO, Practicalman45, the Big Lebowski and a number of others bringing our online ‘regular’ community to about 20. We shared a lot, personal and otherwise.

It was strange how close we all became. I eventually met P-45 when passing through Oregon one winter and the virtual friendship was confirmed in real life. And I have little doubt that that would the case for all of them.

In the end (a five year period), I was likely the one who ‘moved’ the most – major urban couch potato to feral wood-butcher reintegrating with a more natural way of life miles from civilization. Seems that was a bigger leap than most took during that time. But, of course, timing is everything and some may have made the leap since then.

In fact, the OOMs are the furthest ‘out there’. But they always have been. They are a bloody marvel, really. And Steve has been a Georgia hill-billy for decades. P-45 has been a strong isolationist for probably as long. But, if you are measuring where someone was in the year 2000 and where they are today, Sally and I have likely made the greatest changes.

Or, better put: if we haven’t been the longest-of-leapers, there haven’t been many from the old forum to measure against.

Mind you, there is my old friend, Bill……………..

Pulled two jucily-baited traps. Set for 24 hours. Nada. Zip. Zero. NOT ONE PRAWN!

May have to drink heavily…….

Basically I am not a fatalist. But I can’t honestly say that I believe fully in free will either. I don’t think our future is pre-ordained. But I don’t think we are fully in control.

Kind of a philosophical dissonance, isn’t it?

I guess I think that some things are pre-determined (life, death, taxes, sexuality, etc.) and others are personal choice (where you live, what you do, etc.). Probably the truer statement is that much of what happens in life is a combination of that which is ‘built-in’ (genes, culture, era, society) and much of it is how we deal with all of that (action, reaction, thought, change, etc.).

Sorry about that preamble. It is just that it dawned on me the other day that some movies have influenced me in that way and they fall into both categories – 1. pre-determined/other source – and 2. I had to choose to watch them, choose to think about them and choose to be influenced.

Hmmmmmmm?

I mean, of course, movies influence you. All stories do. But some have more influence than others and, in hindsight, I am quite surprised how influential a few have been.

Frontier House (PBS, 2003) and The Matrix are amongst the most influential in choosing this somewhat-unusual-for-me-given-my-history, new, remote, off-the-grid lifestyle. Weird, eh?

Frontier House is a documentary about three families living in Montana in the conditions settlers faced in the late 1800’s. I’ve never forgotten it. In fact, I have seen it three times. It is not so much ‘inspiring’ as it is ‘real’ and ‘human’. It influenced me greatly even at the time. But, if you had asked me how, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you at the time. Still can’t. Not really.

The Matrix, on the other hand, was seen as just another cool sci-fi story that had universal, big-theme elements including Jesus, technology, enslavement, freedom, faith and a whole bunch of entertaining ideas. No biggie. Just fun. I didn’t think, at the time, that it had any influence on me whatsoever.

But shortly after it, I quit watching TV. Shortly after it, I began to seriously plan on ‘getting out’ of the ‘system’ and getting ‘off-the-grid’. The ‘grid’ and the ‘Matrix’ are disturbingly similar concepts – in my head, anyway. Now I think the movie had a great influence. If it didn’t, it was quite coincidentally parallel to my life and state of mind at the time.

Am I just a pudgy Keannu Reeves?

Well, I am kidding, of course. But those movies had an influence on me. I can’t deny that. So did Mother Earth News user forums (a whole other blog).

And so did fate, in a way. Sal and I bought this property 35 years ago. Unthinkingly, really. Well, we thought about it but, in retrospect, we acted first and thought afterwards. So, that critical element of the ‘plan’ was almost ‘accidental’. Fate? Luck?

Just musing, I guess. Here we are, doing what we want to do and being happy and it occurred to me that very little of the fundamentals, the foundation steps were planned or even consciously taken.

Weird, eh?

My friend, John II, turned 70 last year. For most of us 70 is a big number but J-2 is and always has been in denial about himself. He had to be. He kinda thinks of himself as younger, smarter and better lookin’ than he is. Many of us do. Seems it’s a male thing. God bless his deluded little heart.

Anyway, in an exercise aimed at getting his head around that milestone he come up with a concept, a paradigm, a mental construct that allowed it to all fall into a nice perspective. Something a person could get their head around.

“Well, I am pretty spry for my age. My mind and body are good. I have good genes and a great attitude (deluded, like I said, but great). I’ll likely live well for another twenty years!”

When he told me this, I nodded. Agreeing. Kinda. I have learned not to listen too carefully to everything J2 says because he says so much. I have learned to filter. I listen for the ‘highlights’ as it were, and I hadn’t heard anything new yet so I just wasn’t paying much attention……

“But, you know, 20 years is a hard number to grasp for people. Years are long blobs of time. Know what I mean? So, I decided to think of this aging thing in a different way.”

(yawn)

“I started to think about all this approximately 35 weeks ago today. My birthday. And, at that time, I figured I had – NOT 20 years – but about 1000 weeks left to live. But, ya know what? (the question was rhetorical by this time but now I was listening)…….those 35 weeks represent 3.5% of my remaining life! Jeez, man, just thinking about my age used up 3.5% of it!”

He really had my attention now!

I started to do the math……….my family is particularly short-lived. It’s amazing I got this far. At 63, I am already the second longest lived on my mother’s side. 64 is the current record. If I gave myself 1000 weeks, that means I expect to be ‘spry, mentally and physically fit’ and have a good attitude for 20 years. And live to be 83! Hah! Not a chance. I’ve never had a good attitude! With my attitude, body and family shrub (not a tree, actually. Too short!), I am clearly doomed!

(This could be my last blog.)

Anyway, my situation notwithstanding, J2 had made a good point (long overdue, I must say) and he got me to thinking. Am I doing all that I want to do? How much time do I actually have to waste?

I’m still thinking of that but I have already abandoned being limited by social protocol, morality, law, finances and the possibility of huge embarrassment. (Well, OK, I have abandoned those constraints a few times in the past but this is different). I am thinking outside those boxes from now on! Time to get on with it!

And that is J2’s point, really. It isn’t about anything more profound than your own mortality but, face it, your own mortality is pretty bloody profound! And, if you think of it in terms of weeks instead of those nebulous blob-years, it makes one more present. J2 has made the concept of death more present.

What a guy!

Phlegm still rules so this season’s cold is a tough one. But, we have carried on and nothing has really changed in our day except the consumption of Kleenex. And a few extra complaints, of course. Mostly from the dogs. They are not quite the centre of attention they expect to be and their disapproval is showing a bit.

Did a day at the community Bunkhouse project but it was raining hard and we had no tools for the jobs we could do and stay dry at and so little was done. It’s OK. We have a big window. We’ll probably use it, tho. Mind you, things are happening in the background and, like most jobs, it is the stuff that you don’t see that takes most of the time and effort.

Bert has been milling wood. We’re almost fully supplied in that department. So that is good. We’ve all pored over the drawings and made some suggestions for change and they have been accepted. So that is even better. I may have the beginnings of a used/salvaged inverter/charger based system developing so that we can run the ‘shop’ off Green power. And the electrical system in the Q-hut is moving right along. Nothin’ to see yet, folks, but invisible progress is still progress. I am pleased with the way things are turning out.

We have one road on the island (well, it forks at the BIG tree and one arm goes South and the other East). It is a logging road. Dirt. One lane. One of our young men was on his way to work in a small Subaru while, at the same time the boss was heading his way in the company truck. They met at a muddy downhill curve and, despite the quick responses of both drivers, a head-on collision resulted. The little ‘worker’s car was totaled. Employer’s truck fared OK, no damage or injuries except one tooth chipped. Everyone then ‘did the right thing by each other’ and then went home to ‘get it together’. No work done that day.

Weird. There were likely no other cars on the whole length of the island road at the time (approximately 15 miles of track). For both arms. Just the two that met at the muddy gully. Bang! They hit each other. Weird.

Pulled up a good ‘third’ set yesterday afternoon. Got about 150 prawns or about five pounds of tails. Being small ‘c’ conservative in my estimates (and acknowledging that we already ate some of them), that means a minimum of 8 pounds of tails so far. One more set and we’re likely good for the year! Nice way to shop, don’t you think?

Dinner guests last night. Much good food, drink and palaver. Great time had by all. Spread germs to all and sundry. Nothing like a dinner party for sharing, eh?

The poor ol’ Pudding has a head full o’ pudding. My germs got to her. She’s sick now, too. But, with Sal, little changes. A few (cute) sneezes and a minor complaint now and then but it is still ‘business as usual’ for her. She’s busy, pleasant and a going concern.

Not me. When I am sick EVERYBODY has to suffer!

Sal is out right now dropping the prawn traps again. We got skunked last time but the season is almost over so she worked the garden this morning and is working the oceans as I write this afternoon. Gotta get some in for the summer right now!

Actually, the season ‘officially’ starts in the first week in May. But that is for the commercial fishery. We amateurs can drop a pot or two throughout the year so long as we never actually catch too much. In May, the prawns come out to mate and the commercial guys come out to catch them. I think that is how it works even if it seems counter-intuitive to generating healthy stocks. But, you know, DFO has a hand in this….

One thing is for sure: DFO is messing up this fishery, too. Honestly, you’d think DFO hated fish/prawns/nature/life-in-general, the way they manage the resource. They are absolutely criminally negligent if not criminal-in-fact in their wanton ignorance and jackbooted arrogance.

Wanna get crazy? Read Alex Morton’s observations from being on the (DFO) Cohen Commission.

Breathe in. Breathe out. R-e-l-a-x……………..

Interesting to note: prawns are BI . They can be male or female as they so choose. I don’t think it is a matter of ‘choice’ as we might think it but it seems that two prawns are exactly the same in March but one of them will carry eggs sometime later in the season and changes somewhat to accommodate that.

If we catch a ‘female’, she goes right back in. DFO allows a few females to be ‘caught up’ accidentally but the pros are pretty good and, as a rule, they are all thrown back but not as quickly as we do.

Anyway, regardless of why it is in May that DFO allows the commercial fishery, it is a devastation. April 30th you can catch some, May 3rd, you get very little. By the end of May – nada. Zip. Zero.

The commercial guys just overwhelm the area. Their traps litter the bottom with as many as 100 traps per set and, if they drop on top of you, you can’t lift the whole shebang so you are trapped. And, if they drop first, your little trap will just get nothing and they will just lift and toss your gear if it gets in their way.

Things can get stressful if you play into that. The pros usually hate each other because of all that.

Most of the prawners are OK guys. We’ve even got a few friends amongst them and they have been up to the house for dinner. But there are some who are kinda whacked. Militant, bad mannered, surly louts who seem to hate everyone, locals, amateurs and other prawners alike.

So, we don’t prawn after the season opens.

Mind you, we rarely prawn even when they are gone. At least we haven’t done much in the past. Maybe a dozen ‘sets’ in six years…? But, with Johns’ new puller, we’ll ‘up’ that to maybe eight ‘sets’ a year I am thinkin’. If things ‘average out’, that means we’ll get about 12 pounds of tails. That’s a dozen good meals or a-dinner-of-prawns-once-a-month. Which is just fine.

While I was inside nursing the remnants of my head cold, Sally was out in the back yard making her garden grow. She’s got a green thumb, that girl. And a carpenters hand.

Sexy, in our new ‘organic, natural, rustic, sustainable and back-to-basics’ kinda way.

She wanted to make the back half of the new garden box a bit of a cold frame. So she framed the garden box interior with two by two’s and cut some clear, hard plastic to fit and, ‘voila’! She now has about 16 square feet of ‘greenhouse-in-a-box’ and, after an hour, when I went to see it, the temperature under the plastic was already a few degrees noticeably warmer than elsewhere. Today, she is planting.

Soon we’ll have veggies. This nature-thing is truly amazing stuff!

Mind you, it helps to have a Sally to get it done.

Speaking of natural; in the winter, our base population of 60 is cut to 40. People go South. Then, by Spring and in the Fall, it normalizes back to 60. Briefly. The summmer brings extras in the form of guests, visitors and transients and the population may swell to as many as 80 or 90! It is all part of a natural cycle. Here’s how it works:

Neigbours are now returning North like Canada Geese. Like the birds (snowbirds) the flocks of people are coming home to the islands to roost and get the cabin/nest ‘ready’. In the last couple of weeks, four cabins have filled with neighbour-folks all engaged in the ‘readying’ process. And this trend of arrivals will continue til the beginning of the summer when the next wave of ‘incoming’ take over. Visitors and guests come then. The population balloons through August and the first week of September. Think: a rookery of people.

Then they’ll leave by middle September and then the snowbird syndrome will kick in again and by January all those who are going to leave will have left for points South. This come-and-go has become one of the ritual migrations of our times, I guess. Evolution at it’s best.

This coming winter we will be amongst the ‘birds’ I think. That is the plan, anyway.

This is the best place in the world for me to live. Really. I love it. But that statement is only true for ten months of the year. The other two months aren’t hell, mind you. They are good. I like them, too. In fact, this winter passed very pleasantly. But, to be fair, by the time you get to February, you feel the need for some sunshine.

I didn’t used to feel that way. But I do now. By February, there is something kind of bleak creeping into my soul and it feels like only sunshine and a white sandy beach will fix it.

I think that if it was bright and sunny in January and February, I would not need a trip south because it is not warmth I crave, it is light. Anyway, our plan next year (2011/2012) is to head south. Probably Mexico. Drug wars be damned.

How and where we will end up are still up in the air but, if I had my preference, it would not involve actually being in the air. I have developed a profound distaste for flying. A bit more extreme than logic would explain. I just hate it. I hate all the airports, all the procedures, all the rules, all the schedules and I even hate the planes.

Even the flight attendants have no appeal anymore (Thai Air is the absolutely stunning exception).

Flying is not so bad but it takes too long. I can breathe my fellow passengers TB-ridden, Norwalk Virus-filled, influenza-riddled and oxygen deprived air for a few hours without gagging but anything more than four feels like I am sucking at the end of an exhaust pipe from a medical waste treatment facility. Detracts from the vacation experience somewhat, don’t you think?

I kept asking myself over the years: “what is the point of going somewhere to feel better if you are made to feel worse in the process of getting there?” So, I prefer to drive if I can. Hong Kong was a challenge. I tried to figure out a way. Seems they have not yet built a bridge over the Bering Strait. Damn.

So, Mexico beckons yet again. I may go down and rent a casita. Play some golf. Drink some Margaritas, dodge some bullets and try to avoid anyone who looks like they belong to the government, a drug cartel or a gang. Or the Federales. Or Policia.

Sheesh!