Escape from Reality

As you know we worked pretty much all day every day this summer, moving out of one house, into a new one and doing a major renovation on the second. We are now at the highly unmotivating stage of picky details. There is a lot of trim caulking to do, the kayak has to find a home on the ceiling of the garage, our Mexican sink hasn’t got a proper tile base yet, the chandelier isn’t hung, we need a shorter car, we haven’t organized furniture for the TV room, and on and on. But we are liking the place and it seems to fit us quite well. All through the hard work we promised ourselves a reward escape, assuming it might be to the Okanagan since we love to go there. Jim came across a most amazing place on the Sunshine Coast and since we’ve never been over there that became the destination. We’ve just come back and I have to say it was spectacular. We stayed in a tenthouse suite

at Rockwater Secret Cove, written up in all kinds of exotic travel mags, and wicked expensive except we were within a window of deals. One day we drove around the Sechelt Peninsula, had lunch at Molly’s Reach of Beachcomber fame,

and checked out the sights. Did you know that Beachcombers was the longest running Canadian series 19 years!), and had a huge and loyal following of fans even overtaking Saturday Night Hockey at one point? Another day we took a 5hour boat trip up Jervis Inlet to 

Princess Louisa Inlet and Chatterbox Falls, a 70 mile round trip. The boat was fast! The weather was crazy. It poured rain the night we arrived and then got warm, up to 26C one day. The day on the boat it was hot near the coast but as we went up the inlets the temperature went down about 10 degrees and we were travelling so fast we created quite a wind chill. I've posted an album on Facebook.

On the way home we stayed over in Vancouver for an IKEA fix and dinner with good friends Bob & Kimberly. It was 28C in Vancouver and half of the population was at IKEA. No, I do not exaggerate.

Yesterday morning with wind and rain in the forecast we hopped out of bed and caught the 9:00am ferry. Today it is freezing out and the wind is howling. Yikes! Summer has come to a screeching and abrupt halt. 

I recently finished reading a small book of essays: Chasing the Shore, by David Weale. I was reluctant to read it because David and I used to disagree on virtually everything and I've spent a lot of years thinking that I didn't like him much, not that my opinion counts for anything. Jim had read the book and said I should, which he hardly ever says, so I did. The outcome is that I have completely revised my opinion of the author. The essays are short and homely but so well crafted they would make you weep for the beauty of the words. 

We are more than a little better...

Half a dozen times a year someone drives along our street and dumps out the debris from their just-finished McDonald’s ‘meal’.  It must be the same combination of food items because the litter lands in almost exactly the same place each time.  We do our self righteous little tut-tut and pick up the pieces and I assure myself that the offender will eventually either grow up or move away.

Rewind the video by 40 or 50 years and I would have been happily tossing my junk out of the car window too. Everyone did and I find it amazing that we did. I think I started to tut-tut in the mid seventies when I was commuting back and forth from PEI to Orono, Maine for graduate studies and the shoulders of what used to be called The Airline Route (high, narrow, twisty rte. 9) was glittery with broken bottles. In 1973 the PEI Women’s Institute http://www.womensinstitute.pe.ca initiated a province wide roadside cleanup and that might have been when I began to pay attention to junk; of course I would like to think I was more forward thinking but I’m quite sure I wasn’t. The roadside cleanup is exactly that. Garbage bags are readily available and groups, families, schools, individuals get out in the ditches and pick up junk. They leave the garbage bags on the roadside and it all gets picked up.  No wonder PEI has a reputation for looking tidy and clean. There are at least two reasons that PEI is an innovator in environmental issues: lack of resources and small size. Charlottetown has a smokeless incinerator for garbage from the whole province (no landfills in PEI!!!) and that incinerator heats the hospital and a bunch of other buildings in the east end of the city. The university http://home.upei.ca/  has a wood chip burner that supplies heat to a good bit of the western end of the city. Back in about 1965 the ARK project used a wind turbine for power, and so on and so on.

But I digress. What I actually want to comment on is that in the process of our renovation and move I’ve become aware of the amazing and fabulous opportunities there are in Victoria for getting rid of stuff. There are 26 official recycling options listed in the CRD (Capital Regional District) and there lots of unofficial options. Post garage sales we’ve taken leftovers to the Salvation Army or Value Village; St Vincent De Paul picks up bigger stuff; I’ve made friends on Used Victoria and Craig’s’ List where if you list things free they fly out the door, there is a landscape company that takes dirt, broken concrete, sod; every day of the week we can dump yard waste to be recycled to compost; there’s a “Free Store” where we’ve dropped off a tub, old tools, light fixtures, and someone picks things over and uses them; Habitat for Humanity has their Restore to which we have donated and from which we have purchased. It’s seemingly endless. But my hands down favourite is Ellice Recycle http://www.ellicerecycle.com/. With the aid of the Tweedie truck we made a lot of trips to Ellice’s ‘diversion centre’ where they pride themselves on diverting as much as possible from the landfill. It isn't free and we spent about $500.00 in dumping fees, but what a pleasure to have almost one-stop shopping for your real debris: like cardboard which we can put out with our curbside recycling pickup but we had mountains of it and it was in the way. And what’s really nice about Ellice is that it’s clean, and the staff is happy and helpful, and the buildings have the most beautiful murals on the exterior walls.

Yes, we are more than a little better than we used to be.

Agricultural Fairs

We missed the Saanich Fair this year with just too much going on so we decided to go to the Cowichan Exhibition.

A little background info is that we are from PEI where community agricultural fairs are de rigueur and where “Old Home Week” is the PEI king of fairs http://www.oldhomeweekpei.com/. Growing up the only thing I was interested in was the midway, but my parents always went to the harness racing events of which the Gold Cup race is THE ONE and used to include a bevy of beauties that represented the horses in the Gold Cup and Saucer Parade which is another BIG DEAL. BTW, PEI doesn’t have the first Monday in August as its provincial day; it has Gold Cup Friday instead. Eventually my stomach grew out of the midway rides and I started to enjoy the animal competitions and the food and crafts exhibits in the Women’s Institute Building. 

Other notable fairs that we’ve attended are the State Fair in Columbia, South Carolina and the Calgary Stampede http://calgarystampede.com/ which lives up to its billing as truly amazing. If you are Canadian and haven’t been to The Stampede you should be ashamed of yourself! I’m a little bit ashamed that we have not yet been to the PNE http://www.pne.ca/ in Vancouver. Maybe next year.

The Cowichan Exhibition http://www.cowex.ca/ (how perfect is that domain name!) isn’t quite up there in the big event category but it has the necessary elements to make it fun and worth a trip over the Malahat (local mountain road too often the scene of ugly accidents and stupid drivers). The real attraction for us was that our friends Kim & Miriam, former teachers and now farmers, had entries in the fair competitions! Theirs is another long story that I won’t get into right now but Miriam writes a lovely blog http://muckybootsfarm.blogspot.com/ about their activities (and does hard labour in the garden) and Kim raises enormous chickens.  We arrived in time to see the end of the tractor pull, had the obligatory ice cream, looked at exhibits, laughed at the piglets, and avoided the midway.

Kim’s rooster, Hector, won the rooster category championship and her birds picked up 4 other prizes, and Miriam got ribbons for preserves even though she says she has no idea what she’s doing.

I swear Hector is 5 feet tall

gooseberry and lavender jelly - sounds divine

Mir says there is a category for everyone and anyone of any skill level, but there are standards. One year in an entry field of one, a woman got 2^nd prize for her pie. When asked how that could happen one of the judges said it just wasn’t a first prize quality pie! So there.

Next time you have an opportunity to go to an agricultural fair of any size, do it. Chances are you’ll love it.

these are serious cake decorators!

Summer coming to a close...

You may remember that I was pretty whiney about the weather back in the spring, and it continued to be cool well into July this year. For us it was ideal because we were just doing hard work and if we had had a 30C week it would have been miserable. Most everyone else would tell you we didn’t really have summer in 2011 but finally Victoria hit its usual endless sunshine and perfect temperature stride. Never mind that our winter climate is the only decent one in the country despite the gloom and damp, our summer climate is sublime.

Our favourite picnic site is a rock in Esquimalt overlooking the harbour.  I had to hover and impose my evil eye to move some people away from the only table.

What we consider normal is a long succession of days with clear blue skies, cool starry nights, low humidity, 20-30C degrees, and no bugs. This year has been the same, just a little later getting underway. So we’ve had our evening meal indoors twice since we moved in here (which means consuming lots of wine as we sit on the patio for several hours). Friday we went to our friend Gaye’s house, on Finlayson Arm, (no camera!) and spent a fabulous hour paddling down the inlet followed by corn on the cob, salmon, fresh veggies, and prawns from just off her dock. Does it get any better?

But it’s getting colder at night suddenly; Sunday it was 29C in the daytime but down to 10 overnight, and today it is decidedly cooler and gray. We seem to be heading toward autumn, but this year we don’t have yard clean-up to do or house maintenance. Imagine that!

Next week we are rewarding ourselves with a few days on the Sunshine Coast at what appears to be a very interesting resort http://rockwatersecretcoveresort.com/site/location.html. And after that, who knows…