The boss returns
Having spent a month with daughter Cassie, with 3 kids and 3 dogs climbing all over her face, as well as a visit from daughter Amy and 3 of her kids, Janice returned right on time to quarantine for 2 weeks. (What else is new?) She had a splendid time with great memories created with the kids and was eager to feed me before I lost any more weight.
Look grandma! I am slipping and sliding!
Future Parnelli Jones?
What a difference a month makes
Well its been a month since I wrote about my flying saga and ever so slowly I have made a 90% recovery to date. Gone are all the cuts and bruises. Some have said that with age it would take longer but that's ridiculous. Just the other day I was noticing that I had gone nearly 12 minutes without needing to pee. I will admit that I was worried as until very recently, my feet still felt like they had been beaten with a baseball bat and I wondered if they would ever completely heal. Without getting into a knock down discussion about politics, there are only 3 things I can't stand: needles, physical pain and not getting my way. But then I reminded myself that being bulletproof, it would take a lot more than an airplane crash to put me down. Besides it gave me enough time to take up bird watching, start a bug collection and binge watch 20 years of "As the world turns".
I have been told by many just how lucky I was not only to survive but to have had so few injuries. Seriously, I get it, really. But words have meaning and if you are a person of faith, you know perfectly well that 'luck' had absolutely nothing to do with it. We call it being blessed for a reason. I had two serious accidents on the water previously. What I failed to share with anyone at the time and pretty much only float plane pilots know, was the fact that 60% of aviation accidents on water result in a drowning. I survived two of them without so much as a bruise. The worse that happened was that my clothes got really wet. Pretty 'lucky', huh?
20 minutes before
1 hour later in the hospital
7 weeks later
Meanwhile, as Janice and I take turns meeting our medical appointments, we alternate which one of us is on yet another 14 day quarantine. With few breaks in between, we have now effectively been on lock down for the past 6 1/2 months, since March 1 in France. We have just realized that in all that time, the trash has gone out more than we have. Yet, when this is all over, we will still want some people to stay away from us ;) As I write, we return home to the US in 3 weeks, the day after we complete our latest quarantine here.
The Bee turns 20
Hard for us to believe but our beloved Honey Bee is now 20 years old. Well, it's obviously been around a lot longer than that and has had American owners since the late 1800's but we have been it's caretakers for the past 20 years.
We found it unexpectedly after traveling through Nova Scotia, considering the purchase of an island there but quickly realised that an ocean island was logistically all but impossible and besides, no one we knew would ever come to visit. Certainly none of our kids. We were on a vacation to attend a family reunion for my grandfathers 100th birthday held in Ottawa in 2000 when we spent a few days in the islands to visit Bolt Castle. We were having cocktails on the waterfront dock at the Gananoque Inn when Janice pulled out a real estate flyer showing the island for sale. The next morning we were on the water with the agent and by nightfall we were pretty much the owners.
Our teenage daughters who were enthusiastic about the purchase initially, refused to set foot in the mouse infested, dilapidated, just this side of a tear down sorry excuse for a former fishing cabin. It had no water or power but was within our nonexistent budget and our starry eyes could see nothing but potential. Our few immediate neighbors feared the worse, that the Californians would tear it down and build a glass and chrome monstrosity. It took 2 years to get a submarine power cable to the island while the agent who sold it to us assumed we had lost interest and offered to re sell it.
A mere 4 summers of 1 month vacation periods of dragging boatloads of trash to the dump, cooking under a tarp on the deck and living with bags of insulation in the living room, allowed us to have a flushing toilet at last. Slowly, things have improved ever since. In the end it seems to have worked out since numerous magazine articles, a book and a TV special segment have been devoted to the end result. But for us, it is just the Bee. Our beloved summer home.
Here is a sample
Making a grand entrance
Well the fleet grows. Being the proud owners of 6 vessels (two boats, two jet skis, a canoe and a boat the size of a bathtub to float flowers off our dock) we decided to add one more. Our choice had more holes and cracks in it than Swiss cheese, and could float like a brick. Besides, it was too long so I cut 6 feet out of the middle of it. OK, so it was not terribly expensive but heck, we are not made of money you know!
The saving grace were friends who allowed us to harvest Birch bark from their wooded property so I could do my Robinson Crusoe thing. The resulting effort now marks the entrance to Honey Bee Island.
