5C's Que Pasa

It continued to be hectic Friday so my post never happened.  The winds have been brutal and our new tree blown and blown but it is still standing.

Poor tree.

The winds started at at 20 km/h but quickly increased.  I had a fellow in to clean the inside and outside windows and his ladder kept getting blown over.  I finally sent him home.

From here the wind increased to 60 km/h for a few more hours.

By 10:00PM Friday the wind was down to 39 km/h and that was windy enough.  We had white caps on the white caps out on the lake.  Good thing we had our BBQ on Thursday evening.  The new regulator arrived via Purolator and the entire cost with shipping and tax was $36.78, much better than buying a new BBQ.

I was in Costco Thursday morning and they had some wild fresh salmon for sale.  We won’t eat framed salmon at all.  This salmon looked great but…

..the price was high. That is $39.00 for 2.2 pounds of salmon.

However it was excellent and mouth watering and it was fresh and wild. We thought it well worth the price. We had enough left over for fish tacos Friday night. We will buy it again but I won't buy it and freeze it as the taste would be affected.

I received a comment yesterday from Nayarit which is south of Sonora and they are having no problems with their Shaw service.  Thanks for the comment Susan and welcome to the blog.  I think we shall all be fine with our Shaw service for a while at least.

I also received an email from someone suggesting my readers might be interested in winning a free RV.  I’m sure some of you would but I want to check out the details before posting the information here on my blog.  If it is legit I will post it, so stay tuned.

Tags: 319, Duck Lake, food

… for Shaw Direct, well at least for now.  Who knows, perhaps when we get south our TV’s will go south. Colin’s attitude is very positive….more guitar time for him 🙂

Meanwhile we are in a bit of a panic re our new tree.  It is extremely stressed and not doing so good nor looking good at all.

The leaves are drying up and falling off...our tree is not happy. We called the nursery and sent photos and will try a watering only with a specific amount of H2O and stop the showering of the leaves with a hose. The owner, Gunther thinks the tree will still survive.

But we are in a panic over our leaking basement.  The fellow who repaired the leaking roof came by yesterday and completed taking the ‘smiles’ out of the large sunroom windows.  Looks good.  Meanwhile he pulled apart our siding and….

...discovered where the water was coming in and figured out a solution. First we have to wait for the wood to dry.

This is all very tiresome….I am almost done in.  Mom is coughing up a bit of blood and still has a racing heart.  I am glad she is in a proper hospital.

We saw a beaver swim past the other evening, right close to our beach.  That was very special. Sorry but the camera was not nearby so we just captured the shot in out minds.

Our forecast looks very promising so I suspect I shall not be seeing my husband much for the next while! Hope the tree survives.

Tags: 319, garden, health

An arm of the Government finally got it right.  A man has been charged $856,000.00 for setting a camp fire on his own property that caused a forest fire.  Of course he is appealing the decision but I sure hope he has to pay something.  Details and photo here.

Lots of news out of Mazatlan recently….

~the Centro area is being prettied up and restored to days of old.  Read about it here.  I can hardly wait to get back to check out all the colors and ambiance.

~also the second phase of fixing up the tourist area has begun.  We sure loved what they had accomplished last year and it can only get better.  If you want the facts click here.

It certainly looks like Mazatlan is going full out to put itself on the tourist map. As for our Tres Amigos, our RV Park on Stone Island, I have heard that there are still one or two ocean side sites still available.

Still on the subject of Mazatlan, would you like to win a case of wine like I did last winter?  You just have to guess what day the rainy season starts and the hour. Contest information here and all you have to do is send an email to the address in line 5 with your guess.  Umm you do have to be in Mazatlan to collect the wine.  But even folks like Linda and Russell who will only be there next May can enter or Roger and Chris or Croft and Norma who will only be there a short time can still enter and win.  Hey I won, so you can also.

Along with the good news comes some bad news.  Friend and fellow blogger Larry broke the news on his blog post June 4th.  You may want to sit down with a beverage at your side as you read this.  You can read my comments at the end of his blog.  Yes I really did stay on the phone for 4.5 hours to confirm this sad news.  It is very true that we will no longer be able to get Shaw Direct Satellite in either the USA or in Canada.  However it may not entirely be lost, I have a spark of an idea but need to research it first.  Stayed tuned.

...aren't they cute. We have hundreds of these quail running around here right now.

…so my idea did not work out.  Too bad.  Instead I have contacted a few companies and individuals in Mazatlan.  The news is a mixed bag.  People there with the Shaw system are still receiving their normal TV.  Paul at MazSatellite who installs the Shaw Direct system claims that my information is incorrect and it is all systems go as far is he is concerned.  I don’t think he got the official news yet.  What are people like him going to do?  Go out of business?

What to do but call Shaw here in Canada yet again.  This time I went to the technical department and the fellow knew all about it and yes it is all true as of May 29, 2013.  Shaw no long officially broadcasts south of the Canadian border.  So I asked him why people in Mexico were still receiving regular Shaw broadcasting?  He was very very hesitant and said it was technically possible.  I then asked him that if we have the same equipment and the same dish as we did last year, if we should be able to receive what we did last year.  Again he hesitated and reluctantly said yes but that officially if we had an issue with the receiver or the dish that Shaw could not help us at all.  As of last Wednesday the FCC has ruled that Shaw is not a registered provider in the USA.  I asked him if Shaw would likely pay to broadcast south of the border and he said it was unlikely and that things were changing daily and that this was all so new that it was very confusing.  He also mentioned that Shaw is getting hundreds of calls about this in that past few days.

He would not make a further comment or suggestion.  So my interpretation of our conversation this morning is that if you have a Shaw receiver and dish you should be able to receive that same reception as before. That is the programming from the first two satellites but you will not get anything from the new satellite.

Fellow RVers from Canada who stay at Tres Amigos on the Isla will be setting up their Shaw system there in August.  That will give us a better idea of what might be happening.  Right now they are in the USA and I believe that they do have TV.

To be or not to be south of the border? That is the question.

Tags: Mazatlan, Mexico, repairs, Stone Island, Tres Amigos RV Park

What a way to start the day! Here comes our new tree.

It was picked up and treated with love and care. Walter had tied it up properly at the nursery when he picked it up Monday and kept the leaves watered down till the delivery. Big job getting it off the truck. No fork lift at this end, just brute strength.

Those guys got it through the arbour with no effort. If we can get that tree through then we can get anything through. Good to know.

It took a while to decide where to put the tree, exactly that is. Which side faced where and then the hole. Big big job digging that deep hole.

It was our first hot day in a while and of course there is even more stress on planting a tree in this weather.  For the next week we will have to keep hosing down the leaves very early morning and again after the sun goes behind the hill because our forecast is hot, hot, hot.  We are worried as years ago we brought in a tree on a semi from Vancouver and hired a crane to lift it into place.  Well that tree died from the heat surge that week.  We did get another tree from the Vancouver nursery for free but had to pay for another semi and another crane and that tree is still alive and doing well.  Today we are only 25C but going to 30C for the rest of the week.  You can be sure we will be watching this baby like a hawk.

It's in the ground.

I love that it blocks the house next door, giving us that final bit of privacy.

The tree is going to need some filling out on the right side but we don't see that from the house or most of the yard. We also decided not to cut off any of the taller branches until next spring. It has had enough stress.

From concept to fact in 6 days! We did it.

If you look at the top right corner of the house you can see the top of our second tree planted with a crane.  For those new to the blog, we lived just across the road until this past fall.  So I still get to enjoy that tree also.  I guess we like em big!

The calm and peace of June lasted 2 days…such is our life.

This was the final rain chain install in progress.

This is the completed project. This is a permanent fix year round.

My flower garden being converted to low maintenance.

Our new Arizona/ Mexico garden. The bird on the right is our 3rd Mexican piece of art. Yes another bit of iron work that rocks with the wind.

Evidence of Carmeh acting out! Did you think only kids acted out when they did not get the attention they desired?

Whereas Caeli is our calm one ( fat one ) just wanting to lie in the sun.

So what did Colin’s nose save us from.  A potential fire and maybe worse, an explosion.  Normally when we BBQ I do very basic things but last night I decided to ramp it up a notch.  I sauteed potatoes in certain spices and veggies in others.  As Colin lit the BBQ he said  “we have a big  leak”.  No matter what he did we could not bring our BBQ into a safe area so at the last minute and very late we had to cook it all inside.

After 20 minutes we realized it would take forever for the potatoes to cook so Colin cut them into tiny pieces.

Finally close to an hour later we were able to eat. The salad was good, the potatoes were over done and crisp, the asparagus and zucchini were good and the wild salmon patties were great but I bet the BBQ would have enhanced the taste.

Thank goodness  Colin’s nose caught the propane leak. Who knows what would have happened?  Today I called around and we have a new Coleman ( no not a  Weber…sorry MR. GEORGE AKA the Weber man  ) regulator being shipped today out for $21.00 plus shipping and tax.

Looks like this week is shaping up to be repair week #2.

Tags: 319, food, garden, repairs, The girls