You’d think I’d have a lot to say – what with all the guests and all?

But I don’t.

The days fly by.  The folks come and go.  The work-around-the-house has virtually stopped.  It’s a holiday.  Kinda.  Whether you want one or not.

Face it, this is not the kind of life one needs a holiday from.

Still, it is all very nice in a lethargic kinda way.

Well, we are busy when we have guests so it is not really lethargic in that sense.  Cooking, cleaning, shopping-when-you-can and just plain ‘visiting’ takes a lot of time.  And energy.  It is just somewhat unconstructive and, for some reason, I have got construction in my head.  It is a phase, I guess.  The terrible twos, the frightening fours, the tumultuous teens and the still-sexy-but-constructive sixties, eh?

It will pass.

I enjoyed G, Sal’s father’s sailing buddy.  He and I worked well together.  We didn’t do much and what we did wasn’t right but we whiled away a few hours in a pleasant carpenter-kinda way.  It was good.  And, more to the point, we were still talking to one another after a day of working together!!

It is so much different working with men than my wife.  You’d think they were a different species.  And she works well with other women!!??  So, the old from-Mars and from-Venus thing is still strong after all these years!  Mind you, Sal and I ‘patch things up’ quickly and patching is kind of a fun way to while away a bit of time so I am not complaining.  Just sayin’….

Probably said too much…….she does ‘edit’ this stuff, ya know.

Oh well, I am in the mood for a little patching.

Well, the whales showed up again yesterday.  Twice!  Once going north and then, a few hours later, they came back south.  Day-trippin’.

Wild Boys

And eating, I think.  On the other side of the channel I saw what seemed like a school of Pacific White-sided dolphins.  Not unusual.  They are fairly common around here.  But on this side I saw a pod of orcas running parallel to them.  Maybe a half dozen orcas.  Big ones, tho.  They kept apart from the dolphins by a few hundred yards.  Next thing I know there was a lot of leaping and splashing about on the dolphin side.

And some of the orcas began surfacing now and then somewhere in between.

On a few occasions it was pretty clear that some kind of thrashing, swirling, slapping conflict was happening but to be accurate about it is difficult.  It is hard to distinguish an orca from a dolphin except for size and they were then a good distance up the channel.

Still, I think it was lunch-on-the-go for the orcas.  And the dolphins were lunch.

A few hours later, when the orcas went south, there were no dolphins to be seen.  Some may have escaped through the pass just a bit further north.  Some may have slipped through a narrow channel a little further along from the pass but it is hard to know who made it to safety and who made it to the buffet.

We have seen this kind of herding behaviour before.  The orcas slowly gather their prey into a constrained place and then dive in.  For every orca tidbit caught, several tidbits get away.  Those who get away scatter as individuals, probably schooling again later.

It is impossible to do a before and after count.

The only constant is that we see a school of dolphins and then we don’t.  But when we see a pod of say, seven orcas we still see them as a pod of seven when the action subsides.  We don’t see any dolphins.  The orcas can’t eat them all – there is always more dolphin-mass than orca-mass so a good portion of the dolphins must get away.  But we don’t see them.

The orcas we saw yesterday looked familiar.  It is not so much the facial expressions or body profiles that stick out as it is the dorsal fins (which, of course really stick out) and the number of such big fins in a group.  This group – I am pretty sure – is the ‘wild boys’.  Many are large males.  It is not a big pod (6 or 7) but the members are big guys.   And they are always hunting….well, at least on the few occasions I have seen them, they were.  This not a resident pod — they are just movin’ on through, and these guys are always on a hunt of some kind and it usually involves seals, dolphins and or porpoises.

The orca pods really do seem to act like I imagine wolf-packs to act.  The parallel and comparison of orcas to wolf is a native theme and I can see it.  Now.  With the wild boys.

SIDEBAR:  A lot of whales these past few days.  Orcas.  Hunting.  Going up and down the channel.  Sometimes followed by half a dozen whale-watcher boats.  ‘Oooooohíng and ‘aaahíng.  It is quite the spectacle at times.  Interesting. 

We’re back in the thick of it……..visitors.  But, as usual, we like ’em.  Sal’s dad (90) just sailed up from southern BC and is visiting with a sailing buddy.  We’ll eat, drink and be merry for a couple of days and then they’ll sail home.  Takes a week or so to get up here and the same amount back.  So we hope they have a good time.

We should all be sailing, drinking and being merry at 90!  But I think it is best to start practising now if you want to be good at it at 90.  That is the theory, anyway.

The sailing buddy and I will likely do a little construction work this afternoon.  Try to figure out how to do what I need to do.  Maybe get the gable ends up on the studio.  I am challenged by some angles and engineering so it will be good to have a second opinion.  Someone else to blame, anyway.  (Poor guy.  Just wants to help.  Little does he know that what I need more than anything is a scapegoat! )

I’m honest about it, tho.  I told him.  I told him I needed a scapegoat but I mumbled a bit and it sounded more like scaffold to him.  So, he volunteered to help.  I am sure he’ll be surprised when I start yelling at him.  Oh well, no good deed is supposed to go unpunished.

I raised the fourth wall of the workshop the other day with the help of another guest.  He, too, liked to get his hands-on construction experience as part of his eating, drinking and merry-making vacation time.  This is an older male syndrome of sorts.  The women don’t feel the need.  The young guys aren’t so keen as a rule. It is the older guys.   And I like it.  Let the old wanna-be carpenters come!

Real carpenters go to the all-inclusive resort in the Caribean in the winter.  They are busy working in the summer.  I don’t get real carpenters.  I get the summer-weekend-hobby-guy-kind.  But, for me, they are the best.  They may even know more than me (OK, they all know more than me!) but they defer to my judgment because of the eating and drinking component.  So, I get my way.  I get to be the boss for once.

Sal is busy prepping for the eating and drinking part.

I am the boss unless she comes out to see what we are up to……………. 

Plus these guys are ‘real keen’ and I like to exploit that kind of ready-to-martyr kind of energy.  “See those beams?  The ones with the creosote?  You may wish to get some newspaper for your clothes first.  That stuff is horrible.  We are going to need them all piled up at the top of this hill.  You get started.  I’ll be right back….”

Hey!  Somebody has to carry them!

And I do come back………..later………usually just after the last of the beams has settled on the pile at the top……………don’t forget…………….there is eating and drinking………….soon……..Hey!  I don’t feel guilty.   Did I mention the merry-making?

With the new satellite ISP service comes changes.  Passwords, e-mail addresses, that sort of thing.  I am sure that making those changes is easy for those of you who are digitally hip but for me, it is a smidge of a challenge.  So, I approach it the way I do most things difficult.  I ask Sal to do it.

But as marvelous as she is, she is no more digitally hip than I am so we had to do it together.  And, of course, her list is much the same as mine.  I had over 500 addresses.  And I had to tell them all my new e-mail address.  And, I am ashamed to admit it – I could only place about half of them.  “Riley Henderson?  Who the hell is that?  What’s his e-mail address?  Geo-slime@Octopus.com?  Who calls themselves ‘geo-slime’ and why do I know him?”

Multiplied by two hundred or so.

And passwords..!!!  Don’t get me started on passwords!  Don’t get me started because I can’t remember them.  What a horror show!  Of course, I have a couple of favourites,  like Maddog.  But ‘Maddog’ doesn’t have 8 characters or a number – which seemed to become a requirement after I had my password memorized – so I guess I went to Maddogs, Maddogandpudding, Maddogpudding, Maddog123 and so on.  In other words…no idea.

The only good part is that I don’t care that much.  I can’t get on the woodchopper’s forum.  So what?  I know how to chop wood now.  I can’t get on the Ex-pats in Hong Kong forum.  But they don’t miss me.  I don’t miss them.  So, I am good.  I’d like to get on the Honda 50 outboard forum but the engine is runnning good and I may just have to re-register or something when the time comes to learn all about the engine once again.  I am sure there is a better way but, like I said, I don’t care that much.

But I will.

That is the thing about damn computers……………ten steps away and I have forgotten about them.  I don’t care.  I am doing something else.  But first I have to get the ten steps away.  There seems to be some kind of invisible black hole around my computer.  It draws and sucks me in.  And, while I am here, I seem to care about all sorts of things.  ‘Ooooh…..the forum on geo-slime………!’   But, as soon as I get out of it’s gravitational pull, I am free!  So free, that I forget stuff.  Like passwords.  And whatever the hell geo-slime is.

It is like some kind of duality-thing.  There is the real me and then there is the digital me.  And we are separated by ten steps.  And a different memory.  Whatever.

I am never ever going to change my service provider again.

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!