Thank you for all the cards and letters (four) asking me how we made out with our water over the summer and how it is going, now that the rains have arrived. It is obviously time for the inevitable water update blog post.

In the simplest words I can summon, we ran out of water. Normally, by the end of September we would have received a bit of rain water to live on, but we were out. On September 23rd we had to borrow some from our neighbours. E hooked up a hose from their tank to ours and with the help of an electric pump, we “borrowed” 600 gallons. Surely, we thought, that will be enough to tide us over. But noooooooo. The rains still never came and our kids were coming for Thanksgiving so we borrowed another 400 gallons to make extra super sure we had enough for their comfort. (showers, laundry etc.) Those 1000 gallons gave us all the water we needed to live like kings, until this week when the rains did, finally. arrive.

When the 250 gallon threshold of rain water is reached in the 500 gallon tank underneath our deck a pump is triggered to push the water up the hill to our storage tanks. When that pump is triggered, a light comes on. Since October 24th that light has come on seven times. Each time, as you can imagine, there is much excitement.

We are nowhere near full tanks yet, but we are well on our way..

Here is a wee table to show you where we have been at this point in recent years. Keep in mind that through all these years we were critically low on water at the end of August.

Date	Water in Storage
Nov. 1, 2018	2500 gallons
Nov. 1, 2019	1300 gallons
Nov. 1, 2020	7200 gallons
Nov. 1, 2021	6200 gallons
Nov. 1, 2022	1300 gallons

Our neighbours had water to share with us this year but will unlikely have any extra in the future. E has always maintained the position that we have enough storage capacity. He felt 8000 gallons of water should be plenty for our garden and daily life during the usual dry months on the island. The drier summer weeks have, until this year, been interspersed with rains to augment our supply. Do I need to mention that the annual August Vancouver fair which has historically been troubled with too many rainy days. But those regular summer rains could very likely be a thing of the past.

I admit we were reckless with our water this summer. We watered in the garden willy-nilly. We power washed the deck before staining it. We changed the water in the hot tub after our granddaughter had been here. I think next summer we will be extra vigilant and if we again have issues with water storage in September, there will be no problem convincing E we need more storage.

On a separate and completely unrelated topic let me tell you about our latest mail problem. There is no mail delivery on this island, We live at an address which doesn’t even have a postal code. Our mail goes to a post office box in town. We do a lot of on-line shopping with most of our supplies arriving through Amazon. Throughout Covid we have never had a problem. Everything we have ordered over the years arrived as expected and, if it was different from what we ordered, it was easily refunded or replaced.

Last week when we went to the post office in town, we were expecting shipments of, among other things, wine and mason bee supplies. The wine fortunately arrived as expected but the box of mason bee supplies went missing. Although it was noted at Amazon and at the Post Office that the package was delivered, we never got it. The post office manager tracked it and discovered that it did go to the Nanaimo post office but was then redirected (why and by whom?) to Lasquiti Island. Lasquiti!!! Sure, it is an island, but it is very definitely not our island. The post office told us to advise Amazon that the package is lost. Thank goodness it wasn’t the wine

that went missing