My mother’s house was never so clean when I was in school as it was when I had essays due. These days I don’t clean my house  when I procrastinate. I clean my inbox. I sort my emails into tidy folders and delete redundant information.                        

I sort my digital photos into year and month and I bake bread. To avoid writing the island newsletter, this week I have done all these things and somehow during it all, it is getting written. Ever so slowly but it is coming together…

There is a real tendency to repeat the format for simplicity. But this is my sixth issue and it would be as boring for my readers to read as it is for me to produce the same newsletter, same format every time. When it gets boring that is when it is time for a new editor.  This issue, I have tried to mix it up a bit… The content still seems kind of uninteresting to me but maybe that is because I live here and it is old news… But the newsletter is really to keep everyone up to date, even when they are off island. This issue is ten pages. I have finished nine of them and then it needs to be proofed (endlessly) before we send it to the printer for a December 1st publication…

I have been making our own bread again this week. Last year for the second time since we moved here I blew the fuse on my Cuisinart mix master. It cost 100.00 to fix each time. Without the blender I can’t make bread.. my hands don’t “do dough”… When I bought the mixer we lived with the kids and I wanted a deluxo spiffy mixer that could make double even triple batches of cookies…. It was 800 watts…. It never occurred to me living in the city to question the  power I was using….

Living off grid an  800 watt appliance was brutal on our systems and just plain crazy. I was able to get a kitchen aide on sale at Canadian Tire for 250.00 (half price) that only uses 275.00 watts…  That is a huge difference in my world!!!!  It does a great job on the bread….Our freezer is tiny and we use it for meat. The ability to make my own bread saves trips to town and that is always my prime goal.. I hate going to town!!!!

I’ll finish up with a fun example of the kind of crazy challenges we experience here on this quiet island in the winter. My sister and brother-in-law were here on the long weekend and had battery problems with the truck. We have battery problems with all of the trucks, boats and generators. It is a fact of life. My in-laws charged the battery on a charger that is linked to the generator during the weekend. They put it back on the truck, drove to the marina and parked it on the Wednesday morning when they left.

My other sister-in-law came to the house on Wednesday afternoon and drove the truck to the house.. All was well… On Friday, she was watching our dog while we went to town… He ran away looking for me.. She drove over to the other side of the island to our house looking for him… She parked the truck and came down to the house to see if he was at the front door…He wasn’t. She went back up to the truck…Smoke was billowing out from underneath the  hood of the truck.

She is thinking “Shit, I don’t have an extinguisher, the dog isn’t here and is going to get shot if he goes to the farm… what the hell!!!!!”    She opened the hood of the truck…. There laying on top of the hot engine is a large pile of smoking black oil sunflower seeds… One of the local squirrels between Wednesday afternoon and Friday morning had stored his winter supply of food on top of the engine and it was about to catch on fire.

She was able to clean the smoking seeds off the engine and retrieve Sami from the kind arms of CH.   JN had found Sami not at the farm but at his front door and he took him in until CH came for him.

The moral of the story

Even though your engine is smoking it doesn’t mean your dog is going to get shot

at the farm