trip to town

/ Off Grid Islanders

I have a video from the nature channel for you today, but first, an update on our life here in the winter months.

The weather continues to give us a chance to work outside for an hour or two every day. We pace ourselves by watching an inordinate amount of World Cup soccer between jobs.

E bucked up the wood from the tree he felled and I raked and burned up the branches to clear the site. We then carried the wood to the shed waiting to be split.

With the temperatures dropping, the bunkie needed to be winterized. E drained the water and added antifreeze down the pipes. He also removed the on demand hot water tank and put it inside for safe keeping. When the family comes at Christmas, it won’t be any work at all to get the water system back up and running.

Family is coming for Christmas so we thought it would be fun to string lights around the property. They are LED, use very little power and are kinda pretty, especially in the snow. So there are lights now around the house and bunkie, the greenhouse and down the driveway. I hope the tugboat crews enjoy them.

The sun doesn’t reach the main deck side of the house at this time of year so there is no point in a solar water heating system for the hot tub. E took it apart and stored it under the house for safe keeping.

After a suggestion from E’s bridge partner, E made a heat exchanger, out of spare copper bits, which he is going to install under the house to allow us to heat the hot tub with water from our range boiler. We are just waiting on a pump to arrive from Amazon and it should be up and running before the family arrives.

E carried two 72 pound propane tanks down and installed them under the house after we brought a ton of firewood down to the front door. No one wants to be wheelbarrowing wood down a snow covered driveway. We learned our lesson last Christmas to get everything we can down to the house on days when the driveway is bare. Then we took more Tylenol and watched more soccer.

Our new neighbours came to winterize their house and she was able to finally see a whale. There were three or four swimming past on a cold sunny afternoon last week.

I have been quilting again. I started to make the grandkiddies Christmas stockings. I just need to attach the cuffs today and they will be done. Really cute and sewing them is not as hard on my wrists as carrying wood.

Between the recent snow storms and wind storms and world cup soccer we hadn’t been to town for three weeks. I had a very long list of groceries ordered, from three different stores, to be delivered to our car. There were ten packages from Amazon for pick up at the Post Office and the weather looked to be perfect yesterday. So off we went for what was a very productive day restocking and preparing for Christmas. Again, the driveway was bare so we brought down five wheelbarrows of supplies and restocked the house in what were perfect conditions.

On our way home we found ourselves in the middle of a sea lion celebration of some sort. E cut the engine and they brought the party to us. I have about 15 minutes worth of video but here is a two minute portion of what was a very unusual finish to our

trip to town.

18 thoughts on “trip to town”

  2. WOW to all of this! I am blown away once again with all that the two of you do. The video was fantastic! I know you will have a wonderful Christmas with your family, as will we down under. xo

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  3. That was amazing, Thank you! I find it something how the birds get right involved!
    Good for you, getting the wood all chopped and stacked ready for the really cold days. I know how good that is 🥰
    Enjoy your Christmas ❤️🥰
    Gail

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  4. Cool! I thought sea lions just sat on cliffs basking in the sun…these are very active.

    I’m heading to the library to attend a zoom “Human Rights “ seminar from the perspective of strata living. So the sea lion video is a lovely start to my day! And so very different from the library!

    >

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  5. After reading about all the things you’ve been doing, I wanted to go take Tylenol!!! Lol!!
    That was quite the video! I was surprised to see that the seagulls hung around. Don’t seals sometimes eat seagulls?! 🤔

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