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Our friends Neil and Diane often host bands to play at their home on Cowichan Bay. On this occasion, they had The Bandidos, a Mexican band from Melaque/Barra de Navidad. We’d seen The Bandidos on several occasions in Melaque so were really looking forward to seeing them again here.

They arrived in BC a couple of months ago and have been playing in the Okanagan, on the lower mainland, and finally Vancouver Island.

It was a busy Thursday, I had two doctor’s appointments and then had to attend the regular mandatory pub meeting in the afternoon. We arrived in Cowichan Bay just before 5 pm and very much looking forward to a few drinks and some good music. We weren’t disappointed on either count.

The music started at about 6 pm and the food appeared soon after. Rosalie had made a seafood cake which we shared with Jim and Ylda. It was delicious.

There were about 70 people in attendance who had to pay a minimum $20 donation each, all given to the band, who played three sets during the evening. Some people danced.

Neil and Diane are doing a house exchange with some people from Portugal and their guests weren’t expected to make the show because of the ferry situation. However, they showed up about half an hour before the end.

I was surprised to find that Harry was actually English. He is a lawyer and I don’t know what Vanessa does. We had a great conversation with them and Ylda was happy to meet someone from her birth country to practice her Portuguese.

Over the last few months, I’ve been trying to cut back on drinking but I failed on this occasion, waking up with a bit of a hangover. It was a great evening and Neil and Dianne were gracious enough to let us stay overnight.

It was an early start the following day to catch the ferry to the mainland. We arrived at the terminal at 9:30 and were told that we would be on the 3:15 sailing; a six-hour wait. Fortunately, this was expected and Rosalie had packed a picnic lunch so the wait wasn’t too bad. As it turned out we managed to get onto the 12:45 sailing which left at 1:10 (?).

We got to Agassi at 5 pm and had a great weekend with the family including our great granddaughter Stevie’s first birthday party. All weekend was very smokey. It seems as if the whole mainland is on fire.

After getting my eyes fixed I was really happy, that is until I looked in the mirror. Now I can see all the wrinkles; not so happy now!

We have a mosquito that buzzes by every night at about 7:30. He’s so regular that we have named him ‘Mo’. As soon as he arrives I light a mosquito coil, wave it around a bit and we don’t hear from him until the following night. We’ll miss him when we get back to Mexico.

Mexico: it’s only another 5 weeks before we head back there. This year has just flown by. I have to do something to slow it down a bit. Maybe a new hobby; we have an idea in mind but want to wait until we get home to Mexico before we try it. Explosives are cheaper and easier to get down there anyway.

As we are going to be away from our hydroponics for several days and the fact that they are guzzling a lot of water, I have a problem. How do I keep them fed?

I came up with the following idea:

The bucket on the left is the main reservoir and the one on the right is the reserve. Okay, so, the reserve has a tube feeding the reservoir. As water always seeks its own level it lets water into the reservoir when the reservoir gets low.

The large bottle on top is there in case the reserve gets too low. Water in that is held back by a vacuum until the water below drops and releases air into the bottle, therefore, letting out more water to feed the reserve.

Now, if anyone can understand what I just did, please drop me an email as I’m thoroughly confused. Of course, the nutrient level will drop but you can’t have everything.

We’ve been without company for the last few days. perhaps we’ve become unpopular at last. Although Bob and Marlene from next door dropped in for a visit so I’m keeping my hopes up. I think they just feel sorry for us though.

I installed a Spypoint camera so that we can keep an eye on the place during the winter. So far all I’ve got are pictures of Rosalie and me when we forget to turn it off when it’s not needed. I had to up our package from 100 pictures a month to 250 to accommodate our forgetfulness.

I did get excited the other day though when I caught an invader red-handed. Unfortunately, I was under the knife with my eye and couldn’t do anything about it. It looks as though he/she didn’t like watercress so we got off lightly.

I noticed that the CBC has posted a few negative reports about electric vehicles over the past few weeks. It was okay until I read one about a guy who took his Ford F150 into the States and couldn’t get it charged so he abandoned it and had it towed. Big news!

I’ve noticed that some of the stories are about people who don’t plan ahead and then complain when things don’t go their way. If that truck driver couldn’t find a charge station within his 500 Km driving range then he didn’t plan well.

I wondered, if I had a gas-powered F150, ran out of gas at the side of the road and had to abandon it, would they make a news story out of that? I doubt it very much! I’ve sent them an email which I’m sure they’ll ignore.

After having cataracts removed from my left eye and seeing the great results, I was excited when they called to give me the date for my right eye.

It was a bit more of a humane time at 11:45 am so we were happy about that. I arrived early only to find out that there was a one-hour delay. That was fine I just sat there looking bored for over an hour while Rosalie drove off and had fun grocery shopping.

Other people were waiting, as I had already had one eye done I felt somewhat superior. I saw these poor folks shaking in their boots while I was all calm and collected, or so I thought.

After the preliminaries which included seven lots of eye drops and a blood pressure test which was a bit high but nothing to worry about, I was ready. I was offered a sedative but put I on my manly face and refused. They still insisted on that silly hair net thing though.

I walked into the operating room and was again greeted by that ‘here’s another victim’ look.

The Doctor was awesome but he does insist on singing along with the music that is designed to calm you down. I think it did the opposite

Very soon it was all over and I went for my post-op blood pressure test. I was surprised to see that it was 240/80. The nurse didn’t seem concerned until she saw my pre-op numbers. 160/70 which is normal for the stress a person is under. However, they have a practice where the numbers have to be within 20 points of each other so she gave me another test and that was only 180/70, so she let me go. My normal pressure is 120-130 so I must have been more stressed than I thought.

When he was finished, the surgeon put a plastic shield on the eye. I had to wear it until the next day and then only at night for the next week. It’s to prevent me from rubbing my eye during the night or poking myself in the eye with a pointy stick.

I have to take three different drops four times a day as well as finishing up the ones for my left eye that have another week to go. It’s all very confusing but between Rosalie and the many alarms we set, it’s working out well. I wish she would stop slipping in a few drops of lemon juice though.

The upshot is that the right eye is still a little swollen and a bit blurry, but the world is looking a lot brighter and I can already see better. I can’t wait to get to Mexico to see all the young chiquitas on the beach.

How the heck did a kid from a very poor area in England end up with all this? I often sit with Rosalie on the beach in Mexico drinking a glass of wine and enjoying the cool breeze and say “How the hell did I get here?” What did I do to deserve this?

My Dad left home when I was eight years old and I was raised by my Mum. She had a hip operation where they pinned her hip with a steel rod so she couldn’t move it and therefore had less pain. There were no hip replacements in those days.

She did an awesome job of raising me and seeing that I was fed and clothed as we got no support from my dad. Part of the time we were on welfare but she was always looking for work. She was one of the rare women at that time, who could drive so she had a bit of an advantage. She once fell down a small flight of stairs and bent the pin in her hip, but she carried on working.

So how did I end up with a beautiful wife, a lot of good friends in a great country Canada and a great lifestyle that includes Mexico? That’s a rhetorical question because I haven’t a clue.

Growing up without a male guidance system was a problem. My three brothers had long left home to get away from our dad’s physical abuse (fortunately he left me alone.) so I didn’t have them to guide me until much later but by then they were more concerned with their own families.

Was it luck, karma, hard work or just stubbornness to survive? I don’t know, but whatever happened, here I am.

I wasn’t guided into a trade so I just worked at whatever paid well. When I came to Canada I was married with a young daughter and still no trade. Through the years I installed cable tv and eventually, I became an alarm installer. I ended up as an installation manager for Chubb Security in Toronto. Can you imagine me in a suit? I was responsible for 50 employees/subcontractors and an operating budget of 3 million dollars which was a lot for the time. How did that happen?

I’ve tried a lot of things in my life, looking to support my family. When I was 63 I went back to installing alarm systems so I could contribute. I took $10,000 off our mortgage that year.

I don’t have a million dollars but perhaps I have what a lot of people would like, contentment, enough of everything, an incredible wife, lots of good friends and a way of life that suits us both perfectly! As Rosalie loves to say, “We have more than adequate resources to meet our needs”. It’s not about money it’s about how happy you are in your life, and I am completely happy.

However, I’m still wondering how the hell I got here.

As we wind down to the new, Mexico season I’m finding myself a little bit bored so I need something new to excite me. A friend came by the other day and provided the perfect solution: composting. Not just any composting but Bokashi composting.

I turned to the main “how to do it” site on the internet: Youtube, and looked it up. It was a little scary as the last time I did this I YouTubed hydroponics and look at the mess that got me into.

As I’m always looking to try something new I thought that this may be the thing to ease my boredom.

The dirt garden, although getting better this year, the soil still needs a lot of building up. I think a good dose of compost may help. I know very little about gardening but I do try. I heard the word compost and knew this had to be the answer to the failed crops I’ve had over the last few years.

This is all done in two 4-gallon paint buckets from home depot for about $15 or you can buy the proper bucket for about $60. I’m sure you can guess which one I chose. Although the $60 bucket does come with a tap. Unlike conventional composting, this is an airtight process so a tight lid also helps to keep out any odours.

The secret ingredient is a composting process that uses microorganisms known as ‘Bokashi bran’ to ferment organic food waste and create a super-fertile compost that will enrich your soil. The bran and compost are layered in the bucket and at the end of two weeks, the waste is fermented and ready to go into the garden. Meanwhile, the liquid produced is collected, heavily diluted and fed to the house plants. Now you know why you need a tap in the bucket.

Next, you just dig a trench, dump in the compost and then cover it with dirt. At this point, the waste solids haven’t broken done yet, but there is little or no smell. The rest of the process takes a few more weeks.

For anyone who may be interested, here are a few videos. The bran tends to be a bit pricy but eventually, I will make my own with the help of these videos: The second one doesn’t even need bran.

The thing I like most is that the buckets can sit right outside the door and we don’t have to worry about odours.

You can’t plant over the trench for a few weeks as the compost may still be too strong and burn the plants. Anyway, I’m going to give it a try and will report back later.

It started off as a crazy year for my plants. I tried my super new vertical system and found that it leaked so much that I had to refill the water every day. That also means topping up the nutrients which can be expensive. The problem was that I had already placed a lot of seedlings in it. The first thing I did was panic, jump up and down and blame it all on Rosalie.

After Rosalie bought me back to earth with a sharp slap and a shot of tequila, I decided to build another, more traditional setup. Then I took the plants from the vertical setup and stuck them in the new one. I’m not too organized and they all got mixed up so I had little idea of what each plant was. I knew that they would eventually grow and maybe I could get them sorted out. It did work out that way eventually but in the meantime, there were a few surprises.

Our friends Art and Linda gave us about six tomato plants of various varieties. As we had so much success last year I decided to grow them hydroponically again. This was partly a big mistake.

One of the plants started to get so big that the roots blocked the outflow pipes and we had a bit of a flood so I had to relocate it to the dirt garden where it’s doing just fine. Later, a second one did the same thing but the roots were so tangled with its neighbour that I had to leave it and trim it a little. Right now I’m praying that it doesn’t get too get much bigger. The size of my hydroponics wasn’t designed for plants this big. Next year I’ll try a different method.

One morning, while inspecting the troops, I found two more small tomato plants growing among the unknown. Then I remembered that last year, our hydroponics store gave us some tomatoes that they had grown and I had saved some seeds. This must be them.

I caught this guy chomping on the bean leaves. He (or she) casually wandered off as if they owned the place.

We’ve had great success with all our plants but Rosalie is mostly excited about the peppers as she has some great ideas for them. We are also growing Lemon Cucumbers. They are round and tastier than the long skinny ones. From my last inspection, it looks as though there may be a couple of dozen of them.

There are also lettuce, kale, spinach and my favourite, watercress. My Father grew cress for a living in England so I grew up with it. My Mum used to say that I was teethed on the stuff. It has a slight peppery taste and is great in salads and sandwiches.

I’m still learning about all this and it’s a lot of fun. I have so many ideas for different ways to grow stuff that I’m afraid to tell Rosalie. I tried a new nutrient, It’s a bit more expensive but I sure can see how much better the plants are.

This year has been a success so far and hopefully, next year will be even better.

You may have noticed that the blog about the party was a bit late. It wasn’t all about me being lazy, our WiFi has been terrible for the last few weeks.

We have a Telus hub, and it hasn’t been too bad for the last few years. Lately, however, it’s been horrible. I reluctantly called the service department and got the usual run around.

First, after choosing a number to enter, I pushed it and hoped for the best. Who knows if you’re getting the correct department or not? Then I got a message saying that my wait time is three days thirty-two minutes and would I like a callback. Sure why not, I think they expect someone of my age to forget I ever called and the problem will go away.

They did call back twice. However, my phone didn’t ring on either occasion. I found out later that my phone was blocking all unknown callers; another problem for later.

I called them again on a different number only to be informed that I have to try to solve the problem myself online. How can I do that if my WiFi is all screwed up?

Okay, now I’ve had enough. I check online to look for rural internet companies and find that Xplore (formerly Explorenet) is still going strong. We cancelled them before because they only offered 100 GB. Now however they are offering 350 GB. We’re in!

After a short wait, I gave them a call and spoke to someone who spoke English, although with a slight U.S. accent. They were understandable enough though, so I plowed on. Oh! If only all calls were answered as quickly as the sales department.

After signing up I was told I would be contacted within two business days. On the third day, I tried to call the installer. I left a message and hoped they got back to me.

They did call back but my phone didn’t ring again and I missed it. I left another message with Rosalie’s number and waited. Nothing happened so I called Xplore again and was finally told our installation date.

At the time I had so much trouble with the WiFI that I had trouble writing this blog.

Eventually, the installer Steve, contacted me by text and we finally got the installation done earlier than expected.

Next, I had to give Telus the bad news that we were cancelling. I phoned them and after a very brief wait, I ended up talking to three different people. When they found I was cancelling I was offered all kinds of incentives to stay. Why I wasn’t offered these options when I had so much trouble before, I don’t know.

In the meantime, Rosalie had had trouble sleeping and had to spend a night at the sleep lab in Nanaimo. She said it wasn’t too bad but felt like a fish caught in a net.

She did manage to sleep and in the morning worried that they didn’t get enough data. However, the technician told her that she had slept for six and a half hours and they actually got good data. So now she has to wait for the results.

Our annual Melaque party was a little different this year. It happened to be our twenty-fifth anniversary so why not celebrate that at the same time? It was our party after all so we could do what we wanted.

Invitations were sent to sixty people and thirty-six showed up, including us and three of Rosalie’s relatives. The relatives arrived a few days early so we had a good time visiting before the main event.

We had arranged to borrow tables and chairs from various friends and neighbours and rounded some of them up the night before.

The day before the party, I had to go to Nanaimo to get some injections for my back. I took my brother-in-law Gordon and somehow we ended up at the Longwood pub for lunch. While we were sitting enjoying a beer, I remembered that Jim had volunteered to help set up the tables and he now, was having to manage all by himself. Oops!

After getting home about three we piled into doing whatever else needed doing. Then we were all set for the following day.

People started to arrive about 3 pm, and soon the place was hopping. After a while, someone called for the appies to be served and the festivities began in earnest.

Our good friend Gordie (not our brother-in-law) stood up and said a few words for Rosalie and me. Then, I knew I had to say something even though I hate speaking in front of people. So, to calm myself down I played the Mexican national anthem.

https://youtu.be/B9jUdcio5FY

For those who don’t know, this is the propane gas truck that we hear just about every day outside our yard in Melaque.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKmqngs-DxQ

After I said my bit we got the taqueria started and my B-in- law Gordon and I started to sling tacos.

I think a good time was had by all. There were very few fights, no naked table dancing (thankfully) and I didn’t have to carry anyone home. It sounds boring I know but people seemed to have fun anyway.

The following day after an initial clean-up, I started putting my phone back together. After much cursing, as the parts were ridiculously tiny, I got it all together and low and behold, it worked. I now have a nice new phone. Unfortunately, the face recognition doesn’t work as the parts were not Apple approved so I will have to wait until Mexico to get it fixed.

Before I get to that, I have an update. I went to the ophthalmologist and got my patch removed, he said all was well and to continue with the drops. On the way home I began to notice all the changes I could see. Things were brighter and even at this early stage I hardly need my glasses. Some of the drops sting a bit though. I think Rosalie is using lemon juice just to see how high I can jump.

Now to the Grrr! bit.

My granddaughter was good enough to sell me her old iPhone 12 Max Pro at a good price. I noticed that the camera was blurry and after some research found that the camera needed to be replaced. I checked YouTube and the process seemed to be fairly straightforward.

I ordered a new camera and started the repair. After I was finished I put it all back together and turned it on. There was a lovely coloured band running the length of the screen. What I hadn’t realized was that the screen had a small crack and when I opened it up I made it worse. Back to Amazon to order a new screen. In the meantime, the phone still worked but the band got in the way.

When the screen arrived I gingerly opened up the phone again to see what needed to be done. Inside there are some small ribbon cables and while I was working on it one of them snapped. At that point, I almost snapped and threw the phone against the wall. I don’t think I could have done any more damage. I don’t know how it broke as I wasn’t working near it. Back to Amazon to order another new part.

In the meantime, I have no phone. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem but with the big party this weekend people will need to contact me so I decided to call forward to Rosalie’s phone.

I logged into Koodo and found the add-on and activated it for $3 a month. The next problem was that I need my phone to do the call forward thing. (Now you know why I drink) I thought about it for a while and then had an idea. I took Rosalie’s phone and put my sim card in, did the call forward thing, and then switched it back again. I called Peter to ask him to call me and the whole system worked. At least something went right with that phone.

The next thing is, putting it all together when the new part gets here. I’ll keep you posted but don’t expect any phone calls in the meantime..

I had to get my cataracts seen to and found out that I’m not as special as I thought I was. Just about everyone I spoke to had already had theirs done; I guess I’m a late bloomer.

They gave me my appointment time of 7:50 am. I laughed because I thought they were joking, but they weren’t. We got up at 6:00 and made the drive into town.

I arrived at the hospital with lots of time to spare and checked in. Rosalie came with me to find out my pickup time and to make sure I didn’t make a run for it.

She took off and left me to it and I was told to be a good boy and sit in the waiting room. A few minutes later, a lovely nurse called my name and ushered me into her office. First, she took my blood pressure which was a little high. (Well she was a lovely nurse.)

Then she placed a hair net on my head. I think this was for the staff’s amusement as I got a lot of smirks from patients passing by. Little did they know that they would be wearing one pretty soon.

Then she gave me my first of many eye drops.

Between drops, she asked me all sorts of questions. The main ones being, name, rank, and serial number. Or, full name, date of birth and which eye was getting done. After this interrogation was done she explained the whole procedure. She also offered me a sedative but I refused; I am a man after all.

Next, she took me and sat me in full public view with my silly hat. By this time there were a few others with hair nets so we could look at everyone else with disdain and ask why they weren’t a member of our club.

After a while, another nurse came to get me and asked all the same questions again. She led me into an operating room where about six more people looked at me as though I was the latest offering. Another nurse took the clipboard and asked me all the same questions again as well as making me point to the offending eye.

Then I was led to an operating table where they made me comfortable with a nice warm blanket.

The surgeon introduced himself and explained the procedure again. It was quite painless and over in ten minutes. All I had to do was look at a bright light and while he did his thing it changed shapes and looked weird. He slapped a clear plastic shield on the eye and said “All done” and I was out of there. So soon? I felt as though I hadn’t got my money’s worth.

Rosalie drove me home, which was the scariest part of the whole deal, and I started to recuperate.

I have to go through this again with the other eye; I sure hope I get the same pre-op nurse.