The other stuff (1)…

In my last post I touched on the busy nature of life right now here on the west coast of Canada. Not complaining of course – many others are way more busy than are we… but then, we are supposed to be retired(ish!).

As is ever the way when one is busy, all sorts of other stuff – and sometimes stuff that has been brewing quietly for quite a while – suddenly takes off just at the least helpful point.

Somebody has a law about this… probably somebody named Murphy – though on reflection that is more about things going wrong. In this case everything is just happening at once. Buses maybe? That is apparently called ‘bus bunching’ – or ‘clumping’ or ‘ convoying’ or ‘piggybacking’ or even ‘ platooning’… Anyway – buses lead one to think too much about the (questionable) prime minister of the UK – and no-one wants to go there!

I digress…

Here are a couple of other things that are currently in progress after extended periods of not so being:

Back in the spring of 2017 our excellent contractor set our renovation project in motion by tearing off the old rotting deck and leaking (and superfluous) sunrooms at the back of our house, before building us – over a seven week period – the splendid new deck that I look out on from here in my studio. If you want to revisit the details of that project – including the many photos that I took at the time – please do navigate your way back in the archives to May/June 2017.

At the end of that first phase of our external and internal renovation our contractor looked at us and said:

“Now all you need to do is to repaint the outside of the house”

The astute reader has already figured where this is going. Yes – more than three years later we are finally about to get the outside of the house painted! We are paying a company to do this because – though I don’t at all mind painting – I do think I am a little old to be clambering up tall ladders on steeply sloping ground. A friend that I visited whilst back in the UK last year had – shortly before that trip – taken a tumble from a ladder in his garden and badly fractured a wrist. I decided that discretion is indeed the better part…

One thing that I did need to do in preparation for the painters’ visit was to remove a large pile of garden waste that had accumulated at one point against the outside basement wall of the house. I would normally have cleared this myself during the year, but the green waste sites were closed for a number of months as a result of the pandemic and I had not got around to catching up. As I also had some other general detritus to be hauled away The Girl kindly found me a local firm who provide just such a service.

The chaps who actually do the business quickly disposed of my general waste and then made a start on the greenery. They were rapidly brought up short by the discovery that a particularly obstreperous colony of wasps had set up home in my now composting pile. Clearance was thus halted for a week whilst I called out a local pest control concern to give the irritating insects their marching orders.

It feels good to be giving lots of work to local companies in these difficult times, but it is also rather annoying when things do not run smoothly, as will be demonstrated by my other example of things that have been much delayed.

For that – however – the gentle  reader must await part two of this post…