Wow! What a weekend. I almost hate to say it, as a dyed in the wool cruiser, but it was fun to be ashore this weekend. We started off Friday with some friends over for our first of the year BBQ and then on Saturday morning we started off with a visit to the town's Farmer's Market. This was quite good although it was a bit early in the season for locally grown crops. Still we had baked goods and crafts as well as a Petite Riviere Vineyard's booth selling their wines and Ironworks, a distillery selling their hooch. Concurrently there was the Town Wide Yard Sale so Barb and I walked the streets looking for bargains. Herself bough a few more plants and a couple of crockery thing-a-me-bobs and I scored a dart board made from pigs bristles which struck me as kind of interesting. It is apparently unused and I got it for $5! Now I just need to buy some darts.

During the PM we finished planting the remaining transplants that we had and settled back to relax. The stress of the earlier part of the day was hard on Barb's knees and she had to slap on the cold packs. But we weren't done for the day quite yet. That evening we went to the Osprey Arts Centre for a perfromance of "The Brier Island Wail", the story of Joshua Slocum and teh sirens of Brier Island. No, this isn't a part of Captain Slocum's life that you missed. It's all fabrication but a really good one performed by a young woman's choir. Apparently according to the story the reason Capt Slocum was able to successfully sail around the world was because as a young man he was friends with a "flock" of sirens that had made their home on Brier Island. Interesting concept eh?

Sunday we were up early and down to Nelleke. I began by flushing out the holding tank which took a couple of swishes as apparently I hadn't quite drained it out when we put the lady to bed last year. Then I got to work on the bilge pump. The situation with that piece of equipment was that the manual cycle works fine but the automatic doesn't. I took it out and tested the auto portion with my finger and I am afraid that I have to admit that it must have sat in some ice over the winter and the little mercury switch was discombobulated! Nothing for it. It must be replaced, but at least I know. I couldn't finish the wiring for the engine as I needed to think it out, which I have now done and I think I know what I need to do. Next work session aboard I will get on with it. We reinstalled the ship's computer and were quite happy that this time it seemed to work perfectly. We still need to hook up the speakers so we can watch the movies, but that is small stuff by comparison.

We are planning our first "gunkhole" this coming weekend out to McNutt's Island for Friday and Saturday night. This'll give us a chance to shake out some more bugs in particular to test out the Suki Suzuki our little outboard and make sure that it doesn't need another tune up. It will also let us go ashore for an explore and walk about the island. Peri the wonder hound will be quite happy to stretch his legs on a beach and I will enjoy exploring the south east side of the place. If the outboard is performing I might even try some fishing. There are numerous salmon aquaculture cages around the island and some of the little devils are always escaping. I am hoping to catch one of the truants.

Hiatus on the Hard 2011-?

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Hurrah!..........

......or should I cheer? I do tend to get far more physically busy on the weekends that during the week. But, nope, this weekend is promising to be a doozy! We are having the opening of the Farmer's Market to coincide with the Town Wide Yard Sale so combining that with the work that we will do on Nelleke on Sunday should result in a busy but fun weekend. We don't have enough of our stuff to make up a table so we are going to give some to one of the local businesses to put on their table, proceeds to go to the food bank and some to the table run by the yacht club to support the junior sailing program.

We have almost all of the planting done including the veggie garden and the perennials and the three peach trees, and just this morning Barb planted the last of everything including a couple of rhubarb plants. Given that our cruising plans for the future have morphed into our staying here for the summer and heading south for the winter aboard we will have a lot of nice goodies to work with for meals and decoration during our summers.

Slurp!

We are planning our first BBQ of the season this evening and hope to have one or two friends over to join us to welcome in the season properly. In a small seaside community it is quite remarkable how it seems to be coming to life and shaking off the winter. The yacht club has all its docks in and we are helping them to put in the few final shore boardwalks; we are mowing all the ball parks and soccer fields and the green spaces; and on a less salubrious note we are pulling up and inspecting all of the pumps in the lift stations in the waste collection system in town. Boy oh boy, we don't appreciate enough the work that is done by the good folks that take care of that part of our towns and cities. I watched as several massive pumps were winched to the surface, cleaned off and inspected for wear and tear and for proper fluid levels. Quite a job and although there are 23 of them in our system we are not considered a large customer by the pump manufacturers.

Our community is an old one by most North American standards having been first settled in 1784 and as a result some of the streets and lanes have some really weird property lines. It is very common for houses to sit astride a municipal boundary or street easement and the Town Hall is quite used to issuing comfort letters to help people sell property. The real challenge is determining exactly where the property lines run. Survey markers are there but not necessarily at the corner of every property. Sometimes you have to go as far as three or four properties away and measure in. I had an interesting one today. Apparently someone fell and hurt their ankle and their insurance company is trying to get the property owner's insurance to pay for it. The problems is, who is the property owner? If it is the house immediately adjacent to where the accident occurred then the homeowner's policy would pay whereas if it were on town property then since the municipally never assumes liability, the injured party's policy would have to pay. Great fun!

Hiatus on the Hard 2011-?

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Last night I got a phone call from another member of the yacht club who asked if Barb and I would help him take out some visiting doctors that we are trying to entice to start up a practice here in the area. Normally he would take them out in his boat but as the travel lift is broken down and won't be repaired until after they have been and gone, we got elected. As we are normally very happy to have guests aboard and are also very much interested in doing what we can to revitalize the town and surrounding region it is a great fit. There will only be a couple of hours to sail so I hope that we'll get some decent weather with enough breeze to help us pick up and boogie. The town does need a couple of new doctors.

We will be finishing the major part of the garden tonight so that we will have the weekend to work on the boat which would be nice give that we will be two weekends out from having the visit from the newly minted MDs.

The Town Wide Yard Sale is on this weekend and I am told that it will be a bit of a zoo with the number of people that comes in. Barb and I are planning on visiting the Farmer's Market and then heading out to trudge about checking out everyone's offerings on the yard sale. We have our fingers crossed for carpets and period furniture.

At work I am working on the Municipal Climate Change Action Plan project that we are required by provincial direction to have in place by the end of next year. I have been reviewing the data that I have at hand about the climate change figures and I am struck by the obvious and I am wondering how anyone can still argue that there is no such thing as climate change but they are even though they have now changed their tune to sing that it is only a temporary anomaly vice a permanent change. How can some people sleep at night with this amount of misinformation that they are thrusting out into the public? Oh well. We can't solve everyone's problems, only the localized ones.

Hiatus on the Hard 2011-?

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