Once a month Canada’s ‘best’ book-club meets at one of the member’s homes.  The hostess is obliged to serve coffee and tea, juice and water, but the rest of the contingent brings the food.  Typically between 12 and 20 women show up for the event.  Men are not allowed. 

A few years back, Sally volunteered to host the December meeting.  I am not so sure that her motive was pure hospitality, however.  She volunteered in August of that year when we had not yet finished the house!  No furniture, plumbing, electricity.  The floors were not in.  Doors not on.  Walls not painted.  Kitchen unassembled.  I assumed the offer was a prompt for us to work harder.  I was right.  When she told me, I laughed, “Well, these women are good sports.  I am sure that bare plywood floors and water bottles will be OK.” 

“Not on your life, big boy.  We just have to pick up the pace.  This place is going to be finished December 11th.  Now, shut up and work!”

Book-club was held on time.  The women sat on chesterfields and walked on Persian carpets-over-finished-wood floors.  The water was running.  Walls painted.  The wood stove was ablaze with heat and the kitchen stove was warming the pot-luck dishes.  Sal was pleased.  I was dead on my feet. 

The next year, she did the same – volunteered for December.  But this time she got creative with her hostessing.  She made real, home-made eggnog fortified generously with a bottle or two of rum.  She made quite a volume – three dozen eggs, four liters of whipping cream and a whole lot of other stuff.  I would estimate about 2.5 gallons.  But, I am not sure.  I never saw nor tasted a drop of it.  I recall one woman walked directly to the nog bowl as I was leaving at the beginning of the session and she was the last to leave as I returned five hours later at the end of the day.  She was standing in the same place!   

A tradition was born.

Sal’s book-club is not Canada’s best because of the food, the books or the loyal following.  Nor is it the best because they, Sally or I think it is.  It is deemed the best by the CBC. 

Two years ago the CBC ran a contest to see who had the best book-club and why.  It seems that having 20 or so members for 25 years was a good start but the clincher was that the meetings moved every month and that each chatelaine’s home was water access only.  Approximately 20 women-in-boats headed out in every kind of weather every month to attend their book-club.  They came from at least five separate islands and they came singly, in pairs and bunched up in small boats.  Kayak travel is not uncommon.

These are dedicated members.  They are not always so disciplined that every member has read the chosen selection every time but they attend anyway.  Sometimes they even talk about the actual book!   

I guess I deserved it, what with all the boosterisms I bleat about Read, rural and country living.  Comeuppance, thy name is ‘theft’.  Yep!  That’s right!  Got robbed again!  This time on the old Surge road near the ‘middle’ lakes.  I had my old boat trailer parked there and it was well entrenched when we left two weeks ago and yet was gone when we returned home today.

Broken in-to at the hotel and relieved of a rear window and Xmas presents last week.  Bummer!  And then, after denigrating the urban jungle to all and sundry, I find that rural thieves have been just as bad!  My trailer being GONE when I come home is some kind of retribution for dissing the city, I guess.  No place, it seems, is safe!

(By the way, ‘dissing’ does not show up as an error on my spell check.  What has our language come to?)

The trailer is not valuable.  Probably replace it for $5-750 or so.  Maybe $1,000.  But that means a minimum of $1200-1500 in losses this trip.  That kinda cuts into the revenue stream somewhat.   Two steps forward, one step back.  VERY reminiscent of my working life.  I am convinced that NOT working works better for me when you ‘net’ it out.  

And, of course, ICBC doesn’t cover it.  The thieves tossed the plate and we found it.  Wouldn’t you know, we had not renewed the insurance.  The trailer was slated for conversion to a funicular carrier and we knew we weren’t going to use it as a trailer so we didn’t ‘keep the insurance up’.  Ergo: no coverage.  Which is neither here nor there, really.  It would have been valued at less than $500, I am sure, and so the deductible would have taken care of most of that.

I am not so enamored of insurance companies at the best of times but ICBC really sucks even if it was entirely my own fault this time.  C’mon, I have to vent at someone. 

Tís the season, eh?

On a happier note, the dogs are still with Judith.  Thank God!  But they’ll come home tomorrow and that should end the troubles, I think.  Bad things happen in ‘3’s’ and that’s two thefts and the return of the dogs!  Pretty bad.  But that should be it for the bad news for awhile.

Unless Sal reads that last part……………..then it will be 4-parts trouble.  

Dateline: Friday, December 10, 2010.  Time to go home.  I’ve done all the damage I can do for now.  And I’ve taken all the chaos, mayhem, assault and burden I can handle for the time being.  Yesterday, I was stopped dead (didn’t move a foot) in a traffic jam on the Easy West connector for an hour an a half.  I believe it was the worst congestion I have ever experienced anywhere and that includes LA, New York, Bangkok and London.

I can’t live like this anymore.

To be fair, it did teach me something.  To all those to whom I write and get no response, to all those to whom I write and who don’t read the blog or return the e-mails, to all those who ‘just can’t be bothered’, I get it.  I fully get it.  At the end of every day I had no energy for my own bloody blog.  I was simply too tired and too ‘boggled’.  I can’t imagine how any of you can manage to read and respond to mine.  To all those who do not show the love, I feel your pain and still love you anyway.  This madness that is city living seems much harder to do than it did before.  I am now very sympathetic and totally uncritical. 

Or at least I will be until I forget this experience.

It was a productive time.  I got a lot done.  My friend is happy if not ecstatic.  We managed to save him at the very least $50,000 (a $5M suit settlement at $50K.  No lawyers!) with another 100K (better solution to a mechanical problem) likely.  Plus his relations with the city are now repaired (it helps if you speak English well and crack jokes).  But fragile.  And things are moving on all fronts (where before they were stalled).  He’ll be ecstatic if I can get the next two problems resolved but, frankly, I don’t think there are any more rabbits in the hat.  The next two obstacles are just hard slogging and time.  We’ll see.

Made a few new friends along the way (a city sewer guy, a plumber and a metal salvage guy).  I like that.  Makes it fun.    

Sally was a peach!  Poor sweetie.  She was there every day to help and support me but, face it, being my assistant, busing, sky-training and shopping are hardly ‘fun’ times and her dogs were missing to boot.  Sal is ready to go home – with or without me. 

Politically, I am in touch with the BC First party.  Don’t know enough yet but they have some aspects of sanity about them.  We’ve talked.  We’ll see.

Financially, I encountered some real opportunities down here but chose not to pursue them.  I don’t think ‘success’ has much Read Island time in it and so – given the choice between the two – I choose Read.  Still, I find myself ‘number crunching’ in my head and thinking about it.  I have a few ideas that just won’t go away.  One, actually, does include Read.  The metal salvage guy would ‘kill’ to access all the abandoned heavy machinery up and around the islands.  We just have to figure out a way to do that inexpensively.  Could be a shot in the arm for the hermit community.

More in a lighter vein when I get home.  And get lighter.  

Car got ‘mugged’.  Someone broke a window, did a smash-and-grab and split while the alarm whined in the background and the security cameras recorded shadows.  I guess we lost about $5-600.00 in the incident.  It could have been much worse. 

It is getting fixed as I write this.  But not by ICBC.  We have Comprehensive but it has a $300.00 deductible.  “That’s OK, Sally.  They’ll cover the lost Xmas presents, small car inverter, two Swiss army knives and miscellany that seems to missing, right?” 

Wrong.  Seems ICBC no longer covers contents.  Seems people made claims all the time when their car got broken into.  Imagine that!  But ICBC didn’t tell me.  They charged me for what-I-thought-was-coverage but changed the rules.  Quel Suprise! 

“Oh, you can claim on your homeowner’s insurance!” the nice sweet, young thing chirped at me on the ICBC dial-a claim-number.  “I don’t have homeowners insurance.  I live remote.  No insurance.  And, anyway, why would an insurance company covering my home have to pay?” 

“Because we don’t.  Sorry.  Tee hee, hee, chirp, giggle.  Have a great day!” 

This happened after a day of driving.  We went from Richmond to Abbotsford and then to North Vancouver to have dinner with friends.  At the end of the dinner, Roger showed me how he was thwarting the local thieves by chaining his boat trailer, removing the wheels, chaining the engines to the boat, covering the whole back end in a plywood box and running ‘fake’ security wires to the house.  I smiled, commented on how thorough he was and privately thought to myself that he was getting just a smidge paranoid.  “That Roger worries too much”, I thought.  “Who would take a used boat and motor parked in a carport right under the house?!”

Well, It seems a car with an alarm parked in a hotel’s parking lot and filled with Xmas presents (pajamas!) and such isn’t safe either.  Now I think Roger should add a few Doberman’s to the security package.  The lower mainland is not a warm and fuzzy place for us right now.  Looking forward to leaving. 

But we’ll do a bit more re-shopping first, of course.

Funny, you know.  I have been writing this blog for close to 100 entries and, much to my surprise, found myself writing about happiness and nice things, health and community and small accomplishments.  I was a bit worried that I was sounding a bit to happy and sunny.  It is not my nature.  I wanted to be real.

Well, this break-in gave me the material I just wasn’t getting up at Read.  A slice of the dark side, a bit of nasty, an encounter with the ugly.

I prefer sunny.   

Saturday morning.  Sleepy.  Groggy.  Wondering what it is was about ‘retirement’ that included this?  But it may be a harbinger of things to come.  I may have to work now and then.  Once in a while.

Damn. 

I confess that this idea of semi-work is a bit of a dilemma for me.  I love having ‘something new’ to do and I especially love dealing with problems and challenges that fall outside the ‘ordinary’.   I like the idea of being a consultant to the odd – in any sense of that word, the client, the project, the circumstance……..whatever.  This current project certainly qualifies.  Gimme weird.

But any consultancy, strange or otherwise, requires diligence and focus and a sincere commitment to helping out to the best of your ability.  And there is the implicit expectation that effort is not enough – they want results!   I have no problem with that requirement except that I am no longer as good as I was.  A client still gets a ‘good guy’ but not one with an ‘edge’ anymore.  I am not au current.  I am not hip.  I am not the sharpest knife in even the ‘odds and ends’ drawer.  In fact, I may just be the oddest end in the empty drawer.

So, I have been cheating. 

My current client thinks I am doing a great job.  Little does he know that the results I am delivering are the combined efforts of both Sally and me.  Yep, you got that right.  He is getting a two-fer, a genius at organization and paperwork and a walking, talking gadfly of communications. 

And yes, it is true – she is not the ‘sharper edge’ she was either.  We are both ‘out of tune’ to some degree.  Still, it is much better for the client than just getting me.  ‘Course, you knew that.  But it is kinda weird being a two-fer consultant.   

The fun part is in finding a solution.  It is not hard to find possible solutions.  We all do that everyday.  But finding one that will work right out of the box – that is the challenge.  We (the client) doesn’t have the resources for us to learn, research, investigate, attempt, prototype, experiment or any other of the safer, better-business-practices that everyone knows about and suggests.  We have to get a base hit our next turn at bat or else we (me) will be benched.  In my case, I am more likely to be sent back to the ‘farm team’ (literally) instead of the bench.  Consultants don’t have much tenure.

The weekend will help.  New ideas percolate during ‘down time’ and we have some of that for the next two days.  Whew!

I guess I am writing this to illustrate the ‘change of pace’ we have just experienced.  We have gone from idle to red-line in just a few days and it is leaving both of us a bit shocked.  But it is all good – for us, anyway.

Now, if I can just do something good for the client, it will be a wonderful way to have spent a few weeks this winter.

“Gimme that bat!”    

I woke up to Sally’s cheery ‘good morning!’  “You’ll never guess the good news.”

“You are going to stop being so cheery and let me go back to sleep?”

“No, silly.  The water is flowing!  I just filled up the cistern and came to tell you!”

Normally, the second coming of Christ would be insufficient to make me want to get up out of bed early.  And, even then, I’d still be groggy and grouchy.  But, I confess that the water flowing again instantly made me happy.  ‘Woo hoo!’

Turns out we were right.  Who woulda thunk it?  The pipe must have been blocked by ice and the water pressure eventually pushed it through and voila!  Oooh, I love it when things work logically.  It is so rare.

Sadly, we cannot enjoy the water that returned.   ‘Sally and David have left the building.’ We had to leave for the city again.  We are in Vancouver as I write this.  Exhausted after simply getting here.

Two days later:  Working is the pits!  I mean, I kinda like it in the sense that I like traveling.  There is really a lot of discomfort and hardship with a few bright moments  infrequently experienced to ward off surrendering and going home. So, we grind it out.  But, basically, it is a slog.  So, it is not the traveling so much as the memories (selective, of course) that one takes away from the trip. 

And, for me, that is how I describe working again.  Each day is a drag save for a few minutes now and then but, in the end, if we win, the whole effort will become ‘golden’. 

Yesterday we saw the brass ring but missed it.  We ‘almost’ made something happen – but didn’t.  Then, at the next meeting, I swung and missed completely.  It feels like being at bat and swinging for the fences only to have the ball fly foul or worse, the second pitch go in for a strike.  I am feeling 0 for two.  Oh well, at least we ‘got a piece of it’.

The really interesting thing is that we are negotiating aspects of the property for selling it.  Selling price, selling conditions, managing it in the meantime, holding it, dismantling part of it and all that such activities entail.  But the more I get in to this, the more valuable the property gets (to my way of thinking).  Here we are trying to make something happen that, if another person owned it, they would not want at all and would, instead, ‘work’ the property.  This is one of those times the buyers should be salivating.

But the financial mood is cautious if not fearful.  And if it is neither of those, the buyer takes that position anyway thinking it is a good ‘front’ to present.  So, our efforts are, at this moment, met with resistance.  ‘Course, if it was easy, everyone would be doing this.

Which would be fine by me.  We have running water.  I wanna go home.     

Water is not flowing.  Things are not working.  There’s something wrong in paradise!

Usually, Sally fixes it (thus reaffirming my definition of paradise) but this time I thought I’d help.  I have no idea what came over me.  Maybe we need a TV?  

Anyway, when the water stops flowing the first thing we do is ‘walk the line’ and check the connections.  And so we did.  It is always a gas to push through deep brush but winter conditions add a little ‘je ne sais quoi’, you know?

We walked the line back to John’s, about 750 feet down and over the rocky bluff that separates us, and found a problem – or two.  John’s valves had frozen and split.  Water was pouring out.  We made the necessary repairs but it didn’t help John much.  His supply cistern had drained and the repairs only made it so the feeder line bypassed his frozen valves.  He was basically just ‘cut out’ of the system.

No water for John.  None stored.  Broken valves.  And he is not here.  We’ll try to get him fixed up, of course (he usually does it for us) but first we had to get water to the area.  

Our one-kilometer-long ‘system’ is a gravity-feed, stream-sourced 1″ line that starts about 200 feet (elevation) up from the sea back up the hill (about 1000 feet in distance) on the back half of our heavily forested property.  The line ‘falls’ down the hill paralleling the stream.  The ‘pick-up’ for the pipe is in a little pool at the top.  We put the filler end under some mesh and put some rocks to hold it down and the water enters the pick-up and falls uninterrupted until it gets to the beach.  It then stays at sea level in the pipe which is ‘staked to the cliff-side’ for another 1000 feet until it gets to Johns.  Then it climbs up to my place (75 feet in elevation).  In theory I have the pressure you’d expect from a source 125 feet above our heads.   

If it gets that far.

After bypassing John’s cistern it was clear there was still no water.  So we followed the line to the junction in the lower beach rocks.  It had come undone.  We refastened that.

Still no water.

So, we got in the small boat and went to the beach around the corner and checked the line at the ‘tap’ at the bottom of the hill.  Nada.  So, that means more hiking and climbing.  More mud, snow, rain and cold.  Sal and the dogs were happy.  More fun!

John loves these kinds of adventures, too.  I was going to go home and call him.  Sal wouldn’t let me.  “C’mon!  We’ll just hike up through the bushes and fix it!  C’mon!”

I hate her when she gets all macho like that.

We went up halfway and checked the inspection ‘tap’ there.  It had also frozen and split.  We (Sally, actually) pulled that one off and put in a ‘splice’ and up we went to check the rest.

The stream is engorged.  It is a torrent.  Water is flowing like the semi-waterfall it is.  It is dropping 200 feet in 750 or so………that is a good drop rate.  It’s ‘whitewater’.  The stream bed is strewn with deadfall, bushes and boulders.  Getting up is mostly just a leg-climb but, being a smidge portly (especially with ten layers of clothes) I tend to use all fours at times.  Even Sal has to ‘climb’ now and then when it gets steep and muddy.

She went first.  She went fast.  And she called down from the top, “Alright, sweetie?”  

We got to the top.  The water and fallen storm debris was so high we couldn’t find the pick-up but the third inspection tap about 100 feet away was squirting like a geyser so we knew that the water was getting into the pipe system.  And, getting out at that level.  We replaced the broken valve there and put in a splice.  Water was now in the line and the line was intact.

So we went back down to the bottom, opened the inspection tap (the only one that had not frozen) and waited with glee to see the water come gushing forth.  And………we waited.

Still no water.  This is not easily explainable but here goes – the water went in through the pick-up and we patched all the holes in the line.  We opened the bottom to let the air out.  Therefore, we should get water.  Right?

Wrong!  Not if there was still something frozen in the pipe.  And that is what we are thinking.  Now.  We may think of something else later. 

We think there is something frozen (water, probably. Duh) still in the dips and valleys that the pipe creates as it falls down the hill.  So the water that is now in the pipe has to ‘melt’ and push the ice lump until the ice lump melts or it gets small enough to flow to our house.  April, perhaps.  Definitely by May.

This is one of the reasons we go away in the winter.  It is now a more pressing reason to travel.  Soon.  We have about ten days of water before making a cup of tea becomes difficult. 

Who would have expected winter to show up so early!

As most of you know, I built a funicular a few years ago.  It is a tram that climbs our upper slope.  Funicular Mark1 is 80 feet long and goes from the boathouse deck to the BIG house at a 33 degree angle and is powered by a 3 hp, 3-phase electrical motor working through a battery bank, an inverter, a transformer and a Siemens motor controller.  The motor drives a huge winch and it, in turn, pulls up a heavy metal wheeled cart capable of carrying as much as 1000 pounds.  It makes schlepping up and down the hill much easier.

But not easy enough.  This past year I began Funicular Mark ll.  That one goes down from the boathouse deck to the sea.  Of course, the sea goes up and down (tide) and so the ‘working’ length varies with the time of day and the month of the year.  With the tide out the distance to be covered is 70 feet at a 24 degree angle.  This funicular is intended to pull the boat up to the deck like a marine ways.

The motor is a 2 hp, 3-phase with an electronic brake.  The lower funicular will be operated by hand-held wireless remote controllers.  I am hoping to be able to drive up to the bottom of the lower tracks, summon the cart, drive the boat on and, a couple of minutes later, step off on to the boathouse deck.

You have to admire my optimism.

I have already encountered some major challenges in this project but none quite as formidable as the wiring diagram.  My friend, Bill, is a techie of the Gyro Gearloose kind, a live, ‘walkin’, talkin’, Rube Goldberg type who can jury-rig jerry-rigged things electrical, mechanical and, to some extent, culinary.  He is clearly a jack of all things eccentric, master of only a few.  Makes for an interesting time.  

My Siemens motor controller came with instructions for programming written in German.  Bill programmed it.  “I didn’t know you spoke German, Bill.” He looked at me blankly and said, “I don’t.  All computer programs speak a similar language and that is all you need to know.”  Yeah.  Right.  But it works great. 

Bill wanted me to integrate the electrical system of Fun Mk l with the electrical system of Fun Mk ll.  After four years I have barely mastered how to turn it off and on.  I was not going to be able to ‘mix systems’.  “Never mind.  I have it in my head.  I’ll draw it up and I’ll print it out on a diagram for you.  Anyone can follow a diagram.”

Yeah.  Right.  The diagram came in the mail yesterday.  It looks like the communications system in a NASA space station and the labels, names and abbreviations are as close to Cryllic as one is likely to find outside of Russia.  I don’t have a hope.

Sally took one look at it and said, “Gimme that!  You are not going anywhere near our working funicular!  Do you hear me!?  We need that thing.  You’ll try to do that and everything will go to hell!  Gimme that paper!”

Normally, I would argue a bit.  Put up a small macho protest.  “If Bill says I can do that, I can do that.”  But not this time.  I wouldn’t have fooled anyone.  It took me several minutes just to figure out which side of the diagram was up.

By then, Sally had snatched it away anyway.

Some projects go even more slowly than others. 

I write letters-to-the-editor in the Discovery Islander (local paper) once in awhile.  Done it for a few years.  I am pretty much locally tolerated in this harmless pursuit but never commented on.  Not in writing anyway.  That all changed last week.  David Jected wrote in unintelligible support, a mindless gibberish (kinda) on a political piece I had written the week before.  And he was published.

That fact alone is enough for me to reconsider this hobby.

David’s initial is ‘D’ and that ‘sounds’ like: Dejected, a nom de plume.  Seems my sole supporter is mad and incognito.  His letter went on and on and on and ranted, raved, spewed and spleened.  That has to tell me something not only about him and the publisher but worse, about me.  And I am not happy about this.  It is like being on Nixon’s list of desired people.  I could be a nut.  Me and Dejected are associated now and, despite my low standards for association, this guy is beyond the pale. 

Sal was in hysterics.  “He’s nuts!  His sentences don’t make sense!  This guy is bonkers and he is the only one who has ever supported you! Ha ha hah ha ha… hah………. mmmph …….giggle……ha ha ha………..the two Daves!!!”

I have always advocated speaking up.  It seemed like a good thing.  You know.  Honest.  Upfront.  I am beginning to have my doubts.  Right now it seems like it just attracts the loons.  Plus Sally’s ridicule.  If I am going to attract idiots, couldn’t they at least be young and female?

Where are the groupies?   

I may go back to painting. 

I find politics irresistible.  Clearly.  I can’t imagine how many of my regular readers (all 6 of you) suffer when you see that the blog topic is ‘politics’.  Like the last entry regarding the Greens.  Sorry.  I’ll try to resist but, as you know, resistance is futile.  A man’s gotta rant!

Fourth day of cold.  Everything frozen.  Couple of valves ‘popped’ so that when the water does run, it will all run away.  Oh joy!  My ’emergency pump’ for when it is frozen also froze.  So, we have had to siphon a few liters from the tank every day with a suck-hose and make do with that.  But, you know what?  It’s not so bad.  A bit of an inconvenience but that is all.  Well, that was all until it got really cold.

Sally took some of our bottles and cans in from the food shed.  It was 27 degrees F in there so it was a good move.  Everything is fine.  But the batteries are taking it hard.  We get those puppies up pretty good and, by the time the night is through, they are down, down, down.  NOT dead – just down.  But down a LOT.

Sal went to yoga today anyway.  This little piggy stayed home.  So did all the other little Q-hut piggies.  We don’t work when it is cold.  ‘Course, we didn’t work when it was hot, either.  Or raining.  Plus we only work Wednesdays no matter what.  Ya know, we are really great workers when you come to think about it.  We are almost done, it is looking great and we never do anything!  It’s like magic!

It’s funny, this temperature thing…………one tends to think that 20C is just a bit warmer than say, 17C and, of course it is.  Just a bit warmer.  But, at a certain point it gets too warm altogether and it becomes hot.  And that ‘transition’ seems to be more abrupt when it comes to the cold.  At 32F or 0C nothing has changed for us.  Life is the same except a few more layers of fleece, a few more hours indoors.  Even -5 at night can be ‘adjusted to’ simply by cuddling up or adding a blanket.  But -10 is like the end-of-days.  Things break.  Crack.  Freeze and seize.  The dogs won’t go out.  Engines won’t start (unless they are Hondas).  -10C is a real ‘change’, much bigger than the numbers indicate.  I hate -10C and all the numbers lower.

As soon as it warms up, I’ll be good.