I’ve been making one of these little calendars for Steven since 2011. He has a stack of them in the corner of his office. We now have an end-of-year ritual where I toss the new year to him!
Takk, Ole Arntzen at the University of Bergen! What a sweet little creation.
The Waste Watch Residential Collection Calendar brochure for the first six months of 2020 arrived in the mail last week. I use that brochure to mark on our household calendar which weeks are for compost and which are for waste, plus the once-a-month recycling.
I got to May and the familiar green/black/green/black pattern for compost/waste/compost/waste broke! The last week of May and first week of June were both green, indicating we should put our compost cart out twice in a row. I checked the calendar for the other region of PEI (that has a waste pickup the week we have compost), and they had two consecutive weeks of waste collection.
I thought that maybe they had to move the schedule around so were repeating the weeks to get them into a new order, but there wasn’t any note saying “hey, this is why your compost is going to be picked up twice in a row.” Hmmm.
Curiosity got the best of me and I had to know if this brochure was correct. I waited a couple of days in the hopes that I wouldn’t be the first calendar nerd to call Island Waste Management Corporation‘s customer service line. They really do have the friendliest staff, so when I explained what I had discovered on their calendar, the lovely woman on the other end said that they had already received a few calls about this, which they really appreciated. The brochure had gone to the printers before it had been properly proofed, so the calendar should not have two consecutive weeks of green or black.
So, ignore the calendar, keep the compost/waste pattern going.
So much has been happening this fall. I’ve been trying to catch my breath since the beginning of October. Things are finally slowing down and I can reflect a bit more on the fun bits (the not-so-fun bits can just scram!).
We had the fantastic experience of hosting three people who were doing the inaugural walk of a new 700 km trail around Prince Edward Island. I met the trail planner, Bryson Guptill, at Peter Rukavina’s unconference in June, so when I heard on CBC Radio that Bryson was having difficulty finding off-season accommodation in the western part of PEI, I emailed to offer him a bed and transportation to and from their trail.
They ended up staying for three nights over two weekends. It was fun to meet some interesting people and play the role of “trail angel.” They were delightful guests and it was great to support their dream. Bryson has just finished a book about the trail that is at the printers and will soon be available at The Bookmark and Bryon’s Etsy store. And Peter created this great map of the trail, so it all comes full circle!
Our solar panel installation was completed October 9, then we waited for Maritime Electric to install a second meter to finish the process and hook us up to the electrical grid. Some unfortunate miscommunication meant that didn’t happen until the second week of November, but now we are up and running. The amount of electricity we are generating isn’t spectacular, but it has been quite cloudy of late and the sun is low in the sky. You can see some of our stats here.
Last spring I started thinking about purchasing an electric vehicle to replace my 2012 Honda Civic. I will outline my EV shopping experience shopping some other time, but the quick version is that I was told more than once that no one wants an EV on PEI! I finally found someone who wanted to sell me an EV, and December 5 I took possession of a 2020 Chevrolet Bolt EV from Township Chevrolet in Summerside. My first impressions: quiet, torquey, high-tech, efficient, fun. I still have some things to figure out, but so far I really enjoy driving it, especially the one-pedal feature. I didn’t really pick the colour – it was the first 2020 to arrive – but I quite like it now. It is certainly a switch from driving a white Civic surrounded by dozens of other white Civics!
My go-to electricians, Moore Electric, installed a Level 2 JuiceBox Pro 40 charger a couple of days before I got the Bolt, so now I drive into the garage and plug in to my own gas station. The last time I bought gas for the Civic was on a windy, rainy day, so good riddance to that and the grubby pump handles!
We took the Bolt to Summerside last Saturday, a trip that A Better Routeplanner says is 47 kms one way and takes 39 minutes and should have used 10% of our battery, which was not a bad guess. To get our battery back up to 100% when we returned home, it took the JuiceBox 4 hours and 37 minutes to add 30.751 kWh. This is a whole new world of numbers, and numbers just aren’t my thing. Someone asked me today what my mileage was for the Bolt and I said, “good,” and it is, I expect! I will figure it all out some day.
Sprinkled over these past couple of months have been many committee and board meetings, a course through Holland College about how to be a more effective board member (not being on so many committees would likely help!), and a couple of fund raising events. I’m am looking forward to a bit of winter hibernating and ruminating.
There were 304 general elections in the UK in the 1970s, and Scarfolk Advertising Agency did all the advertising for all the parties. Check out three of the best posters from that time.
For more information, please reread or visit Scarfolk.
My mother’s refrigerator is 17 years old, like most of our appliances. It was a floor model purchased at McKenna’s Furniture in Summerside. Nothing fancy, no ice makers or motherboards. Whirlpool Gold GT19DK.
A few times over this little insulated box’s life, we have found water inside below the crispers and on some of the shelves.
After some internet searching, and remembering the appliance expert on CBC Maritime Noon talking about a similar situation, it seemed the likely culprit would be crumbs in the defrost drain hose from the freezer. I removed a few screws, pulled out some panels, and used a hair dryer and a scraper to remove ice that had built up and caused the flooding. I was soon rewarded with the satisfying sound of water running down the drain into the pan below the refrigerator as I flushed out the hose with a turkey baster and some hot water.
The tell-tale puddle reappeared a month ago, so I went through this defrosting process again. When it happened a couple of weeks later, I figured I needed a better solution.
I watched lots of videos and read lots of articles. Seems this icing up is a problem for many other people, and Whirlpool has released a fix without saying there is something inherently wrong with the design of their products. You can buy this part for about $20 plus $10 shipping. It’s a piece of metal you clip on the the defrost heater.
Or, you can save the $30 and do as this fellow and many others suggest: wrap one end of some copper wire around the defrost heater and stick the other end down the drain hole. This will hopefully direct enough heat to keep this silly setup from freezing and glaciating (I don’t think that’s a word, but spellcheck is letting it go, so now it’s a word!).
It’s been two weeks and all is as it should be in the refrigerator. Fingers crossed.
November 24 – 30 is National Home Fire Safety Week in Canada. It’s a good time to test and clean your smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, and replace any that are more than 10 years old. Fire extinguishers should also be inspected and recharged regularly.
Make an emergency plan and go over it a couple of times a year. One good place to start is Get Prepared from Public Safety Canada. I’m glad to see they now have a guide to help create a plan and kit for people with disabilities/special needs and for caregivers. We have had an emergency plan for a number of years, but my mother’s decreased mobility means I should likely make revisions.
One tip I learned years ago that freaked me at the time was cleaning dryer lint from inside the dryer cabinet. It’s easy to clean out the lint trap that all dryers have, but have you ever been told to vacuum inside the dryer? The first time I did, about 12 years after buying the dryer, it was a horror story!
We rarely use our dryer now, but if you even use yours a few times a year, please find out how to safely get inside your dryer after turning it off at the breaker and clean the darn thing out. Clean the dryer vent and hood, too.
And one more thing: plastic/vinyl duct is not for dryers. It gets brittle and leaks, it melts, it burns. Please replace it with a rigid aluminum metal duct.
The floating building saga ended late yesterday afternoon. First they pulled the barge by hand:
Then they put their boats into action:
And here it is this afternoon, near the top of the creek, where it will spend the winter. Lots of lines off to either side to hold it steady until it freezes in place.
Heading to the chicken coop this morning to check on the gals, I saw a building coming down Foxley River. I can’t say for certain this is the first building to move on the river, as I think our boathouse came down from Cascumpec on the ice in 1961, but I wasn’t around for that excitement.
There is an oyster warehouse on the other side of the river from us, so I assumed this oyster shed was headed there. Instead, they started to turn up the creek (pronounced crick by me, because that’s what it is!) that runs in front of our house. I started driving a dory and outboard motor on this river when I was about seven or eight, so I know the tides and channels well, and have been stuck just about everywhere there is to be stuck! I was pretty sure where this was headed.
The tide was fairly low when they tried to pull/push this little barge through the narrow passage that is pure black mussel mud at the bottom, and it hung up. The owner’s 200 HP Yamaha couldn’t budge it.
They’ll be back this afternoon to try again, though the highest tide today will be around midnight, so we’ll see. They had it anchored off Goff’s Bridge in Foxley Bay last winter, but it got beaten up pretty badly even with five lines on it, so they thought they would try here.
The owner (who knows all my Hardy and Phillips fishing cousins, giving me some credibility by association!) said we can use it for putting on our skates this winter when they get it anchored up the creek. There’s a BBQ and everything in there, so we might just have a few parties on the ice.
When we first moved into our house in 2002, and for a few years after, we were lucky to get 5 or 6 trick or treaters on Halloween, mostly neighbours and cousins. Our 1,000 foot lane is often muddy this time of year, and children in the country have to be driven from house to house, so you go where you are taken!
One Halloween in the mid-2000s, I was doing the morning milking with my friend and neighbour, Jonathan, at his uncle’s dairy farm, and we were comparing notes about how many children we were expecting that night. Jonathan lives less than a kilometre from our house and he was getting 20 and 30 kids a year! His secret wasn’t much of a secret: better treats!
So, we upped our game, and the numbers started to rise. By 2010, we had moved into the double digits, and last year we had 20! I love watching the tiny shy toddlers turning into teenagers taller than me. I beg them to keep coming back even after they can drive!
The most heart warming, and perhaps surprising thing in this world of stranger danger and store-bought everything, is that every child who has been here on this rainy, windy evening has been looking forward to one thing only: my mother’s homemade sugar cookies. She baked and decorated five dozen cookies this year, with two-packs to give out tonight, and the leftovers will go to her church Sunday School this weekend.
Her 97-year-old hands don’t work as well as they once did, and she is never really pleased with the decorating job, but she says a prayer as she works that each child who receives them will live in peace and happiness. Nothing I can buy at a store will ever compare to this, and she will be remembered by children born in this decade long into the late part of this century as that nice lady who made the cookies on Halloween.
