The Four-Letter S-Word

November 8, 2017November 8, 2017 / Diane Henders / 62 Comments

The four-letter S-word: Snow. Yep, that’s an expletive around here.

Growing up on the Canadian prairies, snow and bitter winter cold were simple facts of life. We dressed appropriately and respected the danger; but unless the temperature sank to -40 we carried on.

When I was in my twenties I moved to Calgary, Alberta, and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. There was still cold winter weather, but it was regularly punctuated with chinook thaws where the temperature rose above freezing.

But…

Years ago my dad and step-mom used to spend the winter in Victoria, BC. I visited them frequently, and it never snowed.

Later, Hubby and I came to central Vancouver Island once or twice a year for ten years or so. We visited in all the “winter” months, and it never snowed. (Okay, once we saw about an inch, but it melted the next day.)

So after thirty years in Calgary we decided to move to Vancouver Island where ‘it never snows’.

Yeah, right. We got suckered.

Last winter was the coldest and snowiest on record. We had about two feet of snow on our yard, and it stayed for a couple of months.

But, hey, that was an anomaly, right?

*snort*

Guess what happened last week?

Yep, about ten inches of sh-… I mean, snow.

Vancouver Island doesn’t deal well with snow, and often the power goes out when the weather is bad.

Fortunately, we knew this. We’ve wired our house so we can switch over to generator power if necessary. And it was necessary: we lost power four times, for several hours each time.

When I was a teenager, our prairie farm was hit by a three-day-long blizzard. The power went off the first day and was finally restored five days later. The roads were impassable. If we hadn’t been prepared, everything in our house would have frozen, including us.

So last week when the snow came down and the lights went out, my brain flipped into DEFCON 1: “AWOOGA! AWOOGA! EXTREME HAZARD! ALL HANDS ON DECK!”

I scurried around lighting candles, dragging out my big goose down duvet, and helping Hubby get the generator deployed; all the while knowing that WE WILL DIE IF THE GENERATOR QUITS! What if we run out of gas? We don’t have our wood-burning backup furnace installed yet, OMIGOD WE’RE GONNA DIE!

Um, no.

The temperature was barely below freezing. There was no wind. And even if the roads had been impassable and we had no heat source at all, our neighbours’ place is less than a quarter-mile away. If we had actually managed to die, it would have been from sheer stupidity.

So maybe eventually I’ll get over my knee-jerk panic over winter power outages; but that sh-… um, snow… is still sticking around. And it’s barely November.

We’ve been had.

P.S. To be considered a true Islander I have to complain about the snow, but I’m secretly enjoying the pretty white sparkles. This is the best of both worlds: I can enjoy the snowscape in my yard, and if I need a break I can drive ten minutes to the coast where the grass is (usually) green and the ocean waves keep rolling in. Paradise! 🙂

P.P.S Just because I needed a bit more stress in my life, my web host has gone belly-up, taking all my websites and email addresses with it. If you’ve tried to email me, I apologize – your email has probably vanished into cyberspace. I hope to be back in action with a new host by tomorrow. Watch this space for updates…

Update: I think (hope) everything’s working again… *fingers crossed*

Off The Wall(s)

March 29, 2017 / Diane Henders / 35 Comments

Well, we’re moving again: Out of our current rental (our term expires Friday) and into our friends’ place to housesit for a couple of weeks while they’re on vacation. We’re really hoping our place will be ready by the time they return. (Not that they’ll kick us out when they get back, but we’d really like to be in our own house!)

So… yesterday afternoon I was sitting in the mostly-empty-but-still-disorganized rental, trying to come up with a blog post in fifteen minutes or less while the phone rang frequently with house-related questions. My mind was in red alert mode: “AWOOGA-AWOOGA! NEXT CRISIS INCOMING AT TWO O’CLOCK! DECISION-MAKING CAPACITY CRITICALLY LOW! TOTAL SYSTEM FAILURE IN THREE… TWO…”

I took a deep breath or ten and thought, “It’s okay, I’ll just quickly write something off the wall…”

That’s when my overstressed brain got nitpicky: “No, idiot, you meant ‘off the cuff’; as in ‘informal, without preparation’, not ‘off the wall’; as in ‘eccentric, unexpected, unconventional’! How do you expect to write an intelligible blog post if you can’t even form a coherent thought?”

It was an excellent question; and one with a very simple answer: I can’t.

So I’m going with ‘off the cuff’ and ‘bouncing off the walls’, as in ‘nervous, confused, hyper’. That, I can do.

Here are a few events from this week’s jumble:

One of my favourite aunts died this week at age 82, of complications from diabetes and heart disease. Even though distance prevented me from seeing her as often as I would have liked, her passing still leaves a hole in my life.
The herring spawned in the strait outside our rental a few weeks ago and we’ve been enjoying all the action from front-row seats: the water turned milky jade-green (yes, the entire ocean – that’s a LOT of herring milt); scores of fishing boats rushed back and forth; thousands of seagulls swooped in; followed by thousands of ducks; followed by hundreds of seals and sea lions frolicking and barking only a few yards offshore. What a show!
It’s almost spring: After the longest, coldest, snowiest winter on record (which must have been scheduled just for us newcomers), the snow is gone, the grass is green, and the rhododendrons and cherry trees are beginning to bloom. And I saw this cute little guy on one of my walks:

He was moving very slowly – it’s still pretty chilly for salamanders.

Our housesitting gig comes with a friendly roommate: Blue the cat. After only one day he hasn’t quite forgiven us for not being ‘his people’, but it seems his affection can be bought with a can of Fancy Feast.

Blue the cat is a little blue without his ‘people’. (Actually he’s a LOT Blue – he weighs 22 pounds.)

Apparently my brand new 2017 Ford Escape had a leak from the factory-installed roof rack, so the body panels and spare tire liner have been marinating in stagnant water for the past six months. The whole thing smells like stinky socks when I turn on the heat, but I’m on my third trip to the dealer and it should be fixed soon.
Work is proceeding on our house: We now have electricity, a working septic system, half a heating system, and most of a water supply. The walls of the garage/workshop/addition are all framed and the roof trusses are arriving today. It’s happening! It’s really happening! 🙂

Aaaaand that’s the wrap-up for this week, folks. What’s new with you?

Submariners And Sea Monsters, Oh My!

February 1, 2017 / Diane Henders / 50 Comments

Moving to a new place always comes with a learning curve, so this week I thought I’d share some of the discoveries I’ve made since we arrived here on Vancouver Island.

For example, I’ve recently learned the correct Navy pronunciation for ‘submariner’. I always thought it was ‘sub-ma-REEN-er’, but a true Navy man pronounces it ‘sub-MARE-in-er’. (Coincidentally, I also learned some Navy slang for a gay man: ‘diesel-driven turnip’. Don’t look at me like that; I don’t have a clue how that expression came to be. But it made me laugh.)

Speaking of the Navy, I haven’t met a ringer for Aydan’s Uncle Roger yet (in the Never Say Spy series, he was the favourite uncle who taught Aydan her best cusswords); but the other day a Hellhound lookalike roared past me on his Harley with his guitar strapped to his back; and I actually got to meet a real-life Dave Shore:

Paul was one of the truckers who delivered our shipping containers, and watching him finesse an 80’ tractor-trailer into our tiny driveway off our narrow road was education and entertainment combined. I just stood there with my jaw dangling while he eased those big tires perilously close to the ditch, sometimes hovering a couple of trailer wheels over empty space. Then he used a brilliant technique to squeeze into the driveway: he locked up the trailer brakes while he continued to reverse the tractor, pivoting the 53’ trailer neatly around the 90-degree corner and into our yard. Wow!

Talking to him was like gabbing with my fictional Dave: He’s got 700,000 kilometres on his current rig, which is the third his current employer has issued him. As he explained, “I keep miling them out.” (Translation: Driving so many miles that the truck has to be replaced, usually at 1,000,000 km.) He’d rather sleep in his truck than in a hotel, and when asked about his retirement plans in a few years, he admitted, “I’m going to get an RV and drive around visiting my kids. I just like to drive.” It’s very cool to know there are real-life ‘Daves’ out there!

Marine life has been another novelty for me; some of it beautiful and fascinating…

Starfish come in an amazing variety of shapes and colours from white to orange/red to blue/purple, and they have the ability to go from soft to rigid in mere seconds if you touch them. (Guys, did you get that?)

…and some of it quite horrifying:

I have no idea what creature wore this head before I found it bobbing gently in the surf. It was nearly ten inches across and it looked like some hideous sea monster, although it’s probably a mundane fish to a true West-Coaster. But I’m going with ‘sea monster’.

I’ve seen misty sunrises:

Serene moonrises:

Dramatic nighttime cloudscapes:

Rainbows after a storm:

And harbour seals playing. (I was too far away so they only look like black blobs splashing around, but you get the idea):

…And we’ve only been here a month. I can hardly wait to see the strange and wonderful things the Island has left to show us!

But here’s the best photo yet: They broke ground for our house on Monday! Hooray! (Speaking of finesse and expertise, Sam the excavator operator is an artist. His touch with that bucket is so delicate and precise you forget that he’s moving literally tons of earth at mind-boggling speed. Apparently he began operating a small excavator when he was 8 years old.)

It might not be as scenic as the rest of the photos, but this one makes me very happy!

What’s new in your world this week? And… does anybody know what that sea-monster-critter actually is? (Or, more accurately, ‘was’?)

Island Happy

December 28, 2016December 27, 2016 / Diane Henders / 28 Comments

This is just a short post since I’m having computer and internet problems, but I just wanted to check in and say… We made it to Vancouver Island, and we’re thrilled to finally be here!

There were some tense moments (okay, some tense hours), but after weeks of “everything that can go wrong will go wrong”, we finally got here despite Murphy’s best efforts.

One thing: Driving the Coquihalla (Highway Thru Hell) in winter is off our Bucket List – we don’t need to do that EVER AGAIN!

Despite the fact that it “never snows” out here, we had four inches of the white stuff on Boxing Day, but at least it’s warm(ish) and the snow is mostly gone where we are. The Island is putting on quite a show for us – we’ve seen everything from a peaceful happy Island:

…to a cranky Island the very next day (yes, those are snowflakes fluttering down in the foreground):

But it’s all beautiful – I have to keep reminding myself that we don’t actually have to leave!

If the computer gods smile on me, I’ll be back to my regular programming next week, but in the meantime I’ll wish everyone a very happy New Year. “Talk” to you again soon!

P.S. I’m on Pacific Standard Time now, so my posts will be showing up in your feeds an hour later. It’s “Island Time”! 🙂

Coastal Cogitations

April 6, 2016 / Diane Henders / 43 Comments

I’m on vacation this week! We’re on Vancouver Island, and I’m enjoying both the change of scenery and the change of pace. My senses seem sharpened by the glorious sea air that smells so good I could make a meal of it.

Sometimes the enhanced sensory experience is wonderful; sometimes, erm… not so much. Here are my observations to date:

My paranoid writer’s mind never quits. Doesn’t this look like a concealed camera to you?

It’s in the ceiling of our hotel room and the rest of the knots are solid, but not this one. And you guessed it, it’s right above the bed. There’s even a shiny thing that looks like a lens inside the knothole.

Suspicious as always, I stood on the bed and poked my finger into the hole. All I could feel was plastic vapour barrier, so I’m hoping that’s the source of the gleam. But if you happen to discover amateur porn videos featuring Arlene Cherry on the internet, please don’t tell me. I’d really rather not know.

Pacific loons are the Fonzies of the ocean. Clad in sleek black, they kick back casually on the waves, far too cool for the rest of the seabirds. When they dive, it’s with a laid-back ease that makes the mergansers look like skinny little punks who are trying too hard.

I love good oysters, but there’s nothing worse than a bad oyster. And once it’s breaded and fried it’s impossible to tell the difference until after you’ve eaten it. You don’t want to know how I discovered this. But, as the saying goes, “This, too, shall pass”. And it did, quickly.

‘Moving’ right along…

I can’t decide whether I like the ocean better…

…in the sunshine when it’s blue and beautiful:

Or under cloudy skies when it looks like molten silver:

I love it when it’s stormy, too, but we’ve had beautiful weather the whole time we’ve been here so I didn’t get to photograph any big waves. Maybe next time.

I don’t know this for certain, but I suspect that the designer of the Hyundai Elantra’s seats sneaked into my house while I was sleeping, measured every inch of my body, and designed the seat contours specifically to torture me. (Fortunately the car rental company exchanged it for us, or I’d be in serious pain right now.)

No matter how devastating the damage, nature will eventually recover if it gets the chance. I was lucky to have visited Cathedral Grove before the big storm of 1997. It was still majestic after the storm, but the mossy grotto beneath the towering trees had become a brighter place criss-crossed with the massive trunks of the fallen giants. Now, nearly twenty years later, I’m happy to see that it’s slowly returning to its green and shade-dappled glory.

And best of all, the trilliums and daffodils and camellias are in full bloom, along with cherry trees, magnolias, tulips, hyacinths, forsythia, and just about everything else. I could keep snapping photos all day long, and the scented air is divine!

What’s blooming in your neck of the woods this week?

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P.S. We’ll be on the road today, so I won’t have a chance to respond to comments until we’re back this evening. “Talk” to you then!

P.P.S. If you haven’t had your say on the format for the Virtual Book Club yet, please click here to offer your comments. The Book Club will start next week!

Where’s Diane?

March 18, 2015March 18, 2015 / Diane Henders / 22 Comments

I’m on vacation! Can you guess where?

The perfume of hyacinths floating on cool misty air was absolutely sublime!

Even the raindrops are beautiful!

Don’t worry, I haven’t turned into an oenophile – I had my beer for an appetizer. Counterclockwise from top: Painted Turtle Sauvignon Blanc from Oliver BC, Salt Spring Island mussels provençale, pan-fried Fanny Bay oysters, Greek salad. Yum!

I’m usually not much of a shell-picker, but I’ve never seen a moon snail shell in such good condition. This one’s nearly four inches in diameter.

Caught in the act, ice cream cone in hand. But you wouldn’t expect any less, would you?

Ready to guess? If you said “the west coast”, you’re right! The first two photos were taken at the Crown Isle golf course clubhouse in Comox, BC. The food is from Deez Bar and Grill in Qualicum Beach, BC, and that’s me on the shore of the Salish Sea, ice cream in hand.

We’re on Vancouver Island for the week, soaking up some humidity and smelling the flowers while it snows in Calgary.

Our hotel is right on the shore, and from our window we’ve already seen harbour seals, a sea otter, bald eagles, common loons (the avian variety, though we’ve seen a few of the human sort, too), and thousands of surf scoters, black scoters, white-winged scoters, greater scaups, harlequin ducks, and of course, seagulls. Herring roe is lying in drifts along the shore, and the washed-up seaweed looks as though it’s been encrusted in yellow pearls. (Fortunately it’s not smelly.) I’m envying the stand-up paddleboarders and kayakers, but I’ll save that adventure for another trip.

We have lots of day trips planned, but we always have to go to one of my favourite places in the world: Cathedral Grove. This little pocket of old-growth forest is right off the Alberni Highway (#4), an enchanting few acres of giant trees that are hundreds of years old. No matter how often I go there, I still stand in awe.

Just in case you thought I was using a bit more artistic license than usual when I described hiding inside a cedar tree in Book 10 (oops; correction: Book 9. I’ve got Book 10 on the brain!)… there’s room to hide an entire baseball team in here!

Here we are in front of the tree that BC Parks has designated the biggest, though there are several others close to this size. Notice the “small” tree lying behind us – it’s actually the top of a fallen giant, only about 5’ in diameter at that point.

Kinda puts it all in perspective, doesn’t it? This sign was placed around 1992, so that means the big guy is coming up on his 900th birthday.

Yesterday we made it to the North Island Wildlife Recovery Centre and the World Parrot Refuge, and still on our to-do list are trips to Englishman River Falls, some wineries, and any other interesting side trips that catch our eyes in passing.

And best of all, the weather has been perfect so far. As the joke goes, “Weather is here; wish you were beautiful”.

Hope you’re having a good week – we are! 🙂

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P.S. We’re out and about this morning, but I’ll be back to reply to comments later tonight or tomorrow morning. “Talk” to you then!

Author Diane Henders

Canadian thrillers with humour and heart

Vancouver Island