5C's Que Pasa

Good thing I try to remember to take photos so that I won’t forget the que pasa of it all.

The forecast or weather guessers as George used to say, said that the weekend would be the last two warmish days for a long while. The time had come for us to pick the last of our veggies before we entered a deep freeze.

This is the second planting of carrots and we did pretty good harvest wise.

A few days later Colin cleaned them outside and then scrubbed them inside at the sink. They are so sweet.

I was surprised to find even more beets tops. They just kept growing after I last picked them, before the first frost. We have enough for two meals of steamed greens.  Yummy!

Not as many beets as I expected. I suspect that there was not enough heat for them to grow. Next summer I will start to do the second planting right away as I harvest the first crop. I unnecessarily waited several weeks this past summer.

Colin cleaned the gutters that were full of leaves.

I did my third raking of the season. The rake is against the first tree-hard to see with the shadow. We still have leaves on our trees. First time we have ever been here to see how many leaves fall. I did find out from our lawn guy that we have been charged over the years for both fall and spring clean up.  Now I know why.

Just at dusk Colin decided to take a few photos of our outdoor lights.

Can you see the Christmas tree inside? Left corner of the house. So many neat reflections.

Left over fortune cookies from the other night. Those who really know me are shaking their heads and saying “please no, you are already direct enough”.

First time that we have had living plants in our home here. My garden is in Mexico. I neglected to water my $5.00 poinsettia and it shrivelled up. Right now I have some red flowers but the leaves have fallen off.

I am now on my second Christmas cactus. Many years ago I grew these and they looked fabulous at Christmas. Now the buds have dropped off.

Any suggestions? These are dried up buds on the first cactus.

All the lights are giving me a mental boost.

One of my longtime readers, Janet, suggested Blackwell Dairy Farm for the best ever eggnog. This is the link for where they sell their products in my area of B.C.  https://www.blackwelldairy.com/products-purchase-locations If you check that link you will find where they sell in your particular area. Muchas gracias Janet.

November passed in a blur. All because of the fence, I guess. I’m not quite ready for December. I had visualized a few weeks of just laying about reading. I have had some eggnog here and there. Lovely stuff, especially after an absence of 20 years. So far I prefer adding brandy rather than rum, but then I am not fussy. So what type of eggnog do you prefer? Here in Canada we have totally different grocery stores than you do in the US. So far here in BC I have only found Dairyland 😕  Original or Classic? Is there anything better?

In addition to eggnog we have been indulging in a lovely Christmas cake. I purchased this from a lady here in the park that bakes and sells her creations. She is the one we got bread and other goodies from last April and May. All were delicious, so we decided to invest $20.00 in her dark fruit cake.  It was very very tasty but hopefully mine will be a tad better.

Surprise. We woke up to a frozen lake this morning.

It was a lovely sunny day with temps of 4C/39F.

But the lake was frozen. It was all lovely liquid water yesterday. So surprised to see the ice today. How can it happen so fast?  Nothing that I could see melted today.

Frosty cold.

Yesterday I had my last vein treatment, at least 60 injections based on the cotton balls and tape.  Three treatments on each leg within a 12 month period. The earliest I can start again is September 2021. No one knows if we will be traveling again by then. If we can we will still try and get to Egypt. It all depends on rules and requirements for travel. I think I will be delaying my next vein treatments to April of 2022. That way if we can’t fly anywhere, we will hopefully be able to drive to Mexico and stay there as long as we can.

Cindy, a good friend here in the park, snapped this photo a day or so ago. She captured two trumpeter swans and their cygnet swimming behind them.  I so hope that this is the same family I got photos of a few weeks ago. It would be great if that family had reunited.

Cindy took this from far away.  Great zoom on her latest iPhone. The cygnet is between the adults.

The patterns of ice are most interesting.

A quick peek of our tree and small buffet display with some of our cutsies.

Trying to show the tree reflections in the windows.

This was taken two days ago on Sunday the 29th. Simply spectacular.

I was rather surprised today when the sun went behind the mountain at 3:00PM. Suddenly it was darker and by 4:30PM it was dark. I guess we surely are in December.

Tonight as I was writing this I heard geese overhead. How can they land on the lake in the dark?  What happens when they are expecting water but they hit ice 😯

Tuesday mid morning we had a meeting with our financial advisor. Sadly he is permanently retiring, he was semi retired and had kept us on for the past two years.  News to us that was rather unexpected. He invited us and his admin ( who is also retiring ) for lunch at the Kelowna Yacht Club.

We all wore masks until seated and we were appropriately distanced because of the large table. Just after this photo was taken Colin’s phone rang.  It was maintenance giving us notice that they were going to be working on our property. We had been told on Monday that we would get at least one days notice, before they started digging. We just got a one minute notice! So we ate quickly and drove home.

This was taken from the car as we came down our street. Where were the workers. No one was digging.

Oh but they were, on the other side of the fence! But why I asked. Well they just thought it might be easier to start there. This was our first indication that the fence might be in the way. Colin spent hours laying new landscape cloth and levelling his cement slabs to match the concrete. I mentioned before that our plan is to push the shed closer to the fence in the spring.

Quite late in the afternoon they started to dig on the correct side of the fence. Ever so carefully they pushed back the rocks and removed the landscape cloth.

They set out tarps and very carefully shovelled the under layer of small rock on one side and the dirt on the other. It looked very neat but I figured that would not last. It turned out that I was correct.

They left at 4:30PM as it was starting to get dark. At this point we had no idea what was going to happen the next day, on Wednesday. Needless to say I was upset at my yard being dug up. Colin was more like ” nothing we can do about it” and decided to put the tree up and sort out the branches. My heart was not into Christmas but after a glass of wine I redid what he had done and fine tuned it a bit, bending branches here and there. We took no photos as we were still dazed from all the unexpected activity. Neither of us can remember if we put the tree lights up Tuesday or Wednesday. We do recall the Colin made creme of leek soup from a Knorr package.

Later I read and enjoyed eggnog with rum and a piece of banana bread.

Wednesday was all about digging and more digging. Before noon they knew that there was a five foot diameter concrete top that went under the fence to the second hole on the other side of the fence. Fortunately the found a smaller diameter opening and eventually were able to get it open.

There was a lot of rock, mud and some twigs.There was no sign of a pipe coming from the drain in the road. So they started to remove the mud and rocks. They were gone a good part of the day but came back to do more digging. Lots of breaks and a one hour lunch. At the end of the day they said that in the morning ( Thursday ) they might need to remove the fence including the steel posts and the cement used to keep them in place. Again more shocking news.

I did contact our fence builder and he was not available to come until Friday. So we decided that no one was going to take our fence apart except the builder.  Meanwhile I started to put out some of our Christmas cutsies. Things that were not going on the tree.  Thinking back as I type this, I am pretty sure that we did put up the tree lights Tuesday. However neither Colin nor I can recall what we had for dinner Wednesday night. Our minds remained in turmoil.

When they left for the day they once again said that they were not sure what would happen with the fence the next day. They still had not found the pipe.

Thursday morning was spent making the hole deeper. They took away two loads of rock. Paul is actually standing in the hole.  They tried using a shop vac to suck the mud.  Took about two minutes for it to clog.

Having removed a good deal of rock they tried an experiment. Insert water into the pipe within the drain.

And water began to run into the hole. The found the pipe.  It had not collapsed but was full of mud and debris that went down the drain from the road.

Mission accomplished, sort of.  None of these fellows had been in the park with this dry well had been installed.  They could not believe that whoever had built this had filled it so full of rock. They hope that it will fine now. So do we.

They began to put things back together by putting soil into the hole. That confused me as they just shovelled dirt out.

New landscape cloth was laid and bit by bit it all came back together. They did say that it was impossible to level the cement slabs behind the fence. Colin said he had done it and expected it to be done. It took a while but did get it levelled.

They did a good job of cleaning up, better than I expected anyway. Our patio, the driveway and the street are covered with splotches of mud.  The fence has dirty handprints all over it.

I was called out for a final inspection. The wind was blowing and it was cold.  I didn’t have time to put a jacket on.

It looked good but not as perfect as it had been when we finished the big clean up last Saturday. The best part is that we did not have to take the fence part. We still need to wipe down the fence and the gate and move some of the landscape rock.  But other that putting the outdoor Christmas tree back to where it should go ( more or less ) we left it at that.

Colin went out to pick up Chinese take out for dinner. It is time to get back to our regularly scheduled life.  I took part of Friday off and all of Saturday to just sit and read most of the day. Today I am feeling more like myself. Hence this post which took a few hours to edit photos and write this synopsis. It really could have been worse but it was bad enough to shake me up. It has just been thirty days since we took the hedge out and it has not been an easy time. Time to get on with Christmas.

A very special belated Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers. I’m sorry but I totally forgot about your Thanksgiving. I hope that each one of you had a very special day and dinner.

The problems we had were addressed and completed by end of day yesterday. I needed today to get myself back together. Will post soon with photos and the story.

Meanwhile the numbers here are going up everyday.  Please stay safe.

Yesterday, Monday, we had chiropractic appointments in Vernon. Afterwards we returned our Charlie Brown tree to Canadian Tire. We never even took it out of the box but by accident last Friday ( we had a quick 20 minute stop at Walmart ) we found a much better one and taller for the same great price of $39.99. After Canadian Tire we did our large biweekly shop at the Vernon Superstore, so very much larger, newer and with lots of space within each aisle than our local Kelowna store. Next stop was a big wine stock up and fuel top up as the gas prices are cheaper there. So after a long day  ( we were gone close to 5 hours ) and a very full car we came home. As Colin was backing in, I said, “what happened to our landscape rocks”?

This is what we saw.  I felt violated. Why would someone do this to us?

I asked him to call the front office and security while I ran over to a neighbour to see if they knew what had happened. Sadly they did. We have been having drain problems which have become much worse the past few years.  Maintenance tried to fix it a few weeks ago to no avail. Actually they have tried for several years to get this sorted out. Yesterday they brought in a huge truck which sent a miniature camera down the drain and along its length.

There is darker square about 1/3 down from the top right, in the middle of that dark triangular patch.  The dark square is the drain underwater. From that drain you can see two parallel lines that run to the bottom left of the photo.

Those two parallel lines end up at our property and is marked by the orange paint.

Apparently the remote camera only got as far as halfway up our area in front of the new fence where it saw a collapsed pipe. They could not find out where that pipe led.  They think that is comes under our yard and empties into the lake. Maintenance came by to speak with us and that is how we discovered this much.  At that point we explained that there was no exit from our property to the lake. Were we sure, yes we were certain. We explained that in the 17 years we have lived here ( in both homes on opposite sides of the road ) that we always were told that this drain went over to the neighbours ( the ones close to the fence ) and drained out to the lake behind their home. Apparently the mini camera was used from the drain on the road side of our neighbours near our fence and also from the lake to the road and that pipe was clear with no obstructions.

The tiny remote camera also had some sort of GPS or something ( we were not here so don’t really know ) that shows above ground the area where the pipe collapsed. So someone painted where they need to dig.  Yes dig!

So it appears that from the road to the fence it will all be dug up. They may even have to go under the fence or move the fence. We don’t know. No one knows until the digging starts.

We got to enjoy our completed fence, properly placed landscape cloth and new rocks for exactly one full day. Can you imagine how upset we were? So sometime within the next week our front area will be dug up, we will be dealing with a huge mess and likely lots of mud from the rain. Management came to see us today ( at our request ) and promised to put everything back as it was. Have you ever seen anything put back correctly when something like this is done? In fact I could not figure out why our gate was full of mud. Apparently several people were traipsing through our yard look for a place to see where the drain ran into the lake. So if they make a mess of our gate I can only image what is coming next.

One of the most upsetting parts was was seeing the neon orange paint splattered up onto our four day old fence.

Maintenance came this morning and removed most of the sprayed rocks ( they can’t be cleaned ) but still many remain as was seen by management when they came by closer to noon today. Most of the paint came off the fence with a special cleaner but not all of it is gone. You can see a larger grey stone placed near the fence to mark ‘the’ spot. A much neater and less destructive method of making a mark.

We were extremely upset when we returned home yesterday afternoon. There was not enough wine to cope. Today we remain disappointed that so much of our hard work is going to be dug up. We have no choice but to get this done but we don’t have to like it. As you know we are perfectionists and we know that it will never be the same. We have requested that we be given at least a days notice so that we can be here to supervise. The last thing we need is to have a backhoe damage the fence. Next week I have my final vein treatment, a chiro treatment and a massage but I can cancel the last two if needed. Likely they would prefer us to not be here, but if we can we will be.