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2020

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Never too busy

September 13, 2020 in Life in BC | Permalink

Photo by Andy Dawson Reid“Have you noticed that even the busiest people are never too busy to take time to tell you how busy they are?”

Bob Talbert

Well, it has – of course – been busy. It was, after all, the first week of term… the first week of exclusively online teaching (for me – as I did not teach during the summer). As it happened it didn’t go too badly. Fingers crossed that this is a portent for the remainder of the course and that we will sail through it serenely – without alarums or excursions – and that everyone gets an A+ (well – all those who deserve so to do anyway).

On Friday we were also washed – and by ‘we’ in this case I mean ‘the outside of our humble abode’. I mentioned in a relatively recent post that we we finally getting the outside of the house painted; a thorough wash and brush up being the first step in that process. We now wait for a week for the dust to settle (metaphorically, I assume) before the actual business kicks off.

The crew that washed the house were all personable and strapping young chaps and it took The Girl all of about a minute to determine that they play rugby together for one of the Victoria clubs. I can’t tell you how much confidence it fills one with to know that one’s treasured property is in the safe hands of those who participate in that most excellent of sports. The Rugby ethos forefronts the core values of Teamwork, Respect, Enjoyment, Discipline and Sportsmanship – and what’s not to admire about that!

The image at the head of this post marks another development this week. Back at the start of June – in this post – I celebrated the fact that for the first time since the start of the pandemic I had been able to purchase a large container of Lysol disinfectant wipes. At the time I posited that this might indicate a change in the air with regard to the progress of the pandemic. As it turned out that was the last time that I saw the wipes, though not for want of looking. I asked one of the grocery chaps and he told me that they do come in from time to time, but that they usually arrive on a delivery at 11:00 at night and are subsequently and rapidly cleaned off the shelves by the old folk who habitually do their grocery shopping at 7:00 in the morning.

This week – finally – Thrifty (our local grocer) had a consignment that must have arrived during the hours of daylight. I scampered home with my allotted single container, to be met by The Girl who had – naturally – just found one somewhere else. We now have a pleasant surfeit of disinfectant wipes.

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidMy very recent post concerning the wildfire smoke from Oregon and California crowed somewhat prematurely at the rapid disappearance of the noxious fumes. Naturally the very next day they returned with a vengeance and have settled in for the duration. We now have no vista at all, though that does not in any way compare with having no home – which is what happened to one of The Girl’s acquaintances from Oregon.

Looks as though this unpleasant stuff is going to be with us for at least a few more days and I feel suitably humbled.

Now what do they call that? Hubris? Amour propre? Smug-bastardry getting its due comeuppance?

Take your pick…

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Smoke on the water

September 9, 2020 in Life in BC | Permalink

What a difference…

Just the other night I took this picture in the gloaming as we entertained a dear friend to a garden-based repast. It was Sunday evening and it was a good way to end the weekend. The Haro Strait obliged us – as it often does at this time of year – with a spectacular array of subtle tones and changing light – and very beautiful it was too.

We discussed the weather forecast that had been circulated during the day that had threatened the first (and really quite early) of the coming season’s fall winds. The Haro Strait seems to attract them but – as I say – not usually for another month or so.

Sure enough, the following day was blustery to a fair degree. Not a winter storm for sure, but certainly a ‘promise’ of things to come. What made it particularly unusual is that the temperatures here are still comfortably well into the twenties (Celsius) so the winds were more like those encountered in desert lands – hot and dry.

They also blew in from the South – which had another un-looked for outcome… On the Tuesday morning we awoke to a very different view.

Yes – that fuzz in the middle of the picture is smoke… wildfire smoke!

This season has been mercifully free – thus far – of serious wildfire smoke here on the Island, but these winds had blown this lot up the coast from the fires in Washington State (and elsewhere) that you may have read about on the news. Not good – and those with chest ailments were particularly unhappy.

The good things with winds, however, is that they just keep right on a-blowin’… Come this evening the view from our window had reverted to that of Sunday evening.

Thank goodness for that – say I! (With apologies – of course – to those of you who are still under the cloud!).

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The other stuff (2)

September 5, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

Herewith the recently promised second example of things that take a great deal longer to accomplish than they should…

Those who have been following these ramblings for some time may recall this (strangely unseasonal) scene. Back in February 2019 Victoria suffered one its rare serious falls of snow, the last few remnants of which still lingered in sheltered spots a month later.

The good ship Dignity (pictured here) suffered a mishap as a consequence, the weight of snow piled on top of her aged and decaying (I know how it feels) Bimini cover causing it to split at the seams and to deposit several feet of snow into her cockpit.

Once the snow had gone I immediately set about finding someone to make a replacement cover. Until such time as this could be done Dignity was likely to be laid up, covered with a tightly secured tarpaulin. It was touch and go as to whether we would get her on the water for the 2019 season at all.

Oh – if only things had been that simple!

Now – to be fair we were away for a month in the UK and Europe during May and early June – but there really is no excuse for what transpired. I had been recommended a canopy maker – one of Victoria’s long standing family concerns – and they took my deposit, agreed to order the necessary materials and I left them to set to work. That proved to have been a mistake and six months and more later I was still calling, visiting their workshop and generally trying to make a (polite) nuisance of myself. Each time they swore blind than there had been this problem or that emergency and they were just getting started. Each time absolutely nothing – zero! – zip! – nada! – happened.

Then the company disappeared! The workshops closed and emails and phone numbers became black holes from which no response ever escaped. I saw the proprietress once more – when she called at my front door to return the existing canvases from which she was to have made the required copy. I asked for my deposit back. She said she would effect an e-Transfer.

Did I get my money back? Did I bu**ery!

So – at the end of last year Dignity was still securely wrapped in a tarp and I was looking for a new Bimini maker. I thought I had found one, though he was busy until the new year. We very nearly got a cover made in February – but that was just at the time that we went to Mexico for a week and the date slipped back.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck. My canvas maker lost his assistant (who did not return from his winter holidays down south) and the job started to get pushed back and back again. Then the canopy maker’s wife fell ill and he had to withdraw from a host of jobs – mine included. At least this time I got my deposit back… and a recommendation to a third company.

The good news is that, in this case, third time was definitely lucky and – as of this week – Dignity is now resplendent in her shiny new Bimini top – courtesy of Marlene at Verde Studios in Langford. She gets the kudos and the name-check for having finished a job that took more than a year and a half in total.

Of course – with term starting this week and with everything else that is happening Dignity won’t be getting on the water this year either.

Oh well – here’s to next year!

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Huzzah!

September 2, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

With regard to my application to the UK Passport Office, from whom I have been waiting patiently for some good news… I think that the attached needs no further explanation:

Now just waiting on the Canadian equivalent for my Permanent Resident card…

How about it – Canada?

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The other stuff (1)…

August 29, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

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…

 

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Busy, busy, busy

August 25, 2020 in Life as we know it | Permalink

There is no Victoria Fringe Festival this year, for reasons which will require no further elucidation. Indeed, fringe festivals are – in this exceedingly difficult time – exceedingly thin on the ground.

In common, no doubt, with other similar organising companies Intrepid Theatre juggled for a while notions of alternative festival forms (online only – local companies in carefully socially isolated venues…) but in the end had to admit defeat. One of the major problems is that many small fringe companies can only make their festival visits work financially if they can hop from one such to another, filling their summers with a brief international tour of fringes. Economies of scale – dontcha know…

Well – no-one is doing international fringe tours this year – so that all went out of the window. Intrepid – like many small companies heavily reliant on grant income – is having to work hard just to survive, without taking on further major challenges. Kudos to them – say I – for keeping the ship afloat.

So – the gentle reader will doubtless be musing – at a time of year when things are normally pretty frenetic, the Immigrant must be able to kick-back and enjoy the dog days sitting on the deck, chilled white in hand, enjoying the late August sunshine.

Not a bit of it! I am busier than ever and cannot frankly imagine how my fringe duties might have been fitted in at all.

The chief source of such busyness is my rapidly upcoming computer literacy teaching. Term starts in a couple of weeks and, because the course is being taught entirely online, all of the course structures and materials must be re-designed and re-written accordingly. It is one thing in normal times for students to slumber gently for ninety minutes in a lecture theatre whilst I drone on about the good-old days of computing (after all, when I am done they can all head off to the cafeteria for cheap sustenance and the chance to ‘diss’ my efforts) but quite another being taught online. In the comforts (or otherwise) of their own homes not a one of them would put up with an hour and a half of a disembodied voice emanating from the equivalent of a Zoom session. They would more likely just go back to bed and do what students do best.

No – the canny lecturer just has to get a whole bunch more canny than ever in order to keep them engaged. I will report back as to how it all goes.

My other busyness is much more fun. Since The Chanteuse and I discovered how to record with each other safely at arms-length we have been rampaging our way through our back-catalog of as-yet unrecorded tracks – trying to complete them before she too has to go back to work in September. Though I say it myself, we have been doing some great work. There is much to do on the mixing and mastering fronts – not to mention all the other bits and pieces that go to make up a release – but we have an album’s worth of material and we aim to get something out into the big wide world this autumn.

Now – that is exciting! 

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Welcome back!

August 22, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

I am delighted to be able to wish a warm “welcome back” to English Premiership Rugby!

Hoorah!

When the 2019/20 season was so abruptly terminated back in March in the face of the pandemic there were still nine rounds to be played and it was by no means certain that the program would ever be completed.

Now here we are – in the dog days of the summer – watching (where that is possible) rugger again and with the prospect of a great deal more of it to come. The 2019/20 season is to be wrapped up by the end of October – at which point the 2020/21 season will start immediately. The remaining fixtures in the abandoned 2020 Six Nations Championship are also to be shoehorned in and there is talk of some additional autumn internationals – which all adds up to a mouth-watering prospect.

The games are – of course – being played in empty stadia, which does take some getting used to. When one watches TV coverage of any of the matches one is immediately aware of the presence of an artificial ‘stadium noise’ soundtrack. This is actually quite cleverly done – incorporating as it does peaks and troughs that go someway towards emulating an authentically live ambience. What I don’t know is if this soundtrack is added only to the TV coverage, or if the players can hear it in the stadia.

Anyway – when we left them back in March my team – Bath Rugby – were hovering in the exact middle of the Premiership table. They made a good start in the first game back last week – beating London Irish comfortably at The Rec for a bonus point win – and this week they went one better, trouncing old rivals Leicester away at Welford Road. Granted that is not the challenge that once it was, but it is nonetheless still no mean feat. Let us hope that this momentum can be maintained.

It is very good to see live rugby again; a return to at least some semblance of normality.

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WordPress update

August 20, 2020 in Life as we know it | Permalink

I thought it only fair that I should add quick addendum to my previous missive on the difficulties of turning out blog content using WordPress 5.5 (the latest update at the time of writing) – should one be wedded (as am I) to the ‘Classic’ editor rather than whatever it is that WordPress want us to adopt now.

My complaint (should you have missed that message) was that the ‘Classic’ editor (which WordPress is trying to phase out) ceased to work after the recent upgrade to WordPress 5.5.

After further research online I have ascertained that the problem actually lies elsewhere – probably with one or more third party plugins that get referenced by the editor.

OK – now this is going to get a tiny bit technical, but I promise to keep it as simple as possible.

These older plugins had continued to work across previous upgrades because the WordPress build itself used to include a library called Jquery.Migrate – the purpose of which was to provide a mechanism for out of date code to continue to operate even if using deprecated methods. WordPress have now removed that library – hence the pain.

Some good-hearted folk from the Open-Source community have kindly and generously provided a workaround in the shape of a new plugin – Jquery.Migrate.Helper. This gets tools such a the Classic Editor working again – albeit with a constant background cacophony of warning messages.

WordPress seems to be determined to be shot of the whole affair, however, which doesn’t bode well for future upgrades… regardless of the veritable howls of protest from around the community.

Now – what else does that remind you of?

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WordPress woes

August 15, 2020 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

I am not a happy bunny!

I consider myself to be a long-term user of WordPress – the platform on which this blog is constructed. I have used the software since establishing the blog in 2012, but have also built a number of websites on it and have cheerfully recommended the platform to others looking to establish any sort of web presence themselves.

I am – to put it mildly – a fan.

I am not – however – a fan of some of the things that they have done recently.

When one writes routinely and regularly – an activity which requires speed and accuracy – one demands that the tools that one uses do a good, efficient job without getting in the way of the creative process. Such folk – and particularly those who are growing a bit long in the tooth (such as I) – do not like their tools to change because that interrupts the process, disrupts the flow and requires an agonising re-learning period just at the point that one is trying to focus elsewhere – on that which is being created!

The editor that one uses (or used to use) in WordPress is fairly basic, but it is simple – not unlike using a word processor such as Word. It had its drawbacks but many of us loved it and knew intimately its various foibles.

In their wisdom WordPress decided to replace it. Many of us old farts immediately disliked the new tool – a very different beast called the Block Editor. WordPress claims that it is simple to use. Well – let me tell you – it ain’t! Now – I realise this is the equivalent of some teenager telling you that his new mobile device is ‘simple’ to use. That is because it is – to him! Not so the rest of us…

Fortunately – in this case WordPress relented slightly and allowed us old buggers to continue using the ‘Classic’ editor whilst the hip young things got on and did whatever the heck it was that they wanted to do. So that was OK – until the recent upgrade to WordPress 5.5. Now – though the Classic Editor is still visible and can still be opened – lots of bits of it don’t work anymore. It is for that reason that this post looks a mess – ‘cos I can’t access the tools that I am used to employing to format it properly. I can’t format the image – I can’t add tags – I can’t look at the page in raw text mode – I can’t tell how many words I have written…

In fact – I can’t at the moment tell what it is going to look like when published – so my apologies if it is simply unreadable!

Bah!

Not impressed!

 

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Weighty matters

August 12, 2020 in Life as we know it | Permalink


There was an item missing from my recent list of COVID-19 pandemic losses and gains. That item was – counter-intuitively – both a loss and a gain… indeed, it was a gain because it was a loss!

Cryptic – huh?!

The fact is – since the beginning of March I have lost a healthy (see what I did there?) amount of weight – which is, naturally, a significant gain.

Now – I am aware that for some people the lock-downs enforced throughout the COVID world have had the opposite effect – and that the loss of gym sessions and other physical exercise has led to less than pleasant effects. My apologies to anyone to whom this applies (and indeed anyone else who takes offence!) should my gentle celebration come over as being in any way… smug!

Clearly I have been lucky. Now – I do habitually weigh a little less in the summer than I do when clad in my winter ‘overcoat’ and though my regular fitness sessions at our local leisure centre were abruptly curtailed in March I have continued to attend classes… first online via Zoom and more recently in the open air in the rather lovely park adjacent to the library in Sidney – but I don’t feel that these influences are great enough to have caused this difference.

No – something else is definitely going on. This is what I think has happened:

Being (mostly) retired and no longer tied to a single weekly grocery shop I have been in the habit of popping out on a day by day basis as and when we decide what to eat. Further – my two days a week at the college and my visits to fitness classes usually entailed the partaking of a coffee (or two) as part of the process. I have to admit that I had rather fallen into the habit of rewarding my endeavours with a little ‘treat’ of some variety.

Of course, under COVID one goes grocery shopping as little as possible – once a week or less – and without classes to attend (either as instructor or instructee) the notion of a reward becomes redundant.

There you have it. Cutting out the little treats helps Jack to lose some weight!

But does it make him a dull boy?

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