This Summer

I discovered a comment on one of my posts on the blog today and it amused me very much. Mr Bossence (from the Bayfield Bunch) asked me how come I have not had any updates on here since June (actually he didn't put in the month June but I did ). For some time now, I have been reading and following along with some blogs written by some people who live in their RVs or at least travel in them, especially in the winter and travel down through the southern USA. Mr. Al. Bossence and his wife live and work in the community of Bayfield,Ontario near Goderich. I commented to Al that I felt he did very well keeping up on his blog all through the summer even though they are sitting still and not moving around with their RV

I keep thinking about what a person does to fill in space on the blog when there really isn't too much to chatter about, in this case I mean the summertime. I guess if you really want, you could invent things to talk about but in my case, I didn't care to make a whole bunch of idle chatter and I had been busy with a great lot of jobs and activities around the house and country to keep me busy.

My wife and I bought our home in August of 2006 and we, of course, bought it with the realization that it had imperfections and repairs were needed in the future to keep it in liveable condition. Well this year is the year that our shop needed a new roof, or else. We had a certain amount of cash to deal with and everyone knows that money does not grow on trees so a person has to make the money stretch as far as possible and that is what we do all of the time. I had a contractor approach me with an offer to do the rooof for a sum of money and I simply told him that I didn't have that amount of money. I had replaced rooves on previous buildings that we had lived at or owned and I knew that I could possibly do it again here but after my accident 14 years ago, my back does not want to co-operate with me to do this type of labour, including loading and unloading shingles to and from a trailer.

I had talked to different people about roofing and heard the comment that steel was the way to go. I checked out prices on steel roof material and found that a lumber yard near Earlton had excellent prices so this is what I did. I figured that there would be work involved as in strapping the old roof over top of the old shingles and laying the steel on top of that without the back breaking work of handling the old shingles. I also expected that I could get some ocassional help from friends to get the hard parts done and I was correct. Over the period of about three weeks of part time work , the job is done and I expect to have a dry shop and garage area for many years to come.

I also have been busy selling and installing Free to Air Satellite systems this year and it has kept me occupied doing that. I am not an expert in this field but in the past, 1983-1988, I used to sell and install the big 10ft dish systems when we lived in Southern Ontario operating our own tv sales and service business. It has been a real learning experience figuring out how to set up a motorized system but I must say that overall I don't mind doing it.I have installed most of them in the Kirkland Lake area but I did do one below Englehart recently. When I first started doing them this year, I would install them on a tripod mounted on our deck on the south side of the house. I had already had our own there for two winters with no apparent trouble but when I got to the point that I had two systems on the same deck, the frost decided to play havoc with the level of the deck and threw the aim of both of them off so I lost most of my stations. I had to come up with a better solution and I decided to use my cargo trailer to set up the dishes and level them on it, then things started to work out and no doubt people would wonder if I was growing satellite systems instead of a garden.

We also have been working on our basement insulating the walls to keep out the cold and keep in the heat. We had to tear apart the walls of the fruit cellar to be able to apply a proper layer of sheet insulation and also applying a layer of hydraulic cement to the floor to wall join to help keep the moisture out. There is also a small area on the entrance of the house where there are stairs to take you to the second floor and the basement and the basement area had to be insulated as well so this is where we spent many hours.

So as you can see, this is where all of the "spare" hours went this summer instead of writing blog articles. I have included pictures of the new roof, the dish farm on the trailer (most of the dishes are gone now) and the outside of our home. I hope that this has explained our coming and going for the summer.

Wilf Blakey