Letters to M. Dec 2012

Happy Christmas, everyone!

Some silliness in place of a box of Christmas crackers:

What do you call a girl lying in the middle of a tennis court? Annette.

What do you call a boy with a vicious cat? Claude.

What do you call a girl who likes to play hide-and-seek? Heidi.

What do you call a boy with a seagull on his shoulder? Cliff.

What do you call a girl who complains a lot? Mona.

What do you call a boy sleeping in front of your door? Matt.

What do you call a girl with ten suitcases? Carry.

What do you call a boy in a pile of leaves? Russell.

What do you call a girl in a restaurant? Dinah.

What do you call a man with a shovel in your garden? Doug.

What do you call a man without a shovel in your garden? Douglas.

Hoping for the best in the New Year!

S

Great photo of you M! You are a lucky girl - you are starting to look a lot like your mom! 

Hope you all have a happy Christmas and a great New Year! 

My poor cat, Freya, is very unhappy right now. She is having a miserable life, since her staff (Don and I) can no longer open her door into Summer to let her out into the yard. She has tried every door in the house, repeatedly. Everything is cold and wet and she blames us!

She cries at the glass door to go out, but when I open it, she takes a sniff, lays back her ears, looks at the incredible prospect of pouring rain and feels the wind, and then retreats back to the sofa...then when she finally has to go to the toilet, she has to use the cat box in the basement, which is an unbelievable humiliation. And cats don't like it when you laugh at them!

The thing is, she is only 5 years old, so it is probably hard for her to remember the Winter last year. And the fact that Summer will come again. Now, the only thing she has to look forward to is mealtimes and naps.

During the summer, Freya would be outside for most of every day. Now she spends almost all her time asleep in the house. 

Freya was useful recently...Don & I were replacing a basement window and when we took out the old one, we left it open for about 5 hours while we were fixing up the outside wall. A day or so later, we noticed that Freya was sitting in  the basement watching a section of boxes very intently. Later that night when we were asleep we heard her making a loud mew-mew-mew sound. 

Don got up and found that she was watching one of his outdoor boots very closely...he looked inside to find...a mouse! She had caught it and was "playing" with it. It had run inside the boot for shelter and had died, probably from fright. Later the same night, she caught another one, which we managed to capture alive. A third one I caught in a mousetrap. Since then, we have seen no more. We were very glad that she caught the mice and warned us that they were in the house before they did any damage! They are looking for warm places to live over the winter, but we don't want them in the basement!

Love,

S & D..

Letters to M. Jan 2012

Dear M,

Great news that you're starting on the new treatment! One day at a time, everyone...

Our cat, Freya, is not having a very good winter as I mentioned before but now there is more to worry about: firstly there is a nasty new grey tomcat in the neighbourhood - whenever he sees her, he chases her and bites her! Secondly, I have started putting out peanuts for the birds, and a flock of blue jays now come to our tiny bird feeder. This is attached to the front window of our house and it's so close, that Freya thinks she can catch the birds. She runs forward to seize them...until she hits the glass!

So she can't go out, for fear of being beaten up (unless we're around - we chase the grey cat out of the yard) and she gets very frustrated at the mocking and laughing of the blue jays, who have learned to ignore her attacking from the inside of the window. Plus it's cold, and snowing and stuff...and our patio door has frozen up, so she can't go out that way...and...and...she can't wait until Spring! It's a sad life being a black cat, stuck indoors, no fun at all.

Except, from time to time, we throw a dried kidney bean onto the floor for her. She just loves to play with one of these...they skitter and spin like little tops and seem to come to life. It almost looks like a small beetle on the floor. Eventually it gets lost under a chair or something but it is hilarious to watch her! So the cat is in Spring training for Summer beetle hunting!

Her other fun thing to do is hide in cloth grocery bags. We got a couple of these from Loblaws in black fabric and for some reason she loves to play in them (Don says it's because it matches her fur). I have to drop the bag on the floor, then lift it up by one handle so that she can get in, and then I have to pick it up (cat inside) and carry her to the other end of the house. She pretends to be asleep. I then put her down, she sometimes gets out and we do it all over again, or, she will stay in the bag and grab at anyone who walks by! 

I'm not sure who is training whom, or who looks more ridiculous!

Lots of love,

S

Woody Allen's Manhattan, after all these years

We recently watched Manhattan, the 1979 Woody Allen movie. It hasn't aged well, or is it just me?

This is alleged to be a comedy drama. Apart from a constant stream of weak verbal gags by the autobiographical leading character Isaac (played by Woody Allen), it isn't at all funny. The situations are pretty sad; a middle-aged man sleeping with a teen-age girl, the terrible shame he feels that his second ex-wife has left him for another woman - we no longer find either of these situations amusing now in the same way as they were intended. The first situation is not funny; Lolita is barely acceptable now. The second is no longer shameful, just part of life.

Nor is this a drama in my opinion. It is a series of static scenes showing a group of New York intellectuals, each of whom live by some kind of role in the artistic-industrial complex without really having to work. There are authors, writers for TV and magazines, college professors, a student of acting. There is a constant sexual square dance, partners switching joylessly; without much passion or excitement. A running chatter about tennis lessons, ex-wives, alimony, art gallery openings, analysts, going to the Hamptons, worries about what other people will think, and other purported concerns of the New York rich.

This is often cited as one of Woody Allen's "best movies". It has a cast with several well-known female actors.

Diane Keaton plays her usual character in Allen's movies: channeling Kathryn Hepburn on anti-depressants;  kind of crazy, kind of clever, kind of dumb, with unsuitable men but they find her adorable...continually making indecision into a sort of angst-sodden group sport. She did have nice breasts - her nipples feature prominently under clothing in several shots. Woody Allen was nothing if not a connoisseur of the female form.

The other female lead (played by the 16-year old Mariel Hemingway) appears to be made of some kind of sapwood. She's pretty but granite-jawed and mumbling, like a teen-aged Marlon Brando with a mouth full of marbles. She is completely unbelievable as a talented 17-year old actress who is having a passionate affair with 42-year-old, short, balding, self-centred minor celebrity. (Although in reality several young girls did pair off with Woody Allen, but that's a real-life story; dramatically, I remain unconvinced.)

The scenes with Meryl Streep as the long-suffering lesbian ex-wife who has custody of Isaac's son are painful by today's standards and like much of the movie seem to exist just to support a single gag:

"How's Willie?"
"Fine"
"Well, give me some details, does he play baseball, wear dresses, what?"
"He doesn't wear dresses. You'll find out the details when it's your turn to see him."

The thing that really upsets this man is that his ex-wife is writing a tell-all story of their marriage. The fact that his wife was compelled to do this about someone so pretentious and annoying did have a unique ring of truth.

There are visits to galleries with protracted discussions of (mostly) unseen artworks; again with a few funny lines but the scenes go on too long. There were a few items of interest from a nostalgic point of view where typewriters, tape recorders, and old push button telephones were being operated.

The squash game shown in this film may be the lamest example of athleticism in movies, deliberately so I suppose. Isaac, holding his squash racquet along the shaft not at the handle and without appearing to look at the ball, conducts a (for him) profound conversation with his best friend. One man serves, the other misses, the ball is returned for another serve. Repeat, until we get the point that this is funny. Both players are breathing normally when they leave the court.

This is the kind of lifestyle that gives liberals a bad name apparently. It may be sort-of amusing for the time and demographics as a parody where rich Jewish New Yorkers are copying WASP stereotypes, but I didn't really care at the end. The talk throughout about how much in love with New York everyone is was not convincing, there was not really anything to show for it. There is a night ride in a Central Park carriage which is pretty, a walk thorough late-night streets, a number of motor vehicle rides on local highways, ho hum. The only real love depicted was self-love. Is that the point? New York allows one to be absolutely selfish?

The moral of the film is clumsily revealed near the end by Isaac as the author, explaining everything into a tape recorder. Perhaps all these people are running around having affairs, creating dramas and difficulty to distract themselves from their empty lives.

The film does look good; filmed in glorious black and white to emphasize the shots of a brooding New York skyline - sinister towers looming behind shots of Central Park, and a black-silhouetted illuminated bridge at dawn. After a while you stop noticing it isn't in colour. The music, all by Gershwin, is excellent.

So it may be that Manhattan will be viewed in the future as a kind of time-capsule of  interesting details of  New York life in 1979, but I'm not sure that the plot, scripts or acting will ever be anything but silly and implausible. I much prefer Allen's Radio Days, made 8 years later which is much less self-indulgent, funnier and more affectionate.

News from Loon County - January 2013

Hi D, sorry about the long delay in writing or visiting!

We have had a series of small crises and I've had a bad cold in the last while - things that have basically stopped us from doing anything much other than the tasks we had in front of us...

Hurricane Sandy's weather system resulted in very high winds on the St. Lawrence. We hadn't secured the boat shelter properly, so a weak part of the frame broke and we had to repair it. It also ripped a large enough hole in the rather elderly plastic cover so we had to order a new one to be made. It was due for replacement, I suppose. We changed the design a bit and had to wait a while for the company in Texas to make it. And then put it up again. 

This was while the boat was still in the water so when we hauled it out, it was uncovered until two days before the first snowfall...the boat itself had no trouble with the high winds etc. as we had secured it with extra ropes. We were very lucky that there was no rain with the storm, as we had tools and supplies in the shelter that would have been ruined. We were very lucky that we didn't get a lot of snow before we got the boat covered up again, because it's a real pain shovelling off ice etc from the boat.

The Fall was really good weather for all of this - we were also lucky that there was practically no snow until the week before Christmas as we had stripped all the siding off the south side of the basement wall and dug around the foundation to insulate it. We managed to get that job done, removing yet another rotted window and taking out the huge chunks of concrete-bound rubble (1960's sardine cans anyone?) that had been placed under the windows. I am not sure what the original purpose of these were, perhaps to try to get water to flow away from the windows, but they had, in the course of 50 years, sunk into the ground away from the house encouraging water to come in. Another step in the continuing renovation saga! 

Now we have got everything secure and the boat sorted out (indeed we've started work on it again), we are anticipating coming to see you in the next few days or so, we will call you to see if it is OK..

My mother came over here for Christmas dinner - we used to make it at her house until a couple of years ago, but I don't like to do it there now. She is (and always has been) an incredibly messy housekeeper. Not dirty, so much as cluttering the place up with newspaper clippings, magazines, boxes of candy, pet treats, greeting cards, kitchen utensils, frying pans, recycling bins, clothes pins, empty containers, full containers, handwritten recipes, books, cookware, electronic gadgets, prescription medication containers, bowls of nuts, beauty supplies, house plants, and so on. Everything in her life is laid out on on all the counters, tables and bookcases and occasionally the floor, in unstable strata that threaten (and actually do) cascade all over the place at a touch. She has a "treasure,": a cleaning lady called Lorry who does a remarkable job of cleaning up around these piles, but on occasion just heaps one pile on top of another adding to the difficulty of finding things. In summary, I cannot cook in the place - I may be picky, but to coin a phrase I heard in the TV show "Absolutely Fabulous", I can't work without my surfaces, darling!

My mother is a lovely person and at 82, living in her own place and taking care of most of her needs herself, I am not truly complaining, but she drives me to distraction sometimes. It's just that I lived with this when I was a child, and I had always thought that it was just something that having sufficient storage space, shelves, cupboards etc. would solve. It isn't. It's about overflow. When she moved into her present 3-bedroom bungalow, she had been living in a 2-bedroom apartment (with our stuff in her second bedroom when we went sailing). Don and I renovated her "new" kitchen and other rooms with many more drawers and cupboards than she had before. Within a few months the situation had reverted to "not enough storage" - we started adding shelves in the bedroom closets, then the basement...you get the drift. She lives in the happy state of having just enough money, and being close to Giant Tiger, Canadian Tire, Home Hardware, a dollar store and the "Bargain Shoppe". Every other day she goes shopping and brings more junk back home. My last visit to IKEA with her in July (an experience too horrendous to talk about in decent company) resulted in yet more basement shelving. Which is now full, of course. I know now I am approaching 60, having left home 40 years ago, I shouldn't feel that I have to rant about this...sigh :-)

Anyway we invited her to lunch on Christmas Day, we made a turkey-like thing (a pre-stuffed "turkey breast" which wasn't a great success) with the usual (for us) overload of roast potatoes, brussels sprouts, carrots, gravy, with Christmas pudding and custard for dessert. A huge orgy of food, and a shipload of wine, quite unlike our normal meals these days! I think years ago, living in a place with no central heating, perhaps we needed the stodge to keep warm. Now it just knocks us out for the rest of the day and means we don't sleep well. It was great!

Don's sister has done him the favour of sending us a cookery book entitled "Great British Puddings" - which, considering that she and Don's older brother are both diabetic, is not really a favour to anyone. I decided to make one dessert a month, and invite our English friends around for a "Pudding of the Month Club" meeting. The first pudding was the Christmas pudding that we had for Christmas lunch. A rich dark fruit pudding in the traditional manner, but instead of taking 5 hours to steam cook, and instead of having to be made months ahead of time, this was called Quick Christmas Pudding. Very skeptically, I mixed all the ingredients and then followed the method - 5 minutes in the microwave, 5 minutes rest, then another 5 minutes in the microwave. It was really good! My mother (who is super vigilant on the taste of her traditional food) loved it. So this is a recipe to do again, I think.

The second pudding (mid January) was the Golden Syrup sponge. Syrup in the bottom of a pudding basin, sponge cake-type mixture on top of it, then steamed for 90 minutes. Again, this was excellent. Kind of nostalgic for Don...as his sister had imagined, it was "just like mother used to make!" I think the next one we try will be the notorious "Spotted Dick" which is a sweet suet pudding studded with raisins or currants. Originally this was made in the form of a long loaf shape, wrapped in a greased cloth and cooked in a boiling water bath, half suspended out of the water. It is easier to do this in a pudding basin covered in parchment and foil and the result, apart from the suggestive shape, is the same. There is a suggestion that the word "Dick" in the name is descended from "Dough" but I think that's a Victorian idea to make the recipe less suggestive. There's  also "Dead Man's Leg"...suet pastry rolled up with jam in the middle. The colour is pretty vile - a sort of greyish beige with a soft flabby surface, which spurts molten jam when it is sliced. Sounds yucky, but was a great school meal favorite. We are definitely going to be putting on weight!

I have, reluctantly, started back on the rowing machine again. It has been about a month since we stopped physically working hard on various projects (except for snow shovelling, which doesn't count) and it's surprisingly hard to get back into it. Mostly it's the mind...or perhaps the fat cells...weeping 'cos all that suet and butter has become dear to them...

We try to keep active, but it's a struggle. A lot easier to stay indoors a turn into a slug. I'm going to have to find something more to do, although I am doing a lot of reading. My latest is a number of books on the project Gutenberg website. Much that was published by anyone who died before 1957 or so is available, and this includes a lot of good stuff as well as a lot of rubbish. George Orwell's essays have been the best I have read so far. I read the Road to Wigan Pier first - I had a crumbling Penguin paperback that I started reading, but it fell apart, so I continued on the gutenberg.org site. Orwell was a prolific essayist, wrote several pieces weekly to make a living. He was famously bitchy about various politicians, professions, groups of literary types and poets of his day, - some of the latter he refers to as nancy or pansy poets, and is horrible about their (admittedly bizarre) politics. Great stuff, will put hairs on my chest, I am sure!

The worst thing I have read on their site so far was Island of Terror (pub. 1931) by 'Sapper' - the author of Bulldog Drummond. This is one of the worst things I have read since I was about eleven and stopped reading Edgar Rice Burroughs. It's full of tall, heroic white men socking slimy "dagos" on the jaw and rescuing white women from a fate worse than death. Interesting in the sense that boy's adventure literature has moved on quite a bit - in the acceptable plot devices and overt racism. Today, the ladies in question would undoubtedly suffer the fate worse than death, then free themselves in an unlikely manner and wreak unholy havoc on their captors. Today's bad guys are less likely to be fiendish orientals or degenerate South Americans, as to be white industrialists gone bad. Not to mention the race of super-powered human-sacrificing ape-men...oh...right, they're the same!

Haven't heard directly from L. in a while, which is good (for me). I have heard from mutual acquaintances that she went to Russia for the last 2 weeks in December (leaving her children over Christmas....lovely mummy). What a sad thing. I can hope that the kids are going to be OK, but no-one will be surprised if they are more screwed up than normal. Of course this too, in meaningless; it was Philip Larkin who wrote:

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
  They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
  And add some extra, just for you.

And on that cheerful note may I say, I hope you are doing well; I see you are working out like a dog (not your dog who is one of the idle rich) and we'll see you soon!

News from Loon County September 2012

Hi D,

I hope that you have settled into your new place. Did you move to your permanent room yet? 

How are you doing? We hope to come and see you in the next few weeks...forgive us for not coming sooner, but we've both been busy; me with rowing, Don with the boat.

The boat has been in the water for over a month...we have been out a couple of times, which was great fun. We drove out of the marina into the St. Lawrence and tried out the sails with some major rigging changes. Fairly light wind, coming, as usual around here, from the west. This means that to make any progress under sail is fairly difficult. The current always comes from the same direction (south-west) and is quite strong. So sailing or motoring against this is slow progress. After an hour's sailing, we had made about 1 km and then turned around to sail around a local island, Toussaint Island. 

There is a natural harbour between Toussaint and the shore, fairly sheltered. So we stopped there and tried out our new anchoring system - a manual windlass for dropping of the anchor (and, more significantly, for winding it up again). We keep the anchor, which weighs 35lb (16 kg) on a roller on the bow. Once the windlass clutch is released, a slight shove will drop the anchor in a more- or less-controlled fashion. Then the fun begins.

Anchoring, is another one of those major subjects that boaters get boring about...a bit like paint systems, anchoring "systems" are fraught with expensive choices, variable (often unreproducible) results, prejudice, and a healthy dose of fear, anger and a lot of shouting. The problem is very simple. You want to stop the boat. You've been driving about all day, or sailing, you want to have a rest, a swim, make a meal, or stop for the night. The boat doesn't really want to stop; the effect of wind, waves, current, passing boat traffic, all makes it complicated. You want to stop in water that is deep enough that you don't worry about hitting anything, shallow enough that you don't have to let out too much rope and chain, and far enough out of any channels where boats will be passing; also sheltered from the weather as much as possible. We have done this activity hundreds of times, have thought a lot about it, have read all the authorities. The saint here is Earl R. Hinz; his classic work is The Complete Book of Anchoring and Mooring; the title of which should be: The Big Boys' Book of Manly Stuff'n'Shit for its completeness as far as heroic thinking about "ground tackle," what could go wrong and how to avoid it.

Anyway, fair to say, we've anchored a lot...we can more or less anchor in any place or any conditions, given sufficient water, some room and up to an hour or so to complete the operation. We are not following the crowd on this. We are constantly surprised by the flimsy and rusty mangled pieces of metal that we see attached to the bows of boats as we walk around marinas. People are trusting their lives, or at least their precious boats to stuff that I wouldn't use to weight down the tarp on my compost pile! We travelled for more than a year, thousands of miles and anchored almost every night. We are happier anchoring than staying at a marina (once you have bought your "ground tackle" and spent quite a while adapting the chain, hooks, pipes leading to the lockers, ropes, shackles, and anchors, plus windlass, rollers, and tie-downs, it's all free!...lol). I am prepared to say I judge a man by the quality of his ground tackle, but some people might misconstrue that...! And watching other people anchor, when one has already got the anchor safely set, is a source of endless, and I'm sorry to say, cruel amusement. There is just a lot of things to go wrong and to do badly. All that, plus the stress of fatigue, not enough communication, no rehearsals, and a bunch more shouting, leading to fairly interesting cases of marital discord - most boats are sailed by couples, most sailing couples have a dominant partner who shouts at the usually reluctant (and mostly female) partner until she gets some sense into her head, which as you can imagine, always happens eventually. It's often made more embarrassing for the crew because of the audience of anchored wine-swilling bastards that you (rightly) imagine to be laughing at you, large glass of Merlot in hand.The other largest class of cruising sailors is, strange to say, single males.

I am very happy with the way Don had set up the anchoring system on our new boat. Previously we'd had to haul the thing up by hand, 35-pound anchor plus about 15 feet of chain (weighing about a pound a foot). I know all this rowing is keeping me fit, but it was hard work! Now it just works nicely. As total control freaks, we didn't buy an electric windlass to haul up the anchor - which is the most common solution that people use. To my mind, it's a bit like electric windows on a car. Not exactly wrong, but not necessary and in a peculiar set of circumstances, hazardous...electricity, water, hands and feet and a lot of chain...what could go wrong?...and we're not averse to a bit of manual exercise - there's enough of sitting around on a boat as it is.

The basic technique is to decide where you want to anchor. Decide how deep the water is using the chart and depth sounder, and this determines how much anchor "rode" to put out. The rode is the combination of chain and rope that is attached between the anchor and the boat. Long tradition and empirical testing, has put the "right" ratio of rode length to water depth at between 3 to 1 and 10 to 1. That is, if one is anchored in 10 feet of water, the rode length should be anything from 30 to 100 feet!...the actual amount to vary on weather conditions, the type of "ground" under the water, whether there is to be a change of depth from the state of the tide, and a bunch of other arcane things called "experience". The longer the rode, the less strain there is on the anchor - the angle of pull becomes more horizontal and the anchor is basically a hook in the sea bottom.

So the helmsman drives the boat to the desired position where the "hook" will be dropped, while the anchorman lays out the correct amount of chain/rope and unties the anchor ready for launching. This may take some time; perhaps the boat has to be driven around in a few circles until we're ready to go. Usually a bit of shouting at that point, but we have lots of time to do this...Then a last look at the depth sounder...15 feet? OK that's minimum 45 feet of rode, OK. The anchor is launched and lowered...slowly...to the bottom of the water while the boat is stopped, engine in neutral...the wind/current then take the boat backwards (we try to approach the drop heading upwind) as the anchor chain/rope is gently paid out. Then the exciting part...the rode is tied off and we watch the way that the boat swings to the anchor. Ideally, there is a snatch as the anchor hooks into the mud or sand, the head of the boat swings around as the anchor digs in and we have an initial "set". Now we wait, watching the world not going by, looking at the way that the rode is sloping out into the water. The idea is that the anchor digs in a bit and, ideally, settles down. After this, we'll put on the kettle for a nice cuppa or, more likely, have a wee glass o' wine. And start to watch for other boats anchoring. After another 10 minutes or so, it's time to test the set of the anchor. We'll run the engine in reverse for about 5 minutes, gradually increasing speed, watching the rode and watching the land. If the land starts passing by, or the rode goes slack...the anchor has dragged and we have to start over - with the exception of the wine, perhaps!

There are variations, type of anchor...some are better in mud, some in rocky bottoms, some in sand. The absolute weight of the anchor isn't the key, although it is helpful. The design also matters. There are also harbours with a lot of boats anchored in the "best" spots and every boat has to have swinging room. On one memorable occasion, at the end of a very long day we anchored in the harbour of the town of Wrightsville Beach (North Carolina), the guide book said it was a good harbour and we couldn't believe our luck, it was virtually empty of other boats. Unbeknownst to us, the harbour had recently been dredged as it is very subject to silting up. There was not a lot of sand or mud on the hard bottom to anchor to. There is a swift tidal current in both directions here. So we tried the normal anchor - on our old boat, a 60-pound monster that rarely had problems. Set, but it dragged when tested. Hmm. OK, we tried the 45-pound "fast set" claw anchor. didn't even set...bouncing along the bottom. So we pulled out the littlest folding anchor, which only weighs 6-pounds, is made of lightweight aluminum alloy and has an adjustment for setting in soupy mud. We put it on the end of a 10 to 1 scope (probably 120 feet of rode) and set it gently, ever so gently. We waited half an hour before backing down on the anchor, very slowly...and it held! 

By this time, the front of the boat was covered in water, mud, weeds, slime and so was I.  Hauling up the anchor brings up all the crap that is on the sea bottom (and sometimes interesting jetsam, we once found we had hooked an old anchor, another time an entire tree). The wine (or tea) had long worn off, and it was about 9 pm. We had dinner in a foul mood, worried that the boat would drag in the night, and decided that one person should wake up at regular intervals to check on the boat position (GPS is wonderful for this). The boat went round in circles all night, as the tide came in and out, but we didn't drag towards the bridge at one end of the harbour, or the open sea and the marshes at the other end, but it was a long night...we tested the set again in the morning. The weather was good and we could have moved to another anchorage a few miles away, but the anchor held. So we went out in the dinghy to do our laundry at the local laundromat, and walked to the local supermarket and the fish dock about 30 minutes away and came back with a pile of fresh shrimp. The second night we made a memorable shrimp supper on the boat and slept very soundly.

Incidentally, while we were at our errands, we had visitors on the boat. Everyone worries about this...the thing is locked and parked, but you are not there. When we got back, we found the decks were splashed wet all over, although the weather was bright, warm and sunny. We worried about jet skis, and speedboats buzzing us with a wake, thieves, murderers, nutters...but couldn't work out what it was...Eventually we went below decks to put away our laundry and groceries, then there was a bit splash...we rushed up to see a pelican flapping out of the water, clutching a fish in his beak as he flew away. So one or more of these birds had been sitting on the wire between out two masts, about 30 feet up, conning for fish...and then diving straight down splashing the entire boat. Pretty funny...and these are big - with a 5-foot wingspan and weighing about 20 pounds. 

I guess the fishy smelling bird crap all over the sail covers should have alerted us. We hadn't noticed that at first. Sigh.

Other things that have been happening: one of our boating friends, Judy, had to fly back to Winnipeg to see her dying mother. Judy had just started the final stage of sanding her boat's hull before painting and was working in one of the covered barns in the boatyard. The two weeks she was away were the two weeks that she should have been painting (weather was perfect) and when she got back, the barn was needed for winter storage in less than a week. So we spent the next four days painting her boat with her. Just as well, for her, actually. It was a very complicated paint "system" - and she is one of those people that, for some reason, don't read manufacturers instructions. I'm not saying this is bad, actually, but with some stuff that involve chemistry (paint and cake mixes, for example) it's probably advisable. I mean the company isn't trying to make you have a bad experience or a poor result, surely. So once we got involved, and she had already mixed up the first batch of paint, and we had spent 2 hard hours painting with very poor result (streaky, lots of ridges, poor coverage), we read the instructions. Oh...the next 3 days went a lot better, still hard work, but the result is well, stunning. A royal blue paint job that you can see your face in...pretty good. They always say with these special paints that you should either experiment on a small dinghy, or on someone else's boat. So we have done the latter and now I'm about to do the former. 

I bought a couple of single rowing sculls a couple of years ago. They are very nice and easy to row - and it is easy to train people in them. One of them had developed long cracks along each side of the hull, so I have repaired them with fibreglass and epoxy and I am ready to paint. Probably the next dry day I can sand the primer and get the first of two or three topcoats. (Didn't I say that every conversation eventually degenerates in to a discussion about paint? Crikey!)

The rowing club has had a successful season, now coming to a close. It isn't so interesting to go out when it is wet and cold. One or the other, isn't too bad so we're not totally finished for the hardier types. We have also been to three regattas in the last month. 

The first one was in Burnstown on the Madawaska river between Calabogie and Arnprior. Lovely place on a beautiful river. A very welcoming club of friendly people. Very easy, no real hazards on the course, just the occasional jerks who drive their boats badly :-) Last year, we were hit by a competing rowing boat passing us (driven by a cox who should have known better). This year when launching our coxed four from the beach, a powerboat driven by a race "official" drove by so closely at high speed that a wave of about 2 feet high lifted the boat then dropped it on the beach and our fin keel was broken off.  This made the boat unusable. We were lucky there were no injuries to the rowers who were sitting in the boat or the cox who was just getting in. I'm not that into confronting fools, but I did complain to the boat driver. Basically he lied, denied, and acted surprised. Dolt. In a boat, one is always responsible for the wake and there are easy ways to minimize it - don't run fast, close and parallel to the shore, especially at a beach. It's really dangerous. When a wave is about a foot out in deep water then comes in at speed and hits shallow water, the size of the wave increases tremendously just like a tsunami.  I complained to the host club. They generously lent us another rowing boat and apologized. Our crew had a great row in a fancy new boat, so we were happy after all.

The next regatta was Head of the Rideau hosted by the Ottawa Rowing Club at the Ottawa Canoe Club opposite Mooney's Bay. Well organized, quite a big event. Our men's crew rowed in the "recreational" race, which had two boats in it. They came first (haha, had to be first or last!) and got nice medals. 

Yesterday, we went up to Peterborough to the Head of the Trent regatta. It's become a kind of tradition with our club. The regatta is an enormous undertaking for the university with nearly 500 boats and perhaps 1500 rowers and about 100 people officiating. It coincides with the university homecoming, alumni schmooze/fundraising and boozefest. Amazingly well organized. We had two crews rowing and we rented boats because of the distance (it's a four hour trip from here). Our crews did well, better than in previous years. 

Perhaps next year we'll take our own boat to Peterborough - we are lucky enough that the club has been given a grant towards the purchase of a new coxed four. Very exciting as this is only our second boat that I would say is seriously competitive (the other is a two-person boat). We probably won't get or use the new boat before next year...the weather is worse and the water level has dropped dramatically. It becomes more hazardous for our rowers to go out without experts who know the waters properly (we do have about 4 of these in the club of 25). 

One of our old boats was rowed across an underwater rock wall a couple of weeks ago which cut a long split in the hull. Amazingly it didn't sink; there are flotation chambers in each end of the hull and at least one of them worked! When I met the crew at the dock (pure coincidence I wasn't rowing) they were very sad, I think they thought I'd be angry or something! But it was fibreglass which is easy to repair...the old wooden ones are a nightmare. Very fragile and made from specially steamed marine plywood that is paper thin for lightness. This is why we get "given" old wooden boats by other boat clubs who are tired of looking after them. After us, it's the scrap heap, I'm sorry to say. We have pushed two old eight man boats and one four-man boat into the bushes at the marina to rot away...even now I get the occasional plea to take an eight from a club "real cheap". These things are 60 feet long...so they are a liability.

In other news, after a summer of neglecting the house and garden, now comes the reckoning. We have finally started the Augean task of cleaning house, after taking yet another cat to the vet to be euthanized. This last one was 20 years old, which is about 140 human years. It was time to do her in while she was still not suffering too badly - she was declining quite quickly. We are now down to one black cat, which is a great relief as her character and behaviour are easier to deal with. Next, the day-long task of cleaning the window screens and taking out the air conditioner. Then we have to clean the eaves troughs (another day) and then about 2-3 weeks digging up the south side of the house to repair the foundation. Then leaf raking etc. God knows how we ever found time to go to work...

Anyway, we'll call you soon to arrange a visit to your new place.

All the best,

Love,

Sue & Don

News from Loon County August 2012

Hi D, and all,

We finally got the boat in the water! Hoo-bloody-ray! Don and I are both exhausted, physically and mentally...so we've been very quiet for the last couple of days. We'll be coming up to Ottawa for the first time in over a month in the next few days, so we'll come and see you tomorrow, Saturday, if that is OK.

In the event, everything went very well. We got most of the big things done and a lot of the little tasks can wait for a bit. Next big task is to put up the mast. This can only be done with the boat in the water. We will have to drive the boat next to the crane that is used to lift masts, and then it is carefully lowered through a hole in the deck to its footing on the bottom of the boat. We then attach the wire stays to the chainplates (were leaking previously, hope they are not still doing so!) and then we only have the 2-3 days work of putting all the sails on. Then it will be time to take the boat out of the water for winter...just kidding! (But not by much!)

The various paint jobs have come out looking really good. I am very pleased - some of it is half finished, but we had to stop at some point - the summer is nearly over and working in the boat shelter was really hard in the heat. So we will get out for a few weekend cruises in September and October, I think.

Meanwhile, the house and garden have reverted to a state of chaos...I was lucky that we had a drought - it reduced the amount of lawn mowing required to none. However, the house is now so filthy that I think it needs a demolition team to come in and blow it up...never mind. It's a long winter and we'll do it then.

My vegetables garden has been variable in result. The Chinese kale and bok choy seem to have served only as decoys for every pest that would otherwise eat brassicas - my broccoli are in excellent shape, but the others look very sad. Apparently bok choi is delicious! The broccoli should start yielding as the Fall progresses. We also grew potatoes, which have done very well. We just started digging out the early ones. Beans and peas have been good, but the tomatoes have suffered from the heat - I grew the tiny cherry variety and they are small with tough skins. There are some mutant plants of the pumpkin/zucchini family growing out of the compost bins. God knows what they are. There are some small gourds hanging down so perhaps we'll find out what they are.

I was in the garden picking beans the other day, I was talking to my neighbour over the back fence. He inherited the house from his father a couple of years ago. Hi father was very elderly when we knew him and a furious gardener, he had the whole backyard laid out with frames for climbing Chinese vegetables. His son has carried on the tradition and extended it by keeping chickens and guinea fowl, mostly for the eggs. It's rather nice to hear hens clucking away when we sit out on the deck. The son often tells me stories about how his father came from China, paid the head tax twice, in order to go back and forward to Hong Kong where his family was started. The whole family worships Lester Pearson  - apparently that government allowed the unification of such families, which is when the children came to Canada. They are all mostly in the big cities now, but when the father died, this son was living in Ottawa and decided to move here. He thinks his wife regrets it, but he is happy in his retirement with his garden and his chickens. He says that if he was in any big city he couldn't afford to have a hobby farm. He is probably right.

The marina has finally replaced the rotten old docks that were on the western side of the basin. They had been there for 25 years and were a real hazard, both to foot traffic and to navigation. Some spiffy new docks to match the main dock have been installed by a company from Lansdowne (in the 1000 Islands). These guys are pretty well the only company doing waterfront construction projects on this stretch of the river. They came down with a small tug and crane, cut up the old docks and towed them to the launch ramp where the marina crew dragged them out with their equipment. They then launched and assembled the new docks in about 3 days, which is blindingly fast in terms of the local guys. As expected, the old docks were left, on the common sense principle of "Let 'er lie where God flang 'er!" exactly as they had been dragged out. We have been launching our rowing docks past this crumbling pile of timber and steel, generously festooned with decaying mussels, for the past 3 week. Some nights, the boats at the dock 200 feet away were overwhelmed with the smell - people had to go home. Fortunately the mussels appear to have finally rotted away. The smell is more or less gone as long as you breathe through your mouth.

The problem is, of course, disposal. It is one thing to take a pile of wood and steel to the local dump where they'll burn the wood and recycle the resulting metal. However, since these docks consist of large baulks of timber surrounding huge blocks of expanded foam, they are not allowed to be burnt. It would be too much hard work to break down and separate the materials (for our work-shy crew, this represents garbage picking and is beneath them, minimum wage workers that they are). It will cost a couple of thousand to take them to the landfill, so the marina owner has plans to dump them in a piece of land behind the boat yard. They will add to the huge pile of shipping pallets that have been built up in another improbable wheeze to make money...some guy came to the marina owner with a plan to chip the pallets to make a fortune...however the chipping machine didn't like the fact that the pallets are full of bits of metal (duh) and there they have lain ever since. It makes a good source of firewood for the picnic shelter campfire though.

We have our boat tied up on the new docks, which are now filling up with boats, much to the delight and surprise of the marina owner. If you built it, they will come, apparently.

I finally went to my eye doctor as instructed, 6 months after the shingles attack. The vision in my right eye is now 2 diopters worse than it was, which was making my eyesight very unbalanced. In short, I needed new glasses. She gave me a new prescription and I decided to order glasses online. They came within 5 days and I am very pleased. They are about 20% of the cost of the last pair of glasses I had, and are identical (apart from prescription). The only problem now is that my vision is changed and my brain had got used to seeing fuzzy in the right eye...so I now have almost more visual information than I can process. I am gradually getting used to it, but my right eye gets tired and droops at the end of the day.

I hope that we can come and see you tomorrow, Saturday afternoon. I will call early in the afternoon to see if it is convenient.

All the best,

Sue & Don.

News from Loon County July 2012

Hi again D,

After Nicole's recent operation, it's starting to feel like we are all in an Anne Marie MacDonald novel. Crikey! Good news so far, though. Her operation seems to have had great results...thankfully.

More good news, although of less import. I am off the anti-depressants! The shingles pain has retreated to an itch on my eyebrow, forehead, and scalp that I forget about it most of the time. I am so relieved! I dropped the dose down a quarter of a pill at a time, each for 2 weeks and I stopped taking it completely 10 days ago. Good!

We have been doing boat work (forget about launching before July!) and are now putting together the main hatch. It looks lovely. I have painted one side of the boat in white with a green stripe (each colour takes 3-5 days to do, so this is why we are so slow). The weather has been freaking hot (as I expect you've noticed!) so we can only work before 11:30 am or after about 5-6pm when it starts to cool. Other than that, the boatyard is a hellish desert with a bright glare off the gravel. We have seen the inside of the boat shelter get up to 47 degrees Celcius when we open it up at about 1pm. Can't do anything but turn on the fans and wait for evening.

We had a fun Canada Day weekend. The marina held a party, as is traditional, on the Saturday. When we first attended this party about 10 years ago, the staff were frantically tidying up, cutting grass, repairing the picnic shelter etc., right up to 4pm. We ambled by, looking for signs of free food (another tradition, the marina buys the burgers, sausages, condiments and fixings; the dessert and salads are pot luck from the guests). The owner thrust $50 into our hands and told us to go buy fireworks at the local convenience store/bottle return. This we did. It was a fun show that evening, supervised by a drunk gentleman who had the distinction of being in the local volunteer fire service and operated by a marina worker who moonlights from the local beer store (and has the experience of having burned off his eyebrows when shrink-wrapping a boat with a propane torch). What could possibly go wrong? Actually nothing did...everyone had fun, drank too much and slept on their boats afterwards...

By this year, the fireworks have become so elaborate that local people drive to the other side of the small bay to get a good view. The marina owner no longer buys puny retail fireworks; he drives to Montreal to buy the good stuff. I have no idea how much he spent this year, but it was an impressive show.

We had a couple of house guests who came down for this party (and don't mind sleeping with cats) - Jennifer and Gratton have been at the marina as long as we have, and have now moved their boat to Great Exuma in the Bahamas. They spend a Feb-May on the boat, then come back to Ottawa. Until last year, they commuted in their RV, a very old C class (bed over the driving cab). Last Spring, they drove down to the boat, but only made it to upstate New York. The van caught fire, and the propane tanks exploded...they only got out with the what they were wearing. It seems that they had had a new catalytic converter put into the van by the RV mechanic in Carleton Place. They had noticed a strong smell of burning paint and had brought the van to the Canadian Tire store in Morrisburg for a check up...they were told nothing was wrong...three hours later...boom! (One moral, don't rely on Canadian Tire for advice, I guess).

They were stuck in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere with no clothes, money, food or transportation (they had been towing their little car, the front of which was burnt). Fortunately, as often happens, the townsfolk rallied round, found them all that they needed. Actually I put it down to Gratton's character...he worked for the Youth Hostelling organization before he retired, and a more cheerful, simply delightful character can't be imagined. They rented a car after a few days (Gratton was wearing a money belt with his credit cards), continued on to Florida, and went sailing anyway!

It appears to us that this was a redemptive experience for our friends. Most other people would have returned home, after losing all their stuff ("Burrrnt to a crrrisp!" is Jennifer's  colourful phrase; she is a Scot). However, these two, including Jennifer, the most tight-fisted person I have ever met, have taken the hint from Providence that life is not about money or possessions. Unbelievably we even heard her say at one point, "It's only money!" when referring to losing the van. Admittedly, after 18 months they are still arguing with the insurance company, so they are not entirely giving up on that.

Also at this Canada Day party was our friend Chris and with his wife Lesley. He keeps his home-built trimaran at the dock now. As I mentioned previously, he was a squadron leader in the British RAF and he brought with him two visitors from England: Andy and his wife, Judy, who is blind, both in their late 50's. Eventually, we worked out that Andy had trained with Chris in the RAF in the '70's and had ended up as an Air Vice-Marshal - 2nd in command of the RAF, basically in charge of 20,000 service personnel. Very smart and modest man, has just taken early retirement to look after his wife, also a very smart person. She went blind at the age of 25 or so, from retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic condition. Quite a relationship, he walks with her on his arm, talking her through the shape of the ground and any obstacles, while describing what he sees around him. They went to Niagara Falls and the Botanical Gardens in Montreal amongst other things.

This couple had just been sailing with Chris and Lesley, and this had been (as one can imagine) a less-than-optimal experience for a blind person. There was a strong wind and a trimaran steers like a cow at the best of times. When they were blown off the dock straight onto the shoal opposite, Chris had, inconsiderately, lost his temper. Still, everything ended well, no-one drowned and no boats were damaged (as I say to myself every time I return from rowing) - until they got to the dock, that is. As the blind lady got off the boat, no one was watching her and she very nearly walked off the other side. She went home early to have a rest, understandably. 

As it got dark, I got out some coin-cell type 3V batteries and a set of LEDs that I had brought to the marina. I had used LEDs for a project with my friend Bronwyn, but after that they were surplus. You can make a really neat little wearable light by taping an LED to the coin cell with a bit of electrical tape (long leg of the LED to the positive terminal). I first made them for the people at our picnic table, but then the four or five kids at the party all wanted them. And then they wanted to change the colours. Or have their colour match that of their new friend. Or have a different colour from their brother. Kids have waaay too many choices :-) These devices were thought up by a fellow in New York who calls them 'throwables' and goes around sticking them inside helium balloons at night or taping a magnet on and sticking them to bridges.

One of the mothers got quite inspired when I told her about the fashion and technology maven Limor (LadyAda) Fried. She is a New York engineer who has started a company to evangelize wearable technology (amongst other things). The adafruit.com website is where I have been buying some of my electronic kits, one of them I used to make a Tron-ified jean jacket for Bronwyn to wear on Canada Day. I may have mentioned Bronwyn before, she is the daughter of a neighbour, lovely child, who had brain surgery for a benign tumour when she was 6. Now 11, she still has frequent headaches and often misses school. I bought a jean jacket and jeans from the local charity shop for $4, stitched some electroluminescent wire to the seams of the jean jacket (bright greenish blue lines) and sewed LED light strips to the outside seams of the jeans (one red, one white, it was Canada Day after all). 

Bronwyn lives right opposite the waterfront park where Morrisburg has its Canada Day celebrations. There was a craft market, petting zoo (there has to be employment for llamas, doesn't there?) and midway rides with swinging chairs, inflatable slides and "bouncy castles". As the dark fell, Bronwyn went with her brother to the swing chairs ride and was quite the sensation. The LED strips on the pants are really bright. Each strip has 60 sets of LEDs per metre (I used about 2/3 of a metre on each leg). Each LED set has 3 LEDs. One strip was 3 whites in each set, the other was an RGB strip. I just lit the red ones. Normally these things are powered by 12V batteries, like the jerks who drive around with the woofers turned way up and bright blue lights on the running boards, but I figured it would lower her pleasure to drag a car battery along...so I used a 9V smoke detector battery in each hip pocket to power them and only lit one LED per set to keep power consumption down. Still, they are amazingly bright!

Rowing season is in full swing. I think the club's getting a critical mass of people now if we can get 8-12 people out on a week-night in July. A couple of years ago it was just me and another childless middle-aged lady; most people have lives and families and things to do in July...if you can imagine! We only installed the rowing club sign by the road last year, and it has brought us more public awareness than any other thing. Obvious, really. Because I am at the marina a lot, I get called by the receptionist to talk to curious passers-by. I show them around, and, if I have time, I try to give the person a quick lesson. My executive committee, all university trained rowers, with no time on their hands, tried to discourage me from signing up these people, without them having completed our official Learn-to-Row program. However, for a strong, healthy person comfortable on the water there is not much hazard and it is the way I learned.

Thursday night, we had a new guy show up. He's been nagging me to come to learn for a week or so, and I finally brought him down on a club rowing night. Nice man, he is about 6'7" tall, built like a rower, former military, about 27 years old. He casually mentioned that he had done the Cambrian Patrol twice! (I am impressed. This is a British army-hosted competitive event over 2 days in the horrible hills of Wales where teams of military compete over a 60 mile course with 60lb packs on their backs. It's basically two days of rain and watery hell, with guns, but commando-types love it. Our fellow was probably in Afghanistan doing manly things until recently.) Anyway, he took to rowing like the proverbial duck to water. I threw him into our unsinkable training single and got my single out to follow him and give some instruction. He didn't need much, and he had the habit that military people have of listening closely and doing what he was told. It was as much as I could do to keep up with him, even though his boat was shorter with more drag...he'll make a good rower. Apparently he's applied to be a fire-fighter in Ottawa. Rowing is a common choice for fire-fighters to keep up their fitness requirements. He'd be a good choice for Ottawa, I'd say.

One plan for club development this year is to try to get enough male rowers to row together as a crew. For one thing, it will stop them from annoying the middle-aged female crews, who like to chat, rest a bit and row more casually (although we do greater distances). And it would be good to get a male crew to one of the Fall regattas. We'll see. A couple of men in the club are there as husbands of rowers (Don is firmly against team sports, as I used to be, and does not row), and they often have other things to do.

I was very interested in the VR rehab stuff that Shelagh posted on Facebook. Amazing. It looks like a lot of fun, actually. How does it feel? Are you going to do it again?

I am just baking you a shepherd's pie. We made it with ground veal, not so strong a flavour as lamb (plus we couldn't find lamb in the local supermarket). It has onions, garlic, shredded carrots, and minced mushrooms, topped with mashed potatoes and grated parmesan. We will freeze it in 2-meal portions and bring when I come next. Obviously Shelagh or anyone are welcome to share it or eat it if you don't like it. I'll also bring some of the tart version of the lemon curd. I think you may like that. I seem to think the last one I brought was the milder one. And some Seville orange marmalade. Hope to see you sometime in the next few days.

All the best to all,

Sue & Don.