Fun? Really? Fun?

Greetings lovelies!

Summer is really here. It’s been warm — but not excruciating — and so far the “new” windows (now nearly a year old) are definitely helping. We haven’t had any really hot days yet, so we can’t know how the house will behave when it’s scorching, but we have hope.

The last week saw a few things accomplished and some fun had.

On the accomplishments front, we replaced the skylight in the main bathroom. The old one was cracked. (I guess acrylic skylights just don’t last 25 years without issues.) This required paint touch ups in the bathroom as well. There were very strange things going on where the wall meets the skylight, and the fix was a mess. I will probably put another coat of paint on the fixes, but it looks OK at this point.

We also put up new house numbers:

There’s a story there. The old numbers were tiny little things centered over the garage door, just under the light. They were difficult to see at night, and the wrong colour for the new paint. I think they were brushed aluminum, and they disappeared on the new grey walls. As a result we didn’t even put them back up. Instead Anne and I talked and decided we wanted new, large, white numbers.

I started searching around. None of the local hardware stores had anything interesting. I checked Amazon, and while they had a couple of options, the styles didn’t work for us. (That was amazon.ca. Those of you using amazon.com might have better luck.) Then I did a google search and discovered a large selection available on Etsy. Many fonts and sizes, different colours, materials and suppliers. It looks like a cottage industry run by people with CNC machines in their garages.

I found the numbers seen above and placed the order. They shipped a couple of days later by USPS (from Florida) and then were passed on to Canada Post. It took about two weeks for them to get here.

In the meantime the mail and various other deliveries continued to arrive without issue, despite there being no numbers on the house. Everything was just fine but — there’s always a “but” — when I got an email saying the new house numbers had been delivered there was no package to be found. I waited, not certain of what to do. A few hours later I got an email from a neighbour. The package had been delivered to his home.

Apparently Canada Post was unable to deliver the new numbers to our place for lack of a posted address, despite three weeks of successfully delivering mail before then. And to have it go wrong for the new address numbers was quite special.

I installed them the next morning and we think they look great.

The only other major task this past week was clearing out a lot of the accumulated recycling and trash. The cardboard boxes from the skylight and the medicine cabinets took up a ton of space, and getting rid of the old toilet and the skylight was also a big help.

In other “chore” related news, a bear knocked over our garbage can twice… last night and the night before. The thing is, it contained nothing edible. Oddly he didn’t bother with the greenwaste bin that had some fruit scraps in it. For the moment I am keeping the cans in the garage in the hopes this bear will figure out he’s not welcome here. But that isn’t a permanent solution. I need some sort of enclosure to put the bins in and keep the bears out. Yet another big job.

That brings is to the “having fun” part of last week. And when can you recall me last saying I went out to have some fun? It’s been a while.

Anyway, the first thing to note is that I had a birthday. I’m older than I want to be, or should be, or feel like I am. *sigh*

To mark the occasion we went to the Vancouver Art Gallery and saw a wonderful exhibit of work by Parviz Tanavoli, an Iranian artist (mostly a sculptor) who set the tone for modern sculpture in Iran. He retired and moved to Vancouver in 1979. Here’s the only photo I took:

He works in multiple media, and at varying scales. There are significant cultural things going on that I simply don’t understand — being an outsider — but I can see hints of them. I’d really like to go back to this show with an Iranian friend and get her perspective on these things.

His work is also interesting in its intrinsic nature. The pieces can be complex, apparently made of several different, intricate parts. And yet he’s not trying to finish things perfectly. They’re raw — even rough — which isn’t something I have been comfortable doing with my own work. There’s a lesson for me there when I finally get back to it.

The other fun thing I did was go on a nearly 90 minute walk in the woods. At the high point I wound up with this view:

And as you might guess, I was on “Powerline Trail.” To get there I wound up climbing something a neighbour called “the Seymour Grind” but which is more formally named:

I only figured out it was “very difficult” when I got to the top. Though that designation may be for mountain bikers. It was a really steep climb, and I don’t know how a biker would deal with it in either direction.

Powerline Trail was also steep, but much wider and covered with scree in places, which made for an exciting descent. Still, it was a lovely bit of exercise, and I hope to do it again soon.

Anne informs me that with the bathroom done and the house painted, the big things that were bothering her are out of the way, so I can work less now. I understand that, but I have a long list of projects I want to work on still, and some of them are outdoors, so the time is now.

I’ll try to have more about those next week.

Cheers!