Hey the rain has gone away for the moment

Flute circle wasn't remarkable, one man we didn't know arrived, Bernie, a very nice man from Parksville, a snowbird like us, and Terry came, so that was 4 of us.  We jammed and had a great time, but I must admit, I had hoped for a better turnout than that.  We'll persevere, as we get some great practice that way, and a spur to get the flutes out and play.

Lary often takes his flutes outside and plays, but I prefer to be inside playing.

Our 3 night camping trip was nice, at Rondalyn at the south end of the airport on Timberlands Road, though not warm overnight, the days were without rain, but with some large wet grey clouds kind of stalled overhead during the day, so that kept the back of our necks chilly.  Still we had no rain, and an enjoyable first outing, I think you forget what is in the camping unit from season to season, so good to get back in to that mode once more.  We try to leave some clothing that is appropriate there to use, so we don't have to drag it back and forth each outing.

When we used our trailer all winter down south we always knew what was at hand, but since we don't take it with us now over the winters, we forget what's inside all those nice cupboards.

Next campout will be at Living Forest literally right down the road from where we store the trailer, so that will be handy.  At the end of this campout we took the trailer through the big rig car wash in Ladysmith, it is made for semis so you can walk up a set of metal stairs inside the wash bay and direct the spray on to the roof, and try to get rid of all the lovely green goop that our "wet coast" generates over the winter time.  Maybe we will investigate a cover for next year.

Trailer sure looks better- though we still need to address those black streaks that inevitably form as the rain and water run off the body of the unit, and down to the ground.  They don't come off unless you use a special spray that dissolves them.

I held Mothers Day tea for my sisters and our niece here, we had a nice time to visit together as we all get busy doing our own thing, and forget to let the other sisters know what's up.  The day itself was warm and picture perfect, so a real treat.  Our niece is leaving for a job in Edmonton, so we caught up on her news.

Big excitement is Gill's wedding at the end of July in Victoria, should be lots of fun but also a bit of a logistical challenge as the catered reception is at the family lake, mostly without power, reception including a meal to be held in an open meadow.  Sue was telling us a few details, they have a school bus that will run back and forth from downtown to the lake to ferry guests back and forth when needed.  That should be nice if it works smoothly.  Gill's future mother in law is a bit of a worrier, so that is a concern for the event.

Wedding service itself will be held downtown, and likely most guests from out of town will be staying downtown in hotels there.

Funny how things look so much better here in the sunshine.  Lary and I had coffee today at the clubhouse in our complex here, great to hear the latest, and have a bit of a visit with our neighbours who we really don't know that well at all.  One of our neighbours is having her unit painted in the living room, dining room and kitchen, so I went home with her to see the job in progress, and meet her female painter.  The painter says it will take her 2 days which is very fast.  Looks good already.

Cathy and I had planted geraniums out at the entrance gate of our complex, I thought it was way too cool in the soil for that, but oh well, we did it anyway as the plants had been purchased by another lady.  I discovered on the internet that they don't like either their leaves or flowers wet either, and today I found out that they don't like to have wet roots, hey there, live and learn.  The watering system isn't turned on as yet, so we have to water them by hand with watering cans til the water starts.  I hope they don't get blasted out of the ground at that time, either.

A contractor is widening the pathway to our unit, and we will have green shrubs beside that widened pathway to make a bit of a privacy screen for our front door.  Hope that is an improvement for our unit, we plan to put the barbeque up at this level, instead of having it down below on the "lower main" floor.  Should be quite handy to have it right outside the kitchen where we cook, less travelling involved to use the 'barby'.  And we hope to have a wee private place to sit outside in warmer weather.  As it is now it feels a bit like sitting out on the roadway when you are outside our front door.

We bought a lovely unit, but it's right on the junction of two busy roads, without thinking about a nice place for us to sit outside.  At least we have our camping outings, and we both walk in the daytime outside if the weather is good.   But this should be an improvement for us.

Rain, rain, go away, don't come back another day!!!

As you can tell we still have lots of showers, not that many heavy downpours, and not really very cold, but chilly and grey, so very grey.  Temps daily around 10, 11 celsius or so.  BRRRRRRR.  And we are off camping next week, too.

Just heard from neighbours down south at our park that they have 80 - 90 degree temps, and are glad for the wind when it arrives to cool them down.  There are perhaps only 10 or so folks left there in the park now.

Due to our hasty move of houses/move out/leave town/play music weekend down there we left some stuff behind that we should have brought home like our microcube amps, and we also left batteries in some things, and left some food products on the shelves that might not enjoy the intense heat of summer down there.  Ah me, I might have to catch a package air and hotel deal and fly down to address those things.

Lary is planning to head off to Ontario to visit his mum soon, and tonight is our first flute circle evening, hope a few folks come share the music with us.
Should be enjoyable.  It will be the first Friday of every month til we leave for down south once more.  We hope to establish a routine and get a regular group meeting together.

We found Utopia Bakery, right in the heart of downtown Chemainus, and had a nice soup and sandwich meal there, used up one of our gift certificates from the Beer and Burgers night; we always enjoy Chemainus as it's small and rural, with the most lovely picturesque murals on the walls of many buildings there.  It's maybe 45 minutes south of Nanaimo and part of the drive there is along pretty scenic country roads, with frequent views of the seashore.

I believe there are almost 30 murals now, scattered around town with yellow footprints on the sidewalks leading you around town to view them.  And the gift shops are wonderful too, we bought another nut rattle from a store there which carries quite a few world music things, another thing that caught my eye was the Tibetan bowls, but I resisted for the moment.

There is a big Belgian horse and carriage if you want to ride around town too, it's a sawmill town that is still pretty active, but of course these days the BC mills are a shadow of what they used to be.

And recently a couple of mills in the interior of the province had very serious fires, they think it was combustion from the sawdust generated while milling pine beetle killed wood.  What a shame, there were some deaths, and of course people badly injured as well.

That's about all my news, though I will report on how the flute circle goes later on.

Where did April go? It's nearly May......

Sunny at the moment, but as they say, wait a while.....It has been off and on rainy and grey, cloudy and chilly since we got home, though we have been out for walks and other doings in between rain showers.  Not much of it is heavy rainfall, but it keeps the temps down and the days grey and somewhat dull and drab.

Over the weekend on Saturday we went out with friends to a pub for a beer and burgers benefit for the Child Development Center, it was enjoyable, and we came home with a gift basket, some fresh chicken breasts, yum yum, and some gift certificates for a bakery cafe down in Chemainus.  It's called the Utopia Bakery Cafe, and is Dutch.  Chemainus is a mill town that has been transformed by many many historic and natural history murals, and is very attractive because of that, and a very nice theatre that kind of anchors the town.  So we will have to go down and investigate that soon.  After the fund raiser we went back to friends for coffee and cake.  It was a lot of hard work done by Long Lake Chiropractic, and I think a lot of folks bought some nice merchandise and had a good time too.

Sunday we started by meeting our camping friends for breakfast at the Qualicum Golf Club, they put on an inexpensive and nice buffet, and then we had a walk along Qualicum's pretty seaside.  Nice fresh air and good to stretch our legs too.  Great to catch up with friends at the same time over breakfast.  Later we attended a seniors trade fair which was interesting.

Not much else remarkable, except to say that the wildflowers are blooming all along the bypass highway here in town, a friend Jet and I walked along a few days ago, from the Northfield Road parking lot we headed north, and there were fawn lilies, shooting stars, some other pretty things like Oregon Grape in bloom, and Jet even found a trillium, which I convinced her not to pick.

Sister Sue's renovation of her kitchen/dining room is coming along fine, it's a huge job as she had the whole thing ripped up and transformed from a pokey small awkward  kitchen- taking out walls and encompassing the dining area into a large new kitchen with a nice island eating area, all bright white cupboards, from Ikea.  The walls aren't painted yet, they will be a soft greenish yellow I believe, but it's all coming together wonderfully.  Flooring was installed, and new countertops and sinks to come as yet.

Our niece Gill will be married in Victoria at the end of July, she lives in Dubai, UAE, they are arriving with Tristan's mom Mrs H in tow this coming weekend, and they will be here for a night, then off to Victoria to stay in the rustic, very rustic family cottage for a night or two, and check out the wedding venue which will be outdoors in the meadow at the lake.  The church is downtown in Victoria, and the reception will be out at the family lake, so the logistics of all that with some international and out of town guests will be very interesting.  They promise to transport folks from the church to the lake for the reception, and back later to their hotels, which is quite a distance.  Luckily she has a wedding planner for the logistical challenges, as they aren't living here on the island.

Our front garden is very pretty right now with pale pink flowering rhododendrons, pink heather, pieris, and other pretty shrubs like azaleas springing into bloom gradually.  It's a pretty time of the year on the wet coast, as everything springs back into green life once more.  We can still see the sea in glimpses from the house, but later as the deciduous trees get more and more leaves on them, we lose a bit of our view.  There are both wild and domestic rabbits that hop around wild in the townhouse complex gardens, and at times the deer stroll through to make a meal out of our gardens too.  We share things with them, often the deer come later in the evening when we have the blinds closed.

Lary and I have decided to host a monthly flute circle, so this coming Friday night we will have visitors to get together and play and enjoy our beautiful flutes.  We hope that people will come, and we plan on holding our get togethers monthly, first Friday of the month, 7PM, like Annie does down south.  Perhaps that way we might have some regular get togethers to play our flutes, and develop the Nanaimo Flute Circle as a regular event on the Nanaimo music scene.  That way we can also utilize our home, as we can meet either upstairs or downstairs.

That's it for now.

Phone call from the past

Well what do you say when your ex husband calls after 35 years?  Hello seems a bit inadequate, but that's how I responded when he called this morning.  It was a call totally out of the blue, he and his wife of many years now live here in Nanaimo though he is originally from Vancouver.  He is still interested in motorcycles and sailing.  I am not.

Seems he's moving and wants to get rid of lots of stuff, and some of the books he had about sailing were written by friends of my parents, or else gifted to us from my parents.  So I guess he kept them til now.  Nice of him to return them, however.  I'd like to sell them myself, as we are also trying to downsize what we have here in the house.

We went out for lunch down to Duncan, and while we were gone the books arrived, so guess we won't see each other for another 35 years or so.
It was truly a bit surreal, but there you go. 

Had lunch at the Good Company Steakhouse in Duncan, the first get together for our camping group, the restaurant is now run by a young Dutch fellow who is very personable, and the food was good, and plenty of it.  Service also good for our table, but another table waited nearly an hour for their meals.  Erg.  It's pretty hard to handle a big group smoothly for a kitchen I guess.

Good to see everybody once again, after that we headed down to Victoria, I wanted to pick up some books from a series I am reading currently, by J.A. Jance, the Joanna Brady series about a crime fighting sheriff from Cochise County, near Bisbee, Arizona. 

Russell Books in Victoria has super used books, one of the ones I bought was the Publishers release book before the public distribution, so that is interesting.  I had never seen one of those before, and it said not for public sale, but I guess that limitation had expired long ago, as the book has been out since 2003 or so.  No art work on the cover, not sure if the story was edited after that, but oh well, at least I get to continue with the series I am enjoying.

It was a lovely sunny day here on the island today, everybody is saying that the cool spring is long and warm weather is slow arriving.  I agree with them.

That's it for now.

Feels a bit weird to get home

Well we spent a nice night with our pals Sal and Russ in Sooke, and we licensed and picked up the truck, so we both drove home to Nanaimo in separate cars on Friday as we stayed overnight with them.  It felt great to be home again, but of course after a long interval away we had some catching up to do.

 The dock area down by the water in Port Angeles, Washington on a foggy morning.

It had been quite foggy in Port Angeles, so we couldn't see the majestic Olympic Mountains, but catching the afternoon ferry at 2 PM was so much easier than catching the early morning one after 3 or 4 days of travel, it worked much better for us.  And we spent the whole 1.5 hour voyage aboard the Coho Ferry visiting with a couple who also winter in Desert Hot Springs at a nearby park, and live in Victoria.  They were Enid and Drew.  Small world indeed.

All well here at home, it is a nice home that we are very proud of.  The spring flowers like heather and pieris are blooming, and the pale pink rhododendron too is starting to bloom, but hey it's only mid April, and March here was rather chilly, so a lot of things normally blooming at this time of the year aren't ready yet.

 Nanaimo is pretty in spring time

The trees at the front corner of our complex are totally bare so far, but the neighbours beside us have a magnolia that is trying to bloom already.

Saturday we headed back down island to Brentwood School to meet our California cousins from Dana Point, there was a memorial sculpture unveiled in honour of our Dad, and I hadn't seen it, neither had the Californians. 

My aunt was a first cousin of my Dad, so also enjoyed seeing the newly installed sculpture, which is an eagle, with its wings wrapped around its front.

The four of them, and my sisters Sue and Jen, together with Lary and myself had a pleasant lunch visiting and catching up with the latest with them all.  Such a pleasure to keep in touch.

Sunday morning found us out with our Sunday morning group of friends for breakfast and at lunch there was a luncheon for Veterans, so we attended that too.

Today I was working on my I Pad trying to get it going and our pals Jet and Harold came over, he was helping Lary with our RV batteries, and Jet was helping me with the I Pad, trying to get that going for me.  Big help to us both.

Left our park late on Sunday evening

Well we had a very hurried last few days, with a flurry of activity, both in the old place and the new one.  Up stairs and down stairs is what I remember most of all, then very hot as we did our final pack up into the car.  New place was summerized by previous owners, so no air going through as all windows and doors covered by styrofoam, we crept about in the lights, and put things kind of everywhere.  It was very warm, nearly 90 degrees.
Wendy and Dave came over to see our new abode Sunday afternoon, and at the last minute we decided to bring our newish bed from the old place to the new place using Dave's truck, and the newish end tables seem to have migrated to the new place too.  The other stuff got swapped into our old place, and the old place duly cleaned and washed up for possible sale or rental in the late fall.  Thank heaven to Dave for his truck, and his help moving the furniture too.

Not sure exactly where we put all our stuff from the shed, but most of it went into the new place, not at all well organized, just inside the house.  The new house seems to use the bedroom as the access to the outside area behind the wind wall, so we will have constant traffic past the end of the bed.

Put the new bedspread on the bed, and that was kind of it, things went in to cupboards, perhaps not the right ones, but away nevertheless.  There are things that we want to change already, but that can wait for a while.

We left Sunday evening around 7 PM, into very heavy traffic westward toward Los Angeles, it was Sunday of Easter weekend, so roads were very busy and we were stalled quite a few times in extremely heavy traffic. Decided not to cross the desert up through Yucca Valley and across Mojave Desert, instead opting for Hwy 10 west, then Hwy 210, then I-5 north.

We got as far as Pasadena, dropped and flopped into bed, and Monday we were in warm shorts and A/C weather as we headed northward, arriving in Williams, CA, a small town, where a very friendly Highway Patrol officer directed us out to the Coast Mountains foothills for a pretty scenic drive along winding rural roads, beside bright green rolling hilly pastures, and pretty flowering dark, dark pink trees along a creek.  Cattle country.

We had a visit to nearby Maxwell, in honor of brother in law Ian Maxwell, and snapped photos of everything 'maxwell'.  I will attempt to post some photos, the most remarkable of which was a flowering cactus in a front yard right in Maxwell.

 Lary, Di, Judy the ranger at the San Jacinto Monument, Annie,
Marty, Chip and Barbara - we played our flutes on Easter Saturday up on Highway 74, in the midst of our moving from house to house.

 Some scenes from the small rural town of Maxwell, California

 These cactus flowers were the size of cereal bowls, an incredible sight.

 Likely the stage line doesn't use horses any more.......

Looks as if brother in law Ian opened an Auto Parts store.

The next night found us in Cresswell, just south of Eugene, Oregon, and it had been pouring rain most of the day, somewhat disappointing as we had been in shorts and sandals up til then on our northerly homeward trip.

Tonight Wednesday we are in Sequim, near Port Angeles, tomorrow afternoon we will catch the Coho ferry over to Victoria, and head out to visit our friends Sal and Russ in Sooke, pick up our truck, and head home.  Again today it was raining, sometimes heavily, though tonight here in Sequim it is heavily overcast, so not that cold. 

Just seems chilly to us sun worshippers fresh out of our sunny desert winter.  We have heard that southern California today got heavy rains, too which makes us feel a bit better.

We broke our journey today by stopping in an Indian Casino near here for about 1.5 hours, and playing the slots, Di nearly recouped her investment, Lary lost about $20.  We are not big gamers, that's for sure.  About $20 - $40 is our typical daily expenditure when we are in a casino.

Welcome to the 'wet coast' once again.  It's either overcast or raining, green, green and there is moss on the trees here on the Olympic Peninsula.

I think I may continue the blog once we get home as I am enjoying my journaling experience.



Happy Easter to you all

Today has dawned as innocently quiet and sunny as yesterday was blustery and blowy.  What a land of contrasts the desert truly is.  And the speed with which it changes is also mind boggling too.

Well Happy Easter to you all, and have a lovely one.

Love and hugs, Di and Lary
xoxo