Monday, September 12
And yet…
This place is awesome!
As I look out the patio doors from our second floor bedroom, the weather is absolutely beautiful . Clear blue sky, no wind and flat calm water. One thought enters my mind. “Kayak!”. Then another thought. “I’ve got to get that wood moved into the basement so it can get dried out.”. Again… “Kayak!”… “wood?” Over-ruled – Kayak it is!
“Fine”, I said to myself, “but first you have to clean the air cooler on the generator.”. That’s done by spraying brake cleaner through the fins and I don’t want to do that on a hot engine, so I go out to the generator shack and fire up the big Onan 50Kw generator and leave the 20Kw Deutz alone. I return to the lodge to have my coffee and write my Monday morning email to Jordan.
Not too much gets accomplished in the mornings around here, at least not by me. Wendi keeps busy in the mornings and slows down in the afternoon. Other than taking care of blog updates and Facebook, I take it pretty easy in the mornings and get more physically active in the afternoon. I like to eeeeeease into the day, so it was about 11 o’ clock by the time I got back out to the generator and cleaned the cooler. Afterwards, I shut the Onan down and went back in for lunch, leaving the Deutz off too, in order to let the brake cleaner evaporate fully.
We downed a quick lunch and headed for the beach. We took a fishing rod this time. We were hoping to find a good kelp bed to anchor to and jig for lingcod. We didn’t find any really promising places to fish but did grab some kelp and dropped a hook in the water. The water just isn’t deep enough on the inside and it wasn’t looking too good for fishing so we ended up just beaching on Ogilvie Island and going for a hike.
We explored the beach on the South side of the island, where we landed and then took a four minute hike across the island to the beach on the North side. You can see some video here
Tuesday morning I awoke to low cloud and calm conditions. It had obviously rained last night but I doubt we’ll see much more today. It’ll be a good day to get some of that woodpile moved indoors, for sure this time.
After lunch, I went down to the basement and started moving firewood. I spent most of the afternoon moving wood and got almost all of it in and separated into two new rows. The “Wet Row” and “The Not-So-Wet-Row. They are stacked (sort of) neatly beside “The Dry Row”. Wendi helped for a while and then went up to start making dinner. We had Black Cod and Scalloped Potatoes. It was very good!
This morning, Wednesday the 14th, at 10:15 am, as I was sitting at the table writing this week’s blog, I heard something come over the hill toward the lodge. A plane? I jumped up and opened the patio door as it appeared above the trees from the South. A helicopter, the same one we arrived in.
He circled tight around the lodge only a couple of hundred feet above the water. As he went by the front of the lodge I waved. He continued his circle and when he reappeared from behind the lodge, he flew off into the distance to the North, disappearing as fast as he appeared. I guess he was just checking in on us on his way past. Cool!
When I got up this morning at about 08:00, the bay we are in was completely socked in with fog. I couldn’t even see the little islets that are only a few hundred meters away from the dock. The fog was lifted by the time the helicopter was here and now, twenty minutes later, the sky is even lighter. Still no blue though.
After lunch I started moving wood again. Wendi came out and helped again and in just over an hour we were done.
September 15
Wendi found a bathroom scale this morning. I’ve gained 15 pounds since leaving Poets Cove. I knew I’d gained weight and was afraid of how much it might be. As soon as I cross the 210 Lb threshold, my sleep apnea symptoms come back. One day I asked Wendi if I have been snoring a lot lately. She said yes, and that she’s had to poke me a few times to get me breathing again. I suspected as much because my uvula and tonsils have been a little sore lately. Next, if I don’t lose some weight, I will start to lose hair again. Time to get back on the diet.
As I sit here writing this, Wendi is doing some more snooping. I just looked up and found a thermometer sitting on the table if front on me. Was Wendi just here?
The other day I wrote about how I like to eeeease into the day. Well today I pretty much just eeeeased into tomorrow. I went outside twice. Once to start the generator and once to shut it down. I spent too much time on the computer, I played guitar and watched a couple of movies. That was about it for me.
Friday! Woohoo! Oh wait, that doesn’t mean much anymore, does it?
Well we went down to the shore for take two of the rising tide. It was a nice calm day for it with sunshine and intermittent cloud.. I picked a spot and with the GoPro mounted to a piece of plywood this time, I put it in place, weighted it with rocks and hit record.
This time, for some strange reason, as soon as the camera lost wifi connection to my iPhone it stopped recording. We’ll have to try again another day when the tide, the wind and the sky are cooperating again.
I went back to the lodge to “meditate” for a bit, (Wendi doesn’t like it when I nap). It was a short one though and then I spent the rest of the afternoon changing oil and fuel filters on the generator.
When I came back into the lodge Wendi showed me a poor little mouse that had gotten his leg caught in a mousetrap in the kitchen. Poor little thing. In a scene that could be, and probably will be, compared to something out of The Shining, I put him out of his misery… with a hammer!
We found some almond milk in the stores down in the basement so decided to try White Russians with it. Me likey!!! So our Friday Night turned into a pool tournament lubricated with White Russians and ended at about 01:00 hours with the nightly trip – read stagger – out to the generator shack.
I think I’m starting to lose the concept of time. Yesterday I thought it was Friday and today I thought I realized that yesterday was actually Saturday so today must be Sunday. Turns out I was right, yesterday is tomorrow and Sunday is actually Saturday… or something to that effect. I’m sure it’s just those Russians still dancing a Kalinka in my head. I’ll be better by tomorrow, whenever that is.
So a funny thing happened today. Kind of creepy actually. I got up around 9:00 am. Wendi was still conked out so I left her alone. After starting the generator and turning the coffee on, I sat at the computer and pretty much did nothing for a long time. At about 1:00 pm Wendi came back to the world of the living and by about 2:00 pm, was in the kitchen making lunch. I was still sitting at the computer trying to stay amused at the goings on in Facebook land.
Suddenly and for no apparent reason, a random thought popped into my head. This thought was not inspired by any external source. There was no suggestion from anyone or any particular occurrence or condition that could have lead my mind to that thought. It was, “I wonder when we’re going to run out of propane?”.
On the day of our arrival, Jordan and Doug had shown me the propane shed and how the shed full of one hundred pound propane tanks are arranged and connected to the lodge. I hadn’t been back to or thought about the propane since. I pondered that thought for a few seconds and then something caught my attention and it was gone, or I was.
Not two minutes after that thought faded from my mind, Wendi appeared out of the kitchen to inform me that we are out of propane. Weird or what?
So after lunch I was off to the propane shed to find that yes indeed, it was time to change out the propane tanks.
Sunday the 18 was another beautiful day in paradise. Nothing really happened that day. I finished off this instalment of the blog, added some diesel to the fuel tank for the boilers and took some pictures of the big puffy clouds coming in from the open ocean. I find the skies here are quite interesting. The clouds are kind of unspoiled in a way, in that here they’ve not been affected by land forms yet.
I’ll sign off this week with a slide show of some photos of the sky from today and yesterday.
Cheers, and as always, if you’ve enjoyed the content, please like, share and follow.