We packed the car past midnight to be ready to go early yesterday morning.  Mimi had worked on the curtains all night and we will install them at the cabin this weekend.  The curtains will give us more privacy from the cars driving the road in front of the cabin and from the neighbors.  It is not clear how intrusive the neighbors are, the cabin is located in the countryside where we assume very few events and situations go unnoticed. I brought with me many of the duplicate tools that I have collected over the years, I actually never noticed that I have 5 axes, 4 handsaws, 2 skill saws and many more tolls that have been purchased to prepare for Armageddon.

We did not leave as early as expected.  I walked the dog longer than usual to help her with a bout of diarrhea brought about by Mimi feeding her liver yesterday and we also deeply enjoy our morning coffees while reading the paper.

We arrived last night at the cabin around 6:00 pm after grocery shopping locally and a trip to Walmart to buy a cushion bed for our dog Sidney that Mimi treats like her own child.  Of all the dogs I have owned, I think I have had 6 so far, and she is the smartest by far.  We got her as a 3 months old puppy from the SPCA after filling out a multi page questionnaire and visits from all our family members to check on character compatibility.  They told us that the dog was captured on a native reserve along with her mother, a questionable story considering that her mom was cream in color and appeared to be a lab.  Sidney looks like a German Shepard with floppy ears and fluffy butt.  On her first day at our home, she took refuge several times under the deck when she was fed up with us.  She learned the basics commands (name, sit, come, potty training) so quick that I remember looking into her mouth to see if she still had baby teeth and that we did not adopt a 5 year old dog.

As soon as we arrived at the cabin, I went inside to see if everything was still intact and into the crawling space to check the water pump.  I had my fingers crossed on that one as I forgot to turn off the pump last week and I am sure you can imagine the damage if a water line had broken and the water pump kept flooding the cabin for days on end.  I briefly visited the backyard to see if the fruit trees we planted last week made any progress, of course they looked the same but I am an optimist person.  At a nursery run by Mennonites in Salmon Arm, we bought 2 Lapine cherry trees, 1 Bartlet pear, and one peach tree.  In few years, I will sell the fruits as “organically grown” to the high end grocery stores of the rich neighborhoods in Calgary.  Planting the fruit trees was a lot more work than anticipated, the task looks easy at first: remove the loam, dig an 18 inches hole, stick the tree in, compact the dirt well to avoid air pockets.  In reality, the soil underneath the loam was full of rocks, I had no pick axe, and I had to redig each hole 3 times as my laziness kept telling me that the holes were plenty big.

Prior to dinner, we built a folding dinning table that we purchased with the intent of using it in the main bedroom when I have office work to do.  The table looks great, is solid and can sit 6 comfortably.  Oh yeah, the table is too large to fit thru the door of the main bedroom, so much for that brilliant idea.  Dinner was great, Dr. Oeker frozen pizza with a Stella while watching 2 episodes of Outlander on Netflix.

For the purpose of the blog, I call myself Paul, I picked this name to preserve my anonymity and be unburden by issues such as writing offending or questionable facts, and timeline, and I am not too interested in negative feedbacks.  Although Paul is WASP name, I picked it because of Paul Newman in the movie “Cool Hand Luke” that I saw as a youth, and at the time I thought the egg eating contest was pretty cool and possible.