Yeah.  It was sad.  Distressing, actually.  The funicular was down and there was no way of getting it up (no, this is not an innuendo).  We need our funicular.  More than you might think.  It is especially vital when you get to our age to have a working funicular.  A non functioning funicular is just a real downer.

“What the hell you talkin’ about, Dave?!  What’s a fin-nuclear, anyway?”

A horizontal set of tracks with a cart on it is called a railway.  A vertical set of tracks with a cart running up and down it would be described as an elevator.  A funicular is a cart on a set of tracks running on an incline.  Victoria peak has one in Hong Kong.  The Swiss employ a few in the alps and the Italians often have mini-funiculars on their hillsides to service their vineyards.  We have one from the beach to the house – approximately 80 feet of inclined rail at a 30 degree angle.  The cart weighs about four hundred pounds and, with the electric motor, I can pull up about 1000 pounds on it….maybe more.  It was the funicular that made building up on the ridge possible.

Funicular Tracks

In fact, it is the funicular that makes a lot of things possible.  Even shopping.  When we go to town ‘on a shop’ we buy for a month or a few weeks, anyway.  We often bring home over two hundred pounds of food, supplies, materials and such.  Occasionally I’ll bring a big load such as thiry bags of Reddi-mix concrete at fifty-five pounds per bag.  We usually pack the food and other goods in plastic Rubbermaid totes and schlep them from the store to the truck to the boat to our beach.  But, at our beach, we are still quite a hike from the house.

Funicular at Work

Thank God for the funicular!  We load the stuff onto the cart and it pulls everything up to the deck right beside the house.  It is literally a lifesaver.  When the unit went down last week we went to town anyway and shopped (we had to).  A light shop is only two totes and one large cooler and five gallons of fuel.  Total weight: about 150 pounds (not counting the 350 pounds of lumber that stayed in the boat).  I carried it all up eighty-eight stairs (in three loads).  It was a workout.  Five loads and it would have been a myocardial infarction.

Today we made an effort at fixing the funicular.

We don’t know what we are doing.  The problem was a mystery.  To us, electronics is pure magic.  I don’t care what the geeks say, it is all the result of the dark arts.  Nobody can understand all that stuff.  Even my guru, Bill, says things like, “Geez, Dave, I dunno.  It’s all weird science, ya know?  Ya just gotta connect the wires to the right places and then step back and throw the switch. If the lights come on, you did good.  We call it a miracle where I come from!” 

Well, he is better than that, but that is the way he talks.  The voice of confidence.

So, with Bill advising by phone, we took to taking things apart and putting the multi-meter to other things, throwing switches, looking mystified and cleaning up connections.  The first few hours produced zilch.

The system is a marvel of hill-billy ingenuity.  And, sadly, part of it is mine.  And I have no idea.  Not a clue.  But, when we built it, Bill married up my crazy collection of mechanical stuff to an electrical smorgasbord and the cart went up and down the hill.

But then he went home and a few years later (last week) it stopped.  Ergo: the phone calls, the worry, the stress and the stairs.

It is complicated.  There are at least 5 different voltages used. Plus single phase and three-phase power.  The power we use comes from the sun, the wind (12volts DC) and/or one of the two generators (120VAC).  It is run through a charger and stored in the batteries (48VDC) that are then connected to the house by way of an inverter.  The inverter takes the 48 volts DC and turns it into 120 volts AC and we get lights.

Siemens motor controller

But the funicular runs on 240 VAC three-phase.  To get that we take the 120 VAC and convert that to 240 VAC single phase through a transformer I bought for ten bucks at the BC Hydro salvage yard.  That transformer is activated by a smaller DC transformer that uses something like 3 volts DC.  The 3 volts DC activates the switches.  The switches turn the transformer on and that sends the single phase 240V to the German-speaking Siemens motor controller (a mini computer) which then transforms it into three phase to run the 3 hp electric motor.

Confused?  Ha! That was the easy part.  The hard part is the damn motor controller and the micro switches.  That little assembly looks like one of those terrorist bombs you see on a cheap B movie.  A gazillion little wires going all over the place.  While I stare at that hodgepodge, Sal usually starts asking questions like, “Hey, see that thingy?  Is that supposed to be there?  What about that wire?  I am sure I have seen that wire somewhere on the fridge?  I know they aren’t connected, silly, but why are they the same?”  

I just slowly look up and stare hard.  My eyes get dark.  She shuts up and does something else.

The real problem is when she is right.  Sometimes that ‘thingy’ is in the wrong place.  Or whatever.  Gawd, I hate it when that happens! 

Anyway, the story for the day is that, despite all that, we managed to fix it.  Yes, we replaced the ‘thingy’ and followed the wire that looks like the fridge wire and did a lot of other stuff.  No idea which action worked.  When we were done and it was running, Sally didn’t say anything.

I had to.

“Ya know, I have no idea if it was the ‘thingy’, the fridge-like wire or the connections we cleaned.  Maybe it was the new switch we installed.  I don’t know what the hell we did.  But the chances are at least 50/50 that one of your suggestions did the trick.  Now that I have said it, we’ll let the matter drop.  OK?”

Sally just smiled.  Smugly.  She thinks she has a real knack for the dark arts.

And I am just going to let the matter drop.  OK?

Scott and Helen Nearing, in their book, The Good Life, make a pretty good case for living off the grid (although they did not, in fact, live off the grid but rather ‘out of the system’). Still, off-the-grid and out-of-the-system are pretty much the same thing in many ways. Scott and Helen were islands-in-their-time.

They lived near a small town in Vermont and later, another village in Maine.  And  they were minimalists in the extreme.  Social isolationsists.  But the Nearings did this crazy, organic, self-sustenace, healthy-living thing in the two decades leading up to WW2 and then for thirty or more years after. They became the poster parents for the back-to-the landers in the 70’s.  They were way ahead of their time.  And they made this big leap when they were in their forties and found themselves not liking living in New York city.  Scott died at 100.  Other than being dead, he was as healthy as a horse at the time.

I am surprised by how little this way of living has changed, really.  Their story is our story except, of course, they had a much harder time of it, worked ten times harder and became so much more adept, skilled and capable in the process. Plus they seem dedicated to doing things the hard way.  We are spoiled-brat baby-boomers by comparison to their austere, Depression era roots.  Not only that but they were vegetarians and didn’t drink wine or scotch.  No wonder Scott died young!

But there are considerable similarities, too.  They worked only 4 hours a day at projects.  They worked with found materials as much as possible.  They grew most of their own food and they ‘harvested’ from the wildness when in season.  Scott and Helen also had a generous open-door and open table policy and honoured it faithfully despite preferring to be alone.  Only Scott would ‘hide out’ now and then when people came and – even then – only in the later years.

The loved their life.

What struck me as surprising, though, was the comparable disfunction of their community – as a community.  We are similarly afflicted.  I think.  I am still trying to figure it out. 

Now don’t get me wrong – I am not unhappy with our community.  It’s fine.  And it does pull together now and again. In the community in Vermont, the Nearings experienced a stubborn tendency for their neighbours to ‘go-it-alone’.  Generally speaking, the community did not cooperate.  They chose to be separate from one another even if they were doing the same work in the same way and needing the same help.  They remained independent.  Each aspired to be an island.  It seemed the only time the community came together was for entertainment (potlucks, etc.) and when the war happened and everyone did their part.

We are like that.  We tend to unite against things like some government or corporate initiative to rape or poison the land or ship oil down the coast.  We may cooperate on a community building or something but those efforts are short and frought with petty clashes.  And we will all stand around and eat burgers and drink beer at the drop of a hat.  But community cooperation initiatives are hard.  Too much ego.  Too much history.  Too much difference of opinion.  All that and busy at-home schedules makes most neighbours opt out of the co-op.  Co-ops just don’t seem to work.

Everyone, it seems, wants to be an island unto themselves but, at the same time part of a community.  It is a conflict of the spirit.   Maybe.

I mention it only because most of us go through the same such cognitive dissonance as did the Nearings.  We come to a new place, we establish and we connect with others. We work hard around the home to get it all together. Then, in an altruistic manner, we offer to help out, add to the community, do our part to make the larger community better.

Cooperation.  It turns out that it is – even in Vermont and Maine – a surprisingly difficult thing to do.  The Nearings blame the way society is ordered.  They blame mostly the cash economy (money based values and comparisons) and the fact that specialists are rare in rural areas.  They blame the erosion of the rural population causing less investment all around.  Whatever.

It is all true today even more so, I think.

Part of the reason, of course, is that technology has allowed us to remain independent.  We have better tools, more access to information and the materials we work with are better, more durable and effective.  Even foodstuffs are more easily and cheaply accessed.  I guess we just need each other less.  Like urban condo dwellers who don’t know their neighbours because there is no reason to, we are running out of reasons to know our own.

There will always be some reasons to cooperate.  Survival is one of them.  Sometimes you just need help out here.  There is bookclub.  There is the odd- work-crew-job that requires others.  And there are the smaller community building efforts as difficult as they are.  That will all continue.  And, of course, beer and burgers will always draw a crowd.  So we are still a community and likley one that is more cohesive than most.

But make no mistake, modern life and benefits has a ying and yang for everyone and one of the social downsides is less traditional community.  And we are getting more modern all the time.  Computers and smartphones isolate – we know that.  But so does a cash economy.  So does income disparity.  So does rural/urban differences.

It was true for the Nearings back in the day (well, not the computers) and it is true for us as well.  We came out here to be islands living on islands and we may just get our wish.  On the other hand I am reaching out to a different community by way of the blog.  And the Nearings became extremely well known because of their book and subsequent speaking tours.

So are we becoming more isolated or becoming more connected?  I dunno……

Phone rang that night – the one ending the day in which I had posted my wood need.  “Heard ya lookin’ fer some wood, eh?”

And so my need for dead vegetative matter in the form of planks was answered promptly.  I went up yesterday to pick it up from the public dock.  Fir.  Thick and heavy.  The 2×12’s must have weighed 10 pounds a lineal foot.

Tide was out.  Of course.  So the boards came down the ramp the hard way (carried one at a time) and then schlepped along the wharf to the boat where I placed them specifically so that the boat was loaded properly.  After loading it, off I go.  Slowly.  Down the coast in a mild sou’ easter.  Not rough.  Just a little cold and wet.  Eventually I got home and tied the boat up.  I’ll unload and sling ’em up the hill later today.  I got about 18-20 pieces.  It is a start.

This made me happy.

How weird is that?

There is no question that I am happier living here and there is also no question that I am made happier by simpler things.  Wife, whales and wolves, for starters.  Water and wood coming along next. And that is just the ‘W’s.  And not all of them!

The ‘D’s are good.  Dinner is always BIG.

It is probably just age.  But, honestly, it takes less and less to make me happier and happier.  That may be weird but it is also pretty good.  Bodes well for the future. I don’t see too many fancy doo-dahs in my future.  But I see dinner.

Like I said, it may just be age but I think it is partly a function of living simpler and living in the forest.  Somehow – and I have no explanation for this – just living in the forest is happifying.  Kind of a natural therapy.  Henry David Thoreau wrote about that.  And he was right.

Works for me.  Works for Sal.  And I was talking to the wood guy and it works for him, too.  In fact, I was talking to another neighbour the other day and we were comparing notes on town trips.  I said, “If I never went to town for the rest of my life, I would be happy.  Just as soon stay here.  All day.  Every day.  Doesn’t sound healthy but it is what I feel.  I hate going to town.”

“I feel the same way but that has to be some kind of weird, don’t you think?  I mean, shouldn’t we want to see people and stores and new toys and stuff?  Wouldn’t staying away make us hermits, kinda?  And aren’t hermits weird?”

“Not to me.  Not anymore.  And, anyway, I’ve always got you.”

“OK.  NOW it’s definitely gettin’ weird”.

OK……………This is weird.  But I really need some wood.

I know!? 

I know what you are thinking, too,  “Dave, you got wood up the ying yang!” and that is true. I do.  I got logs on the beach, on the pile, in rounds and as firewood.  I got logs.  Hell, sometimes they just float by!  But I need usable wood.  Builder’s wood.  I need planks.  I need beams.  I need plywood.  It’s a weird thing, this.  It really is.  I feel deprived not having wood lumber at my disposal. I feel constrained.  I feel poor.

Worse, I feel lost!  I need wood to do my projects and, now that I am no longer disabled by blindness, smashed hips and other stupid (mostly self-inflicted) obstacles, I wanna get a’buildin’.  A man’s gotta do. But a man’s gotta do with wood!

It’s not just me, either.  Sal is kinda ‘itchin’ to get back on the worksite.  Well, maybe ‘itchin’ is stretching it a bit but she is saying, “Gee, ya know, we really need to have more of a wood supply.  I mean, we don’t have any 2×6’s!  What kind of a gong show we runnin’ here!?  Shouldn’t we always have some 2×6’s at the very least?”

(To fully appreciate Sally’s different take on this, think of what most women would be saying….“Geez, this place has no flour, sugar or salt.  I can’t even find tea bags!  What kind of a place is this!?” ).  Sal now sees 2×6’s as a staple, like raw tuna, rice, wasabi and soy sauce (yes, she has a different perspective on a lot of things now).

Two by sixes are the staple of DIY building.  But only by a small margin.  You really need 2×12’s, too, if you are going to do stairs.  And, when you live on a slope as we do, you have to do stairs.  So, for us, 12’s are almost a staple, too.

Plywood.  Ya need plywood.  Lots of plywood.  And we have used up all our plywood.  I feel naked without plywood.

The other day we needed some 6 inch lag screws for some log assembly and I went into my pile of junk and came out with what we needed.  Exactly.  Then we needed some long carriage bolts.  Back to the supply shed and voila!  There they were.  Brilliant.  Having stuff on hand is a necessity out here.  You just can’t ‘run to the store all the time.  Not very easily.  Much better to buy a hardware store and bring it all here in the beginning.  And I practically did.  But it is hard to buy a lumber yard and bring all of that in the beginning.  Lumber is one of those things you buy-as-you-build.

Still, you should have a good, generous amount of ‘general purpose’ lumber on site at all times. You just should.  Hard to explain.  Trust me.

This could be a hard time for me…….over the next few days……………got no wood.  Nice weather.  No rain.  Feelin’ good.  Got a partner.  Got a plan.  Got a project.   (now cue in the accompaniment with a 12-bar blues guitar)………

My baby done left me.  So did my dog.  But I tried to do the best I could. Oh yeah.

But now I got no, got no, got no wood.  Got no wood.  Lord a’ hep me, I got no wood. 

Bit of social activity yesterday.  Lunch.  Very nice.  A bit different.  The hosts are quite well-to-do and the setting and food were straight out of Fine Homes and Fine Dining.  It was set in a forest-by-the-sea estate.  It was enchanting.  And, like so much of the fine-living set, they were also very kind, gracious, generous and a delight to be with.  I liked it.  The ‘fancy’ was great.  A lot of fun.

We had joined them with a dozen other locals and so the mix was pretty familiar, only the setting and the fare unusual.  I asked the host what brought him to our neck o’ the woods……

“Just fell in love with it.  So beautiful.  We just retired and this seems like paradise…………and………………well………………….uh……………….you know…………..the world seems to be getting a bit out of whack and this seems like it might be a good off-the-radar kind of place, ya know?”

Which got me thinking.  My new ‘friend and neighbour’ was just saying what so many of us have been saying for some time.  The Sky is Falling!  In fact, ‘Armageddon’ has been the topic of conversation for almost four decades up here starting with the back-to-the-landers in the seventies.  And I, of course, generally agreed with ’em.  I don’t think it is a conspiracy so much as a lemming-like gene for self-destruction.

Mind you, who’s quibbling about why?

But he was saying that it was not looking so good today!  2013.  POST market crash!  So-called revival time!  The Dow is around 14000!  Unemployment was down!  His message felt somehow more current.

They had just retired.  He had done well at the game.  They were both healthy and youngish.  And yet he was stepping off the merry-go-round with the same kind of concern that had prompted so many people before him.

“Wow!  They thought the world was going rapidly askew, too.” said Sal.  “You’d think that they would have more faith in the system having done so well in it, wouldn’t you?  Especially now that they are saying the worst is almost over?” 

“I know.  But, I have come to realize that every thinking person has those thoughts.  How could they not?  Climate change, wars, threats of epidemics, some notable failures of institutions, constant fear-mongering from the media and government.  How could anyone think otherwise?  Fear may, in fact, be the right conclusion but I am starting to think – like the contrarian I am – that it will all work out just fine.”

“What!? YOU?!  The voice of doom suddenly starts singing gospel??  What has come over you?”

‘Well, I have been thinking and throughout history the hoi poloi have, for the most part, just meekly gone about their daily business.  Even when doing so required dodging bullets in the marketplace.  Hell, millions of people have been gently herded to their doom without so much as a peep and this horror has been repeated many times throughout history.  We are a species of ‘go-alongs’ to ‘get-alongs’ and that pretty much precludes the much ballyhooed raging hordes events we all talk about.

“I no longer expect chaos and violence by way of the poor, unhappy, demoralized crowds fed up with corruption, greed and rape of the planet.  They just won’t do it.  That state of affairs simply doesn’t seem to be enough to make ’em mad enough.  Hell, most of them won’t even vote!  Historically, we just don’t do radical change very well.”

“So, what are you saying…………..?”

“I am saying that riots are local and local-issue based.  Not really indicative of anything political.  They are just ‘mini-opportunities’ for political expression at high-stress points.  They are NOT change.  I am saying full-scale rebellion is organized and financed by some self-interested power to manage people who are sufficiently disgruntled enough to be motivated and managed.  But they (the people) wouldn’t have done it on their own.  On their own, they leave their country or go along quietly.  And the average person is not disgruntled anywhere near enough over anything for that to happen unless they are also very very hungry. In North America food is cheap.  North Americans will never rebel so long as food is cheap.  I think it is that simple.”

“Good food is not cheap!”

“I know.  But Cheez Whiz and Kraft Dinner, Big Gulps and Super-sized Macs are still very cheap.  Marie Antoinette said, “Let them eat cake!”  She erroneously thought the starving people had just run out of choices.  The French Revolution was not from choice.  It was from hunger.  Primal.  Wall Street won’t make that mistake.  “Deliver them some pizza!  Let them eat nachos, let them drink coke!  While you are at it, turn on the TV!  That should keep ém quiet!”

And it does.

‘COME THE REVOLUTION!’ ……….……ain’t gonna happen…..………

I am remote.  Mostly.  Kinda.  I mean, it is hard to claim legitimate remoteness when you write a blog, isn’t it?  But that contradiction notwithstanding, I am pretty ‘out there’.  Off the grid.  Isolated.  I am certainly not part of any influential information-sharing network.  I am not milling about in the madding crowd.  I am not in the least way hip.  I am way, way out of the loop.

It was not always thus.  I rode the merry-go-round.  I rubbed shoulders.  I chatted at cocktail parties.  Been there, done that.

When I lived in Vancouver, I would even, on occasion, be in the news or be part of the news or be part of a news story.  No biggie.  I worked in Skid Row and the media love doing pieces about that.  I helped refugees at one time and that, too, was easy grist for the media mill.  Building KIDS ONLY MARKET at a time described as the ‘echo boom’, ensured another minute or two of my allotted fifteen minutes.

It was all less about me and more about the voracious appetite of the media to fill air in order to sell advertisements to, well, people like me.  And I know that.  But it happened.

So, imagine my surprise to have had several ‘contacts’ over the last few years from media-types doing ‘stories’ on people living off the grid?  It is almost a phenomenon.

It isn’t, actually.  It is considerably less than a phenomenon but living OTG has attracted a bit of attention.  It falls short of a phenom for me because, so far, the media types don’t really want my story.  My story is not what they are looking for.  I think I am too dull.

So, we chat for a minute and part amicably.  And then they write what they write.  It is always about something else.  Not just someone else but something else altogether.

It is amazing how far off the mark they are.  At least from my perspective.

Nick Rosen wrote a book and is currently keeping a blog about living off the grid.  But his sense of living OTG is people who live in cars, RVs and up North. He might include liveaboards or desert dwellers who just live far away. He sees some farmers as living OTG because they live remote not because they are actually off the grid.  I think Nick misses the point.

And I just had contact from a woman who wants the story of someone who is “….just leaving the city and maybe just bought a farm and, like, maybe is getting chickens and stuff for the first time.  You know, urbanites hobby-farming?”

“Oh.  You mean like a hedge fund manager who picks up a hundred acres in upstate New York and has a funky barn he gets renovated?”

“Yeah!  That would be great!”

“Well, you can contact Michelle Pfiefer, the actor.  She has a home up here somewhere.  She is rich and has staff, too.  Comes in by helicopter.  Does that work for you?”

“Ooh, that would be great.  Do you have her number?”

I guess Michelle and the fund managers qualify as much as I do as living off the grid but, somehow, it seems like the wrong image.  Most of the people I know who live OTG are not wealthy.  They are rich because they want for little and  rely on less.  They do it all themselves (give or take) and they are off the grid because they do not even have direct road access, let alone piped in water, electricity and cable.  My definition of OTG is more along the lines of Mother Earth News than it is Lives of the Rich and Remote.

But judging from the media contacts, I am off the mark as well.

We have to get back outside working on all our projects.  The list just keeps growing by two for every one we check off and we haven’t checked off many lately.  It feels like we are slipping.  Chipping away at the to-do list is a chore that never ends but is, at the same time, pleasurable and satisfying so long as we can get a sense of progress.  And, if we keep at it, we do get that.  It’s good.

Somehow it seems to help if the sun is shining.  Better photo ops, for sure.

Today is Tuesday – a day after the no-lifting ban has been removed.  We are going to attack some logs to celebrate.  Then, after we have vanquished the pile at the beach, we are going to – maybe – start on railings for the deck.  Although, that might require first getting some lumber from up the coast.  Which can’t really happen (logically) until I re-launch my boat.  Which still has some work that needs to be done…..and, well………………maybe a little breakfast first, eh?  An extra cup of tea?

It won’t be hard to get going today.  It is gorgeous outside.  And I can see forever.  Still, our pace is basically pretty slow and we try to keep the work day to four or so hours of ‘real’ work.  The hard, physical stuff.  There is quite enough to do that is not ‘real hard’ work just keeping home and hearth together to fill the rest of the day quite nicely, thanks.

Yesterday, I hit a minor milestone.  I had finished sharpening the chain on my chainsaw and noticed that the teeth were all pretty skinny.  I had kept this chain working and sharpened for so long that I had managed to sharpen it down to the nubs.  But all the nubs were much the same.

The mark of a pro.

A good sharpener will have a worn chain that still has all the teeth much the same.  I usually over and under sharpen my chains so that I have to replace them earlier than I should.  That is the mark of an amateur.  Having all your chain-teeth worn and sharpened equally is a sign of growing skill.

Yeah, I know………..get your kudos where you can……

Before I sharpened the chain yesterday I had been down on the dock splicing some prawn trap lines.  Short-splicing, not long-splicing.  (Short splicing is when you attach two lines and the weave or splice is a double thickness.  Long splicing is when you taper the strands so that the splice is almost unnoticeable.)  They would both work in this application and the short splice is so much easier.  Still, it took a few hours.

And the lighting was good.

So there I am sitting all by myself on a dock in the middle of nowhere splicing lines like a scene from Herman Melville.  I’m sitting on a bucket.  In a plaid shirt.  Toque on my head.  Little ‘reader’ glasses perched on the end of my nose.  Dog at my feet. C’mon, does it get any more funky than that!?

Splicing and then later, sharpening my chainsaw……I mean……c’mon!!……‘where is National Geographic when you need ’em, eh?  Shouldn’t some indy with a handycam be drooling right now? 

Hello, SUNDANCE!!

Post-operative recuperative phase?  There isn’t any.  Not really.  I mean the eyes have to adjust and all but, really, it is nothing.  Lots of nothing.  A smidge too much of nothing, actually.

So much nothing a guy can get into trouble.

Seems you are not supposed to lift anything for a few days.  Eyes will pop out or something.  I dunno.  But I was happy to give up lifting for awhile.  Any excuse will do.  “So, Sal, could you lift my toast onto the plate?”

That might have been the first sign of trouble right there.……….

First day or so I may have pushed the envelope a bit but I didn’t do any lifting.  Stayed the course.  Sal did all the heavy lifting.  All the medium and most of the light stuff, too.   

Funny thing is that the day before I went to get operated on I visited a local sculptor to ask about rocks.  He was throwing out a few chunks of marble so I took ’em.  I kinda forgot that in a few days, I would not be allowed to lift ’em.

So Sal did it.

Kinda funny.

That may have added to the trouble a bit, too.

I like to think we are 50/50 partners, Sal and I.  I like to think I pull my weight.  I usually do the heavy stuff.  This was just a short vacation.  I also like to think that I am an equal-opportunity kitchen aid at the every least.  I cook.  I do the dishes.  I vacuum.  I’m good.  But, as I sat there watching her do all the stuff, I realized that I am not really the better half.  Not by half of a half.

When I do the dishes I always say, “Sweetie, you prepare the dishes and I’ll do ’em.” This is because some foods are saved and others are thrown out, some foods are wrapped in one thing, others are stored in something else.  Some get composted.  Some get thrown out for the gulls.  God only knows where everything goes afterward.  It is all way too complicated.  So, I take over the washing phase after all the sorting has been done. And I bask in the washing-up credit afterwards.

A little while later – when I was reading – I heard Sal putting all the dishes away.  She does that because I don’t know where all the dishes go.  OK, I don’t wanna know where all the dishes go.  Basically the same thing.

“It just dawned on me, sweetie.  Maybe I am not so much 50/50 after all.  I mean, you scraped and sorted the dishes and put the food away and now you are putting the dishes away.  I just washed ’em.” 

“This just dawned on you?”

“Well, yeah.  Kinda funny, really.  Don’t ya think?”

“Hysterical”.

“Well, because I can’t do any heavy lifting right now, I was reflecting on my role here.  It occurred to me that I wasn’t doing much else except the heavy stuff.  But I at least cook, right?  I mean, I do sushi and pizza and toast, feed the dogs and I pour the wine.  It’s not much but not too bad, right?”

“Don’t get me started.”

“What?”

“Well, when you do the sushi, I get all the ingredients out.  I prepare them.  You assemble them in sushi rolls and put ’em on plates.  OK, you heat the sake.  But then I do the dishes and put everything away.  Same for pizza.  You are like all the idiot guys who think they cook chicken because they barbecue.  The wife buys the chicken, marinates it.  Then she gets all the crap out and prepares it and then takes it out to the doofus who inhales chicken-smoke for half an hour and thinks himself a super-chef while the wife makes potato salad and everything else.  She does the washing up, too, while doofus-for-brains stands over the grill drinking beer.”

“Hmmmmmm. This is embarrasing.  I really should be better, shouldn’t I?  What are you gonna do next?

“The laundry.”

“Damn.  Sorry.  The basket is kinda too heavy for me right now, ya know?  Want some tea?”

I was in the waiting room with a bunch of old women, all of us waiting to have an eye sliced and diced.  I was in for eye #2.  I’d been there awhile when the O.R. nurse came over to me and gave me the pre-op speech and put the blue hair-hat on my head.  I took that to mean it was my turn and stood to follow her.  “Oh no, not yet, dear.  Stay seated.  We still have someone on the table.  If I took you in now, I’d have to put you on top of her!”

I couldn’t help myself…..

“Could I at least check her out first?”, I asked.

Five old ladies and a nurse cracked up and laughed out loud.

Then the slightly naughty jokes started being told……………all of them by the women!  I am sitting in a room with five old ladies, all of whom are 75 plus except for the sixth, a nurse, who was in her late 50’s.  And each felt obliged to outdo the other with some kind of naughty, ‘…..a priest and a condom salesman come into a bar…’ kind of joke.

The waiting time flew.

Second eye got done.  Piece o’ cake!  By the next day my vision was 90% there and today, I suspect, I’ll have both eyes pulling together like draft horses.  I can see.  It is flippin’ marvelous!  Two eyes are definitely better than one.  And even the one reconstructed eye was way better than the previous two in their prime.  I almost kinda wished I had a third one somewhere that he could rebuild.  I don’t care what I would look like, it is just fun seeing so much better.

Turns out I like little old ladies.  In small groups, anyway.  (One-on-one..?…I am not so sure).  Who woulda guessed?  I’ve had two groups now and they were both a lot of fun.  They have some kind of old-lady cohesion thing going on.  The yap-yap sisterhood.  They all seemed to know each other even tho they had never met before.  They started chatting and laughing and talking about quilting, kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, cats (yes, cats!) and how far they had to travel and then they gave up a bit of their life story.  They are all old.  They are all no-longer-married.  They all have cats.  And they are living alone and independently.

Four of ’em had I-pads, too!

One old crone said she volunteered three days a week at the senior’s centre!  “Yvonne”, I said, “forgive me for pointing this out but I would venture a guess that you are, yourself, a senior!”

“Yes.  But I am healthy and active.  I sing in three choirs, too.  Plus I volunteer at the hospital here!”  

One of the old ladies is aboriginal and she still does all her old native things.  She just came back from clam-digging up one of the inlets.  “Yesh, it was pretty cold.  We had to break the surface ice to get into the beach.  But we dug up a boatload.  We did good”.  She was late 70’s. Just barely five feet tall.  Didn’t weigh 100 pounds.  And they hand-dug the beach with small clam-rakes and collected the little mollusk morsels in large net bags!  Took ém all day to fill the boat and then drive four hours back to Powell River.  In the winter.

Lot of stories like that.

When my operation was done, they took me down to the lobby in a wheelchair.  Sal was there waiting and looking concerned.  “Oh, sweetie……..you OK?  Everything all right?” I smiled at the old volunteer and said, “It was hell!  Oh my gawd!  I am gonna need a lot of extra attention.  And tea.  Lots of tea.  Maybe a little lie-down before dinner……………..ooooh……………eye operations, eh?  Pretty hard on a guy.”

The volunteer smiled and kept her mouth shut.  It was Valentines day, after all,  and I guess she figured I was needing a bit of coddling.  After all, the men just aren’t as tough.

When you get your eyes slashed and whacked you are obliged to put in drops four times a day for about three weeks.  Of course, most people undergo cataract surgery when they are older.  And they are the ones who have senior moments.  They forget.  WE forget! Can you believe that!?  Sal and I have forgotten to ‘do drops’ at least three separate times over this eye-drop regimen.  We missed a session again yesterday.

Well, I missed the session yesterday……………

“What the hell is wrong with us?  This shouldn’t be so hard, right?”

“Well, we have our lapses, sweetie.  And I did manage to put the dogfood in the breadbox………….”

“Yeah.  And I put my hat down somewhere within thirty feet of the front door and, for the life of me, I still can’t find it.”

“It is Sunday, right?”

“Not a clue.”

Honestly?  I don’t think we are really losing it.  Not really.  Well, OK, maybe a bit.  But I have always had trouble finding my keys, glasses, socks, etc. and Sal hasn’t finished a sentence in years.  She starts them but they just end mid-sentence.  I usually finish them for her.  What else are partners for, eh?

“Sweetie, I was thinking that on Tuesday I’d……………………..” (and then a pause so long it could pass for a vacation).  So, I fill in………

“Go to the post office?  Make muffins?  Invite someone over?  Rearrange the furniture? Write a novel?  C’mon, Sal, gimme a hint.  Tuesday is a long day!”  Sometimes I pull on my ear and say, “Sounds like?”

She just looks at me…………

But basically we have it together.  I think.  We’d likely be the last to know though, right?  I mean, it is the loons who think they are sane, right?  True sanity is checking in now and then to make sure…………..ya know?  At least we are still checkin’ in to make sure.  That has to be a good sign.  Right?

Tho I can’t remember the last time we checked in………..

Never mind………………..we are fine ……..and……………well………….?…hmmm……… where was I going with this?

Oh yeah.  Eyes.  A few days from now I am going back for eye number 2.  The stress level is way down this time.  Nothing like a little success to put one’s mind at ease.  And eye #1 is like having had an eagle’s eye swapped in.  It is great.  I should have opted for Blu-ray, maybe.  But, still, I can see from one eye very well and it is very reassuring.  I am actually looking forward to it.

I just hope we don’t forget which day…..