Month: August 2023

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.