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Tempting the gods

March 28, 2024 in Life as we know it | Permalink

“There is such a thing as tempting the gods. Talking too much, too soon and with too much self-satisfaction has always seemed to me a sure way to court disaster. The forces of retribution are always listening. They never sleep”.

Meg Greenfield

Just a few short posts back – in an offering entitled ‘Make it beautiful‘ – I ventured a short disquisition on the subject of permanence and impermanence. I wasn’t being particularly provocative – or so I thought. Apparently the fates saw things differently and no more than a couple of posts later I found myself having to relay the tale of our exploding (or more likely imploding) shower screen in a post titled ‘Synchronicity‘.

That particular mess is going to take a while to clear up (figuratively speaking!). The manufacturers of the screen rapidly ‘fessed up to what was most likely a manufacturing fault by the simple expedient of sending us, in short order, a replacement under warranty. I got in touch with our excellent contractor who had overseen our original renovation and came away with a list of contacts to get the bath re-surfaced (lots of pits and scratches from the falling glass) a man to install the new screen and another to put us in a new hot water tank (not directly related but I did mention it in the first post above).

The problem is that these things must be done in the correct sequence… nothing can happen until the bath is restored, and the bath restorers clearly have enough work on to take them through to next Christmas. I am still awaiting a call-back…

I had hoped that things would now settle down on the bad news front. Sadly, it seems that the gods are not finished with us quite yet.

A little over a decade ago – whilst The Girl and I were still resident in the UK – we purchased a device that the manufacturers describe as a ‘spinal mobiliser’. It is a sort of massage machine upon which one lays and which – by means of a system of rollers – stretches out the vertebrae whilst simultaneously massaging the surrounding muscle tissues. We came across this thing at (of all places!) the Windsor Horse Show. Horsemen and women are, it seems, much in need of such treatments after a heavy day’s competing in the saddle.

Now, as long as I have known her The Girl has suffered from Sciatica. There at the horse show she hopped (gently) up onto the demo device on the stand and immediately fell in love with the relief that it provided. The machine was an expensive beast – costing several thousand pounds even back then – so we hired one for a month to be sure that it was worth the outlay.

The answer being greatly in the affirmative we scraped together the monies and made the investment. When we later came to Canada the machine came with us (there being no equivalent over here, apparently) though we were obliged to purchase a big step-down transformer because the device only ran on 220V.

It would be an understatement to say that the Mobiliser has served us well and it has more than paid for itself. The Girl uses it most days and it is quite common for those visiting us to jump aboard as well. It was, thus, was a considerable shock when – just over a week ago – the machine emitted a plaintive rattling sound and gave up the ghost.

So – we now have something else that requires fixing. I shall have more to say on the subject in my next post.

Needless to say – The Girl is not happy.

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Synchronicity

March 3, 2024 in Life as we know it | Permalink

A couple of posts back I was musing upon the permanence/impermanence of things – including those items of domestic appurtenance with which we surround ourselves.

My last post concerned the domestic refurbishments/renewals we have recently effected to enhance our living spaces.

What odds then that this next post must needs concern a matter that touches on both of those last two topics. As the saying goes in London (on the subject of the London omnibus):

”You wait fifteen minutes and then three come along at once!”

Last weekend The Girl flew off to Prince George (for non-Canadians: in BC but way up north and still in the middle of winter) for a work event. She did not return until late on Wednesday evening.

The day before her return I had, in the morning, attended my regular fitness class – and had upon my return home made myself a cup of coffee, the which I was enjoying whilst checking my emails at the very peninsula in our kitchen at which I am writing this missive.

All of a sudden there was an almighty crash from somewhere close at hand, though I was unable to ascertain immediately whence the sound had emanated. Naturally I at once set off around the house to see if I could discover the cause of this loud report. The Master Bedroom was clear, but when I entered the en suite bathroom I came face to face with this:

Wow! The inner fixed glass screen of our bath/shower had shattered into a gazillion fragments, most of which had fallen into the bath. There followed an extensive and delicate operation to remove all of the glass debris from the room. Naturally it had gone everywhere.

The very next thing to do was to question the InterWebNet as to how such a thing might have happened. We had the shower screen installed when we renovated the house in 2017, so it is not that old. Google informed me that such happenings are not exactly rare – though the odds of being hit by flying glass whilst in the shower are apparently a fair bit less than those of being struck by lightening.

There is – it seems – always a cause for such a calamity, be that a manufacturing defect or damage caused to the screen during installation. Tempered glass is, of course, effectively under constant tension and a small flaw can spread suddenly and explosively… as we have seen.

Now, of course, we will have to battle to get the screen replaced. Sigh!

I was just very glad that The Girl was not at home – and certainly that she was not in the shower. I am also very glad that I was at home. I don’t go into the en suite (the which is The Girl’s bathroom) except to hoover it – and had I not heard the crash the first we would have known about it was when she arrived home at 11:30pm from Prince George and went into her bathroom to prepare for bed. That would definitely not have been a laughing matter.

Phew!

 

 

 

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Open to improvement

February 27, 2024 in Flotsam and Jetsam, Photos | Permalink

The home is a human institution. All human institutions are open to improvement.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

As we wait for spring to arrive (today the sun shone – then it hailed, whilst the sun still shone – then it clouded over and big fluffy snowflakes started falling. We are now left with what is, I am assured, termed a ‘dusting’!) our thoughts inevitably turn to matters inside the home.

The Girl and I are very fond of our dark-wood furniture – a fair amount of which followed us here from the UK. One ensemble that did not was our rather fine twin pedestal dining room table and matching chairs – the which we acquired here in Victoria from some folks who no longer had room for it. For a reproduction suite it was and is really pretty splendid, with the exception of the rather tasteless fabric with which the chairs had been re-covered. Having lived with this for a couple of years we decided that it was high time to get things upgraded.

As is often the way here in Canada we rapidly established that the perfectionist friend of ours – who did all the difficult painting when we renovated our main floor some years back – was also a wiz at re-upholstering chairs and benches. Cool! She has just completed the task – perfectly as ever – and we thank her most gratefully.

Whilst we were at it we thought we would buy a couple of nice stools for the peninsula between our kitchen and dining room – and a dark-wood plant stand for our over exuberant spider plant.

Anyhow – I thought you might like to see a few photos…

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson Reid

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Make it beautiful

February 15, 2024 in Life as we know it, Life in BC | Permalink

"Impermanence" by Licorice Medusa is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0“I’m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in. I’m here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.”

Hala Alyan

I find myself sitting here – on a blustery Valentine’s day – gazing from my studio window at the grey, choppy sea and the distant mountains – pondering questions of (im)permanence.

There is no question – regardless of anything that we might do – that this sea and these mountains will exist long enough to register as permanent (certainly by comparison with our measly four score and ten)… whereas the cherry blossom which is just starting to bloom on the tree at the bottom of our garden will be gone in a few short days (weeks at most).

A few years back – shortly after we came to Canada – I wrote a song which bore the title – ‘Cascadia‘. The lyric started thus:

Where I come from we are rooted in the land

Sinking where we stand in the slow sand

We know who we are – we’ve been here for so long

That even when we’re wrong we don’t care

In new found lands – where cities tremble on the brink

Closer than they think to Armageddon

Machines turn to rust and tremors shake the crust

Dominions of dust are blown away

The song came about because I was fascinated – having just moved to Canada – that in a country in which everything was considerably inflated by comparison with its north European counterparts (distances greater, climate more extreme, animals wilder, terrain more difficult) and subject to all manner of extreme events (snow storms, earthquakes, heat domes, avalanches, wildfires, arctic outflows, etc, etc) – domestic construction is, as far as one can tell, a good deal less robust than that to which we ‘old-worlders’ are accustomed.

Back in the UK I owned – at various times – portions of several houses constructed in the 1740s. Such buildings may have their short-comings by modern standards but they were clearly intended to last and tend to be fairly firmly embedded in the dark soils upon which they are erected.

Here in British Columbia most residential properties are constructed primarily of wood (no surprise there) and sit lightly upon the land. They are also considerably less valuable than are the plots of land upon which they are built. In many instances – should one see a house of maybe thirty or forty years of age for sale – one is not surprised when the purchasers simply tear it down and build a new one.

Even the fabric and fittings of these buildings seem destined not to be long for this world. Our house dates from the late 1970s and is thus positively ancient by Canadian standards. We were advised upon purchase that it had had its roof replaced some twelve years before our purchase – the which was therefore around halfway through its expected life (the shingles at least). The slate roof of our apartment in Buckinghamshire in the UK dated was back to sometime in the 19th century! The hot water tank here (powered in Canada by what we Brits would call an immersion heater) was replaced (cheaply!) when the house was put on the market in 2015. The Girl assures me that it is thus nearing the end of its useful life and must needs be exchanged for something more robust. I am sure that she is not wrong!

I am not entirely sure why I am musing upon such matters at this point – though the long wait for spring might have something to do with it. Yesterday and today have been particularly blustery and we were without power for a number of hours overnight – though fortunately all was restored by the time we awoke (thanks BC Hydro!).

Anyway – I feel that it will not be long until the news here, at least, takes a turn for the better.

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Playing it cool

June 20, 2022 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

I gather that the UK is currently experiencing something of a heatwave. Lucky you, say I to those that reside there. Of course, excessive heat – brought about by climate change – is not a good thing at all, but then neither is an extended, unfulfilled wait for summer.

Long-time followers of these postings may recall a missive that I uploaded at about this time last year (entitled ‘Head for the Hills‘) the which contained a description of the unprecedented ‘heat dome’ under which the west of Canada was then suffering. The Girl and I retreated into the basement of our residence for a week or so to avoid the worst of it, but it was not a pleasant experience.

In a second post, a month later, I reported that we had decided to have an air-conditioning unit added to our forced-air heating system – to protect ourselves against future such weather events. In these strange times all such projects seem to take an inordinate amount of time to be effected. We finally ordered the system at the very start of this year, but the first installation date that we were offered was not until June.

Well – I can now report that we have enjoyed the required visitation, the work has been most efficiently carried out and we are now the proud possessors of equipment necessary to enable us to keep our cool in any future such events. The installation was rendered much easier by our having considered this as a possible option when the furnace was installed back in 2017 – the necessary spacing and services having been left intact should we decide to go this route.

Inside the house there is nothing new to see – unless one looks really closely at our furnace room. Outside there is a small and elegant compressor, tucked away in a part of the estate that we normally only see when cutting the grass.

Now – of course – we are eagerly awaiting an opportunity to try it out! Here we are in the middle of June and the weather has still not caught up with the season. There are few cloudless days, temperatures are still struggling to get up to seasonal norms and – though I have fired up and checked out our garden irrigation system – it is still not running to its normal schedule because there has been no shortage of rain!

I have no doubt that this will all change abruptly in a couple of weeks, when we have set out on our travels and are no longer in residence.

Sigh!

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Get’n ‘er done!

September 2, 2021 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

Photo by Andy Dawson Reid“Headlines, in a way, are what mislead you because bad news is a headline, and gradual improvement is not”.

Bill Gates

Gentle readers may recall – should they have little better to do – that much earlier in the year all the talk in this forum was of major renovations to the basement of our splendid peninsula home. Some of those readers may well have already stayed with us in our basement and they might well concur that a little improvement would not go amiss.

The details of our thinking in this regard were first outlined in my usual annual ‘looking ahead‘ post way back in January. Sadly this later update – posted during May – gives chapter and verse as to how and why those earlier plans went up in smoke, largely as a result of the iniquitous increase in the price of raw materials – fueled by the pandemic – which saw the cost of our proposed refurbishment more than double.

At the time of writing prices have fallen back slightly but it is clearly going to be some time before they revert to sensible levels – assuming that they ever so do.

All was not entirely lost, however. Though even our stripped back renovation proposal was outwith any price we were prepared to pay, we have been effecting some more minor – but none the less important – home improvements throughout the summer.

As part of our major rebuild back in 2017 we replaced all bar three of our windows and sliders (patio doors). The reason that we did not do the last few was that we were at the time perilously close to exhausting our budget. Anyway – the long and the short of it is that they have all now been done, including this rather splendid new casement for my studio:

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidThat should keep things a little warmer during the winter months!

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidWe also finally lost our patience with our alarm system. Most houses here have such systems, not only for security purposes but also for the all important fire safety (these are mostly wood-framed houses after all). We inherited the contract for the old system when we purchased the property and it has been exhibiting the usual signs of technology that is about to expire – all manner of chirps and klaxons going off in the middle of the night as sensors fail.

The provider of this ailing system is based in the US rather than being local (the which would have been our preferred choice) and their call centre distinctly gives the impression of being somewhere even further south than that. I got fed up with spending hours on the phone to a foreign country whilst a most helpful but hard to comprehend operative tried to diagnose the problem without being able to see what was going on.

Enough was enough – we switched to a local company and they came and installed lots of shiny new hardware (at the same time covering our estate liberally with stickers and signs announcing that they are the new incumbents in the alarm system stakes).

So far – so good!

Finally – The Girl has long been advocating for our shop (garden shed, for UK readers) to be given a new coat of paint. Following the repainting of the exterior of the house last year we had a fair bit of each colour paint left and it was a no-brainer to give the shed a colour-coordinated update.

This has duly been done and very nice it looks too:

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson Reid

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Cold and Hot – 2

July 20, 2021 in Life in BC | Permalink

It will surprise the gentle reader not one iota to be informed that the worst time – the very worst time – to seek to purchase an air-conditioning system (be it portable or fully installed) is when a ‘heat dome’ is camped on top of one’s home town – when temperature records are a-tumbling day on day – when wildfires are breaking out faster than they can be brought under control…

…and when the forecast is for more of the same.

Oddly enough one is never the only person in such circumstances seeking to obtain said items or systems.

Nonetheless, on the first day that the temperatures soared unpleasantly towards the stratosphere (as documented in my last post) and we decamped to our basement, I called our heating/ventilation engineers and – when I eventually reached a real person rather than a voicemail box – asked to be added to the list (the long list) of those who would like to talk about air-conditioning. A week and a half later I had a call back and an appointment for a visit was set up – in the middle of August.

Well – we knew that it would not be quick – and also that by the time anything were to be installed it would probably be the middle of winter… whatever that looks like these days!

Now – as detailed in that last posting – when our inherited heat pump gave up the ghost some years back we replaced our furnace but went no further. We did – however leave in place the duct-work and necessary services such that a heat pump or air-conditioner could be added at some point in the future. Well – that point is now – and we are pretty certain that we are going for the latter – though our engineer may well try to sell us the former.

Our rationale is this: The house is good and warm during the winter and the gas bills are very reasonable. During the temperate parts of the summer we like to be able to throw our windows wide without having to worry about interfering with whatever a cooling system is doing. If we have an air-conditioner (which would be much cheaper to install than a heat pump) we can leave it turned off except for those exceptional periods when it will prove a life-saver.

If we only run it when absolutely required it will not only cost considerably less to run, but it will also last a whole lot longer than if we run it all the time.

That, at any rate, is our plan at the moment. I will, naturally, issue an update in due course.

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Hot and cold – 1

July 15, 2021 in Life in BC | Permalink

A few short posts back I was regaling ever patient readers with a description of life under the great North American ‘heat dome’. My intention to develop that thought into something related (but slightly off-topic) was overtaken by the tragic events in Lytton.

With (as ever) the reader’s kind permission – and given that I am always loathe to leave a notion only half-considered – I will just dot back to that thought now…

OK? Good!…

When we purchased our home here on the peninsula some six years ago it came with a heat pump. For those who do not know what a heat pump is, Wikipedia offers this explanation:

“A heat pump is a device used to warm and sometimes also cool buildings by transferring thermal energy from a cooler space to a warmer space using the refrigeration cycle, being the opposite direction in which heat transfer would take place without the application of external power. Common device types include air source heat pumps, ground source heat pumps, water source heat pumps and exhaust air heat pumps”.

A heat pump, then, is a sort of air-conditioner that works in both directions – taking heat out of the air during the summer and adding it in during the winter. Heat pumps are all the rage in these parts because they can offer considerable potential savings on heating costs in this sort of climate.

I say ‘potential savings’ because the amount of heat that such a pump can produce depends greatly on the type of device that has been chosen – and on that also depends the cost. Air source heat pumps are unable to deal with very low temperatures but are the cheapest to install. The other types do better with lower temperatures but cost a great deal more.

Systems such as the one we inherited use the relatively inexpensive air source pump but supplement it with a backup furnace – ours being an electric one. The problems that can occur with this sort of system became apparent a year or so after we moved in. The refrigerant circuit sprung a leak which went unnoticed until the electricity bill for a couple of months of electric furnace heating showed up, causing us to fall off our chairs with the shock.

We were advised that the old heat pump was not economical to repair (quelle surprise!) so we set about looking for an alternative. This was at about the same time that we were starting on the major renovations that were most fully documented within these pages. Being uncertain as to whether or not a straight replacement for the old heat pump was the best solution we chose instead a sort of halfway-house. We replaced the electric furnace with a modern efficient gas furnace and left space to add either a heat pump or an air conditioner should such prove necessary in the future.

Since then we have enjoyed a lovely toasty warm house during the winters for very reasonable gas costs – helped considerably by the replacement of most of the windows and the upgrading of the insulation during our renovations. Until this year the summers had not called for anything more than throwing the windows wide and turning on the ceiling fans.

This year – of course – has caused us to think again…

…but more on that next time…

 

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Summer nights

July 4, 2021 in Life in BC, Photos | Permalink

These long days and concomitant short nights give us opportunities aplenty to observe from our deck the ever changing evening light upon the waters of Bazan Bay and the Haro Strait. We find ourselves particularly enjoying the varied spectacles that are the sunsets which are a feature of the season. It occurred to me that the gentle reader might care for the chance to do likewise – however vicariously…

As ever – click on the images for the full effect!

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson Reid

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Punched in the mouth!

May 12, 2021 in Life as we know it | Permalink

“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”

Mike Tyson

I promised in my last post that would I bring the gentle reader up to date with our progress with regard to the plans and resolutions that I boldly (or not-so-boldly) outlined in my customary start-of-the-year posting way back in January (different month – same lock-down!).

The observations that I made concerning work have panned out exactly as predicted: The Girl is working mostly from home and – though I didn’t teach during the winter term – I am currently in the early stages of a condensed version of the course that I taught last fall. Apart from being somewhat frenetic (since fourteen weeks worth of material is compressed into seven weeks) it seems to be going reasonably well thus far. Frankly the coursework delivery itself is not much of an issue. Doing the marking is more of a struggle.

I posted recently an update on my musical activities, so that just leaves one… big… area to deal with. There it is in the corner of the room… large, grey and with tusks and a trunk!

Given that travel (and much, much else) is currently out of the question we had decided that we would focus this year on carrying out renovations in our basement, to complement that which we did a few years back on the main floor (see pretty much any of my posts from late 2017/early 2018). We engaged a designer to come up with some proposals and contacted our exemplary contractor who did such a wonderful job upstairs and with our deck.

Well – these things all take time but we had hoped that we would be carrying out the desired works about now. We planned to turn the half-bathroom downstairs into a full bathroom – we aimed to replace the kitchenette – we decided to replace any of the windows that had not been done in the earlier project and we had the bright idea of carving out a fitness room from the large but relatively little used downstairs family room. Finally we would make good the remaining spaces and redo the flooring throughout. Although this would have involved a fair bit of work it was nothing compared with the extensive works we had had done back in 2017/18 and we anticipated that a budget of approximately 50% of what we had spent last time would suffice.

What we should have foreseen (particularly as our contractor warned us that this was going to be the case) was that the cost of building materials had not only shot up as a result of shortages arising from the pandemic lock-downs, but that they were continuing so to do. Even thus forewarned his initial estimate for the job came as a serious shock, equaling the figure that we had spent on the entire main-floor renovation a few years back.

Well – we simply don’t have that sort of money and we really don’t feel inclined to borrow at this point in our lives… particularly given the uncertain situation in the wider world.

Having thought long and hard we went back to our contractor with a proposal for a greatly stripped-down project – pretty much just sorting out the bathroom and replacing old windows. When the quote for this lesser work came back it proved still to entail spending a large sum of money and we once again found ourselves reluctant to give the go ahead.

And that is where we currently are. We don’t feel inclined to spend this sort of money on parts of the house that will be used chiefly by visitors from abroad (who knows when we will see any of them again?). There is also considerable uncertainty as to what will happen to material costs once the pandemic recedes. We would be really annoyed if we found that could do the job for significantly less simply by waiting for a year or so.

All of this naturally leaves us feeling somewhat down-hearted. The project had in part been intended as a focus for the year – given that travel was out of the question.

Now we will just have to think of something else.

 

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