Winter – wait, what?

Time has been flying by pretty quick lately.  It’s hard to believe that we’ve been here for six months already.  Christmas seems like it was just a few weeks ago and here we are about to head into March.

I got an email from Jordan last week.  He was asking for a few bits of information he needs to prepare for the upcoming season— another sign of spring.  Among the things asked for was the model number of the incinerator saying, “You’ve probably noticed that the chimney needs to be replaced”, so I took care of that and a few of the others of his requests.

The next day, Friday was an incredibly beautiful day!  Wendi asked me to burn the garbage so I grabbed it on my way out to the toolshed — Jordan had also asked me to drag an old boiler from the toolshed into the lodge, so I took the garbage to the incinerator first, lit ‘er up and tossed it in.  Then I headed for the toolshed, I was in there wrestling with the boiler when I heard a bunch of crashing and banging outside.  I stopped what I was doing and kind of went, “Wth?”.  I reckoned I ought to go have a little look see… I came around the corner and looked at the incinerator.  The chimney was gone and in its place was about eight feet of flame shooting out like exhaust flames from a dragster but with more of an evil glow like the afterburner of a fighter jet.  The stack was lying on the ground, in two pieces, beside the incinerator.  There was no danger of anything catching fire so I went back to business in the toolshed.

Here is the email I sent Jordan afterwards:

“Yup! Needs to be replaced alright, lol.  I have a half stack jury-rigged.  Not sure how many burns it’ll last for, though.”

After that, I went down to the docks and replaced a few more of the zincs and then grabbed a lawn chair and went out to the end of the dock to sit in the sun for a while.  What a great spot!  It felt so good to just sit there quietly, feeling the sun on my face, hearing the surf in the distance and the waves lapping at the shore behind me. 

I sat and watched a seagull wander around the helipad, scraping salt crystals off the cement with his beak.  I whistled a little tune and whenever I hit a certain note, he would cock his head and strain his neck in my direction.  Probably thinking, “What the hell is he trying to say ?”.

Saturday was another cool but sunny day.  I made a time-lapse movie of the sun progressing along the docks and the frost melting away but for some strange reason the camera would move every once in a while, so it didn’t really turn out.  I really need a tripod… and ND filters… and… You know it’s funny how things go, you buy one thing — like say a camera — and the next thing you know, you need this and you need that.  It reminds me of the song about the little old lady who swallowed the fly, except this shit is swallowing my money.

Now that spring is coming and we’ll be getting out of here relatively soon, we’ve started picking up the pace and getting a few things done around here.  Wendi has been pretty busy cleaning up the walk-in cooler. It’s a big job, she’s been at it all week.

The other day we got a big dump of snow. Well, big for us — this isn’t Whistler — we didn’t measure it but it looked like at least an inch and a half.  Hey, don’t laugh, that’s bigger than all the other snowfalls combined this year.  It’s all gone now and the temperatures are a wee bit warmer — not much, we still have the breezes coming from the north for a few more days yet.  Hopefully, once they turn back to Southerlies, we’ll start to get some real warm days.  We took another hike up to the bog for a snowy perspective. We got a few good shots of the snow on a bright and sunshiny day.

We went back down to the docks the other day and sat in our lawn chairs in the sun for a while.  No sooner did we get comfortable than three bald eagles started circling above.  I got some half decent pictures but they just did not come low enough for any really good shots.

That’s about it for this week, thanks again for checking in. Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, I post a few pics there from time to time between blog posts.

Thanks very much for your support!

Ciao for nao,

© Ron Morrison 2017