I was up at the site this afternoon, raking and tidying debris. I had a small burn pile going and, as I cleaned up the area, I could hear E singing down on the deck as he worked on our first urgent project. He is nothing if not happy when working with his tools on a useful project.

We have decided to move our batteries out of the house into a separate box on the deck. It is perfectly safe to leave them where they were but curiously, over the last week, we have become super safety conscious and are going to change a few systems. The eight Surette batteries will be located in an insulated box outside, and well ventilated on the deck, by tomorrow.

We went to town yesterday and picked up our new 6500 watt Honda generator. E’s Dad always said only buy Japanese generators and, thirteen years after his passing, we still do as we were told. We had lots of offers of help to get the 230 pound generator into the boat and down to our house. We were happy to have the help from those who were able to show up.

Again, and for probably every day since the fire, we were in bed by 7pm last night. We are then up at 4, which has the potential of a good nine hour sleep (if we were actually sleeping) but it is kind of awkward that we are on a Toronto time zone sleep schedule. It is not that we are dwelling on what we have lost but we are planning on what needs to be done and where we need to go from here.

This will be the last blog post about the fire. I don’t know about you but I am sick of thinking about it and would really like to return to conversations about sea lions and humpback whales.

You might have noticed that I have rewritten my previous two posts to eliminate the specific names of people who came to our aid. I had wanted to make mention of all of the islanders who came to our aid to thank them publicly but it has since occurred to me that perhaps they didn’t want their names or pictures publicized. Lord knows I don’t want to offend any of these fine folks. So I have replaced their names with the word neighbour. When reading, the word

might seem repetitive.