Same old for the past couple of weeks

Not much excitement in our lives lately unless you count a trip to Nipawin or a thunderstorm. We've been hanging out in Regina, working and occasionally doing some cleanup in Mom & Dad's old apartment. Yesterday was a big day at the apartment. Mother & father came over and went through the last of the closets and drawers. Now we have a plan in place to distribute the remaining furniture to family. The remaining clothing will go to charity along with some of the food. I think it was a hard day for mother saying goodbye to possessions, as it was for us too but everybody just put their heads down and got on with the task at hand. Broadway Terrace management has come up with a new tenant for the apartment starting October 1 so now there is a deadline on getting the remaining stuff out of the place.

We're leaving here next Friday to start working our way west to Vancouver so we need to get as much done this week as possible. I'm not 100% sure we'll get the place completely empty before we leave but we should be able to get close and we'll be back in Regina before the end of September anyway. It should look a lot different by Wednesday night - Marlan & Michael are coming on Monday to pick up some furniture and then on Wednesday Mary is coming for the kitchen table and the deep freeze. Right now the place still looks full because there is furniture scattered randomly around every room but it will look a lot different once the big stuff is out of the living room and bedroom.

Last week we made a quick trip to Nipawin. We picked up the mail that Quint has been collecting for us but weren't able to go into the post office to pick up the mail while we were there. Some kids apparently set the garbage cans at the back of the post office on fire the same day that we arrived in Nipawin. Radio Norm commented that it was pretty short sighted of them to light a fire at the post office since that is where their family welfare cheques arrive. You tell 'em Norm!

The yard was a mess but not nearly as bad as we had expected. Our lawnmower man failed us completely so we had hired another guy to mow the yard in mid-July but it hadn't been attended to since then. The ditch didn't actually look that bad. There were a few alfalfa plants that were pretty big but the rest of it was acceptable. The back of the yard where it hadn't been mowed since late May was pretty wild and the "garden" was its usual joke self. Its been so dry there that the raspberries hadn't amounted to anything. It was probably pretty optimistic to expect anything off them this year anyway. They got hit hard by the May frost last year. There's some pretty decent canes there now for next year but we won't likely own them by then so it won't matter. We did get some cherries though. They were pretty tart but would make excellent pie cherries. They were edible raw and there weren't anywhere near enough to make a pie but there is hope for next year. I think that's four years now since I put the little sticks in the ground for the ones that are bearing.

This coming Friday we're going to pull up stakes here and move to Climax, to Gail & Al Balfour's yard. We'll stay there a couple of days while I deliver some FCC reports in the southwest and then we'll start working our way west across the south route. Many years ago before we discovered Mara we spent some time with the kids in the Kootenay region. We had a lot of fun there and our memory of the area is that it hadn't suffered the runaway development that the Okanagan Valley has. We want to check out the current situation to see if that is still true. We really liked Kaslo and New Denver so we will definitely check out both of those communities. Our plan is to go right across the south route to Vancouver and then come back through the middle - probably up the Okanagan to Vernon and then across through Lumby, Needles, Nakusp and New Denver to Kaslo. Depending on available time maybe we'll go out through the middle.

We've got a reservation at Capilano RV park which is right downtown in North Van. Kerry's wedding is on the 13th and it sounds like a bunch of the family is going to congregate starting about the 11th so we will get there in time for all that and hang out until everybody leaves. It feels like we got our summer in BC cut short so we are looking forward to getting back out there for the end of summer. I think I'm looking forward to the trip through the interior just as much. There's some really neat communities in there that date back to the silver rush in the late 1800's. We're not sure where we're going to settle but it might very well be one of those communities.

Steffie Ding Dong is on the TV right now claiming that he doesn't feel an election call is necessary right now. Wanna bet that Steven gets him backed into a corner and he caves (again) while the Conservatives continue to implement their agenda? You all remember that this is the idealogical government that was too rigid to last two months as a minority when they got elected.