How we spent our Easter vacation

Four-day Easter weekends are enjoyed by government workers, union members and people who work construction on Hornby Island. I LOVE this place! I was envisioning that I would get a massive amount of work done on the house but instead I had a lot of fun and accomplished a small amount of work on the house.

I was able to patch up all of the scraps of missing wall sheathing, finish the soffits on the main part of the house, and prepare the addition for soffit and faschia work. I ran into Remi, the log miller, a few days a go and he says that he's almost ready to come mill out wood. That wood will be used for window and door trim, and the board and batton siding that will be on the upper half of the house.

Our good friends Paul and Lisa are up from Vancouver for a week. They have the gorgeous house next to us that we use for laundry, the occasional shower, and to put up visitors. We had a fabulous evening of food, drink, and conversation with them on Saturday night. For 2 years in a row now, they have managed to break into our house and hide easter eggs when we have been out.

Before dinner I took Paul and their 3 year old son Colm to the firehall to check out the trucks. He was pretty excited about it all until I opened the door to the truck bays. I think it was a bit too enclosed and contained too much big machinery and was just a bit too intimidating for him and he was too afraid to go into the bays. He eventually relaxed enough for a quick tour, but it was a pretty hard sell for a while.


On Sunday we went to visit our friends Dale and Iain, who have a beautiful house on Whaling Station Bay. Dale's family has been coming here since the 60s and she and Rachelle became good friends this past summer.

This is the view out of their kitchen.















Afterwards we carried on to Pete and Judith's for Easter dinner. These are the same people we had Christmas dinner with. Once again, they included us in their festivities and made us aware of the great friends we have here. These guys did it up right for Easter with a full Greek meal of roast lamb, spinach pies, Greek salad and roast potatoes - followed by copious amounts of wine, scotch and Easter chocolate. All of this with a power outage too! Electricity is overrated when you have a barbecue and lots of imagination.

That's Pete's parents Frank and Mary Jane at the table.

The food was good but it was the conversation afterwards that got me going. Pete is a very entertaining conversationalist with a crap load of insight into this island, how it works, the history, and the crazy characters that make it so unique.

It's both inspiring and humbling to have such great friends and kindred spirits here.