Todd Creek Trestle returns

It was a lovely walk, that potentially could have continued long past Todd Creek Trestle, but we stopped there, to take it all in, marvelling at the rebuilt wonder. It has been quite a wait for the Galloping Goose Trail to be repaired, but it was worth it.

After seeing all this wonderful woodwork, I have an urge to make a coffee table or something.

Moving Muck

There has been a lot of activity in the front garden since the rocks arrived, moving and turning grass, planning where rocks are dragged to, ordering more muck.....

Five cubic yards of top quality garden soil from Sooke Soil and Landscape.

The rocks at the front are being used to create a divider between the upper and lower beds, so five or six square yards are now devoid of any trace of what was used to be called lawn, in fact seventy-five percent of the front is now one large canvas to install shrubs.

"We demand a shrubbery"

Around the corner, more grass has been removed for what will become an extended path into the back yard, we have researched what type of compactible gravel we are going to use, however, one major step at a time and we will order that in August.

The path will be completed by using heavy landscape fabric and a parallel line of large rocks that will alter the existing flower beds on both sides.

Cedar Waxwing

Karen shouted me and said her long-time favourite (and rare) bird was on our tree, she thinks this is a female of the species, and we saw a pair of them. A rare sighting in this neck of the woods....

Note, this is on full 14x zoom, Canon SX220, through our bedroom window.

Bubbles?

The local Bad Dog Brewery has been packaging a snakebite, which is a 60/40 mix of their 642 session ale and homemade cider. They have a temporary shortage while they brew another batch, so we decided to throw a gallon of apple juice into a jug and brew some alcohol into it.

Memories of my misdirected youth spent helping my mum brew crab apple wine, well, brew almost every type of wine known to man or woman.

Hopefully this little four dollar experiment will come to fruition, one thing is for sure, we do have bubbles...

Day 77 or thereaboots....

Yesterday, a trip up to Sooke Soils before the rain started and we watched them load three cubic yards of mason rock into their truck. The owner thought it was quite funny that we had specifications for our rocks, they should be around 14" so quite moveable by hand or dolly, and they needed to be "nice" and aesthetic for our second phase (the right hand side) of the front garden.

We raced the truck home, temporarily dug up a couple of plants so the truck could back over the bed and voila, the new rocks were dumped on the grass, ready to be moved to their new locations over the summer.

The planning begins.....

Day 32 report on yesterdays garden action

Tomorrow we hope that five cubic yards of alder mulch will be delivered, so we are taking time this week to weed old zones and prepare new ones to be covered.

This is at the back of the garden, we've turned over a lot of the grass and added a cubic yard of our composted soil from last years efforts. This area will become a new blank canvas for some lovely plants and shrubs that have been biding their time in our nursery area (the raised bed at the back) and while we were at it, Karen spotted a notorious Scotch Broom behind our fir tree. Karen climbed up there and made short work of it.

At the end of the session, we sat for five minutes with our feet up before going inside to put our feet up.

Cabbage Soup

Once a week we make either a pea and ham or a cabbage soup.

This is the cabbage soup, which has a lot more than just cabbage in it.

Cabbage
Celery
Potato, Carrot, Onion (dried bulk mix)
Quinoa Soup Mix
Mexican Rice
Herbs, garlic
Salami
Chopped cooked salted pork
Beef Boullion and Oxo
Hot sauce
Tomatoes

Basically anything that may be in danger of being in the fridge too long, our basic principle is that we do not waste anything in this house.

Monday, day number.....

The overall goal in the garden is to remove the grass, and a year ago we placed a tarp over an area, which is now basically devoid of grass, so at the weekend, I moved the tarp.

The new zone, for the next 18 months or so, has been created over another patch of grass, next to the euonymous hedge that Karen just planted. If we're going to look at it for a year or so we decided to make it a feature.

The weekly shopping adventure, Monday morning, we picked up some annuals from the supermarket, and Karen potted some of them, and here is the "rockery" before they bloom.

Cheeseless until Tuesday

Here's one for Pat, who is trapped at home and will be cheeseless until Tuesday.

I wandered lonely, in search of cheese
That floats on high on Aldi's shelves
When all at once, I saw mushy peas
Besides the carrots, beneath the beans
All alone, I'm going crackers
Crackers, hhhmmm, now where's that cheese?

27 : Pancake Saturday

It is always our responsibility to keep our eyes on best before dates on things in the fridge, and this morning, milk and eggs were highlighted, so it was either scrambled eggs, or another family fave, pancakes.

Pancakes won.

Karen loves her pancakes with sugar and lemon juice, I'm more of a maple syrup and preserves fan, so we stuffed ourselves with three of each.

Number 26

Karen was talking to her mum this morning and mentioned that she wanted to put a hedge of salvaged plants (from the front garden deer buffet) in the back garden. I don't think she intended to do it today, but we both "dug in" and extended the side of the bed at the back, an area that will surround a small seating zone eventually.

The gardening session was then followed by a neighbourhood walk and now that we have returned, the typical reward beers are being quaffed.

It has been a good Friday so far.

Day Twenty-Five

The new normal plays out while the world turns, the sun comes up each day, and our daily routine continues.

The 25th day of our self isolation started with toast and coffee, a few hours of gaming and internet, lunch of fresh bread and cheese followed by pottering around in the garden and garage. It was then essential to visit the local brewery for twenty-four bottles of beer, pale ale, red ale and IPA.

Sooke Ocean Side Brewery, thank you for your efforts to support the likes of us!

The afternoon walk was taken on a section of the Galloping Goose, past the stables with big, and little, horses and over the highway for the coastal walk. I took a different camera with me, mainly to take a couple of pictures in the bay of the old Lamford Forest products site.

The navy ship is HMCS Cowichan, a Bay class minesweeper 1957 - 1997 now privately owned.

Year Eighteen

It is day twelve of the lockdown and we spent the day gardening, pottering about, washing the car and walking. It's time for happy hour and beers are being applied as adequate "self medication" in these odd times.

It was March 21st, 2003 when Karen picked up her new Acura RSX, and it is still with us as it enters it's eighteenth year, still looking good and driving great.

It has been a most reliable car.

Roche Cove regional Park

A few more photos from yesterday.

Eleven

A world gone barking mad.

Day Ten - Tea Brake

The man versus car tournament continued today, I woke up this morning looking forward to the next challenge, the front brakes. It's been about a month or so with a very slight squeak coming from somewhere, at first I brushed it off as being other cars, but then after a while I concluded that 115000 kilometres was probably a good moment to inspect, and replace, the front brake pads.

I have to comment that I don't particularly use brakes a lot, which is why these seventeen year old pads have lasted so well. It was last summer, on a thirty kilometre drive back from Victoria, I noted I hardly touched the brakes at all. I expect that my style of driving over the years has resulted in the original set of pads lasting so long.

After some research I decided on ceramic disk pads from Wagner and my preference was for pads with a separate, shouldered shim as opposed to a bonded shim. I ordered them from Amazon for grand total of C$40.10 including taxes and shipping, they took three days to arrive.

The job took a couple of hours, which included an odd half hour at the start with the camber of my driveway working against me actually jacking the bloody car up correctly in the first place. I also used the job as an opportunity to rotate the tires front to back so I was using a secondary jack. This second set of tires have about 45000 kilometres wear now, so I hope by rotating them I'll squeeze another few years life out of them.

Featured above, Vintage Canadian Tire trolley jack and fixed stands from the early 1990's. It was two thirds of the way through the job and the back passenger side tire had been rotated and I knew the finish line was in sight, so a cup of tea was deserved.

The two 12mm bolts were loosened on the caliper.

The piston was cleaned and lightly greased and cycled using the old brake pad and a four inch clamp. I found that my resolve and strength were beginning to flag at this point as I was approaching the two hour point, however, I was about ten minutes away from completion and I found some enthusiasm to get the job done in a methodical fashion. 

Canadian Tire clamp from a set, door crasher from the mid 1990's.

As I drank my cup of tea, had a biscuit, I was transported back in my mind to the times in the 1970's when my dad would be working, in the driveway, on his Austin Taxi for the bi-annual test. I would take him, and his good buddy, Freddy, a cup of tea so they could have a break from the hard work, usually involving the front brakes and the king pins.

It is difficult to convey how happy doing stuff like this makes me, as I was working on the car, Karen was working in the garden, transplanting shrubs here and there for the new season, but she took some time out of her activities to put the kettle on.

She is a lovely lady and she makes a wicked cup of tea.

Day Nine - A bridge too far.

The walk of choice today, one of the few left that has not been highlighted as a social collection area, was on a four kilometre stretch of the Galloping Goose, up by the trestles, one of which is not accessible at the moment as it is being repaired, we thought we'd take a nice stroll on a slightly damp day, to see if anything was happening up there.

First bridge, the healthy Charters River Trestle.

Rain, rock and moss. A beautiful sight on a quiet, serene walk.

Karen and myself, ignoring social distancing rules. She loves that hat, and I love her.

The bridge too far, the Todd Creek Trestle, which should be repaired later this year.

Day Six - Man versus Headlights

I decided to (finally) address my frosty headlights, as usual, did a little research, paid twelve bucks for the compound and assembled the necessary tools...

Meguiar's Ultimate Compound, an old sponge, a piece of old pajamas.

The headlight before the process :

A quick wash with soapy water, then two or three passes with the compound, applied in a circular pattern with the sponge, a little bit of pressure.

It was ten, or fifteen minutes of circular polishing with the compound, then a couple of washes with plain warm water.

I was very pleased with the results, after less than an hour for both headlights they seemed as good as new. I had used about a third of the compound, so total cost around four dollars.

Job done.

Day Four - The Widget

It was a beautiful day, a perfect day for swapping the widget.

The blower in the Acura stopped working a few weeks back, so off to the interweb for some research and various videos led me to an educated guess that the resistor unit had failed, there was a more expensive solution, but I like to try the cheap version first.

I ordered the widget from Amazon, it was quite cheap at $24.98 including taxes and shipping.

The HVAC blower is located under the glove compartment on the RSX, so I popped the cover off to access the component. The resistor unit is there in the upper left hand side of the photo, and as usual with this sort of thing, a bugger to get access to.

Just two screws held the unit in, but removing them was rather fiddly. I would rate this as an easy job but I found removing those two bloody screws to be a test of my sanity. I had no idea at that point that putting the things back in would be double the fun.

The old widget, hopefully bad widget, was then pulled out of it's mount and this gave me good access to test the new item before wrestling those two unwilling screws back in.

Original part on the left, generic replacement on the right.

There was a moment of apprehension as I plugged the replacement in, I turned the ignition and by golly, the blower was working again. the gamble to the try the cheapest solution worked.

Happy smiles all around.

This is the original widget with the cover removed. I was going to do some testing with my multi-meter, but I realised that would be time wasted, it was much better to find and test a beer.

One last thing, when I removed the cover below the glove compartment, all three plastic snap things shattered, well they were over seventeen years old and quite brittle. Anyway, I replaced all three of them with a familiar household item, white plastic drywall E-Z anchors that work very well.

The conclusion to all of this, I understand that Honda would charge five hundred bucks or more to troubleshoot and fix something like this and I get away with twenty-five bucks and a stiff back for a few days. It was an educated guess that the electronic part would have failed over seventeen years and not the motor, it was also, excuse the pun, the path of least resistance to buy the cheap part first and try it out.

Job done.

Day Three - Not in the House

It is day three, no outside contact regarding shops, bars or restaurants, so we took advantage of the incredible weather and did some time in the garden, weeding mostly, of course, when weeding you have to put them somewhere, so I dug a quarter of the compost heap out.

After gardening, we went on a neighbourhood walk in the glorious sunshine, said hello, at a distance to some neighbours, then arrived back home for happy hour.

Happy hour with house pants on, you cannot beat it.

Day Two

A little early morning shopping, minimal interaction with humans, then an afternoon walk down on Whiffin Spit.

Tide was out.