I Need Home For a Rest

Between power outages, trips to Vancouver, and work parties, this is the first time I've been able to put up a blog entry in weeks. It all started with 6 days in Vancouver helping Rachelle with the Circle Craft sale.

Circle Craft is a huge sale involving 500 vendors selling mostly handmade things. It's five days long and can be pretty exhausting to work it alone. This is the first time I've had a flexible enough job that I was able to take the week off to help.

We stayed right across the road at the Fairmont Waterfront, so we could leave the show and be in our room in under 5 minutes. After spending 12 hours on display and selling wares we didn't really want to do any extra interacting.

I was able to escape for a little bit to play some floor hockey with my old work mates, and to pick up a bunch of plumbing supplies to try to get some running water happening around here. The show went fairly well and I actually had a pretty good time. Rachelle was pretty happy that I didn't break anything and would consider having me back again next year.

We traveled back to Hornby in the middle of a fierce November storm that bounced the ferries around more than I've ever experienced. We arrived home to find a huge lake at the front of our house and the entire Island in the middle if a power outage that lasted 4 days.

That's Rachelle demonstrating a high brace in the lake. She's actually floating and was able to paddle around a little bit. The lake is mostly gone now, and will probably only come back in another extreme rain event like the storm that just happened. We will need to deal with it though, considering that our septic disbursal field is up hill from the lake.

The power came back on Wednesday just in time for Jeffo and Sarah's arrival. They came up for the weekend to help us build. The project that we decided on was to frame in and install a sliding glass door between the cabin/tool shed and the house. We've had a quilt hanging there to try to keep out the cold but it just wasn't cutting it. The wind would howl in, blowing the cold air with it.

There was already an entrance way in place, but it was the wrong shape. We had to cut the studs above the header and move it higher, frame in some wall to the left of the door, and re-sheath the outside plywood. It worked like a charm. Jeffo and Sarah worked so hard that I was too busy trying to stay ahead of them and never did get any photos of them while they were here.

Some other jobs that they did were rerouting the phone cable, installing a clear sighting tube on our water tanks, building shelves in the cabin, cutting much firewood, and building the skylight mounting boxes. More importantly though, we had great food, drank lots of good wine and had were happy to get together with them again. Thanks so much for coming!