Took a while getting here this year – but after the snow, rain, hail, winds, damp, grey skies and general lacklustre demeanor – Spring is finally putting in an appearance. Mother Nature – who has been drumming her fingers on the counter-top for some weeks now – enquires frostily (seemed appropriate):
“What kept you”?
Cue the usual annual photos of Mother Nature doing what she does best…
In my last missive I told the sorry tale of the Mobiliser that has ceased to mobilize!
The Girl ain’t happy – and when The Girl ain’t happy… well – you can join the dots for yourself.
So – what is to be done?
Naturally, I contacted the small English firm who make and sell the device. I sent them a recording of the machine’s death rattle and explained the symptoms. They were most helpful and – sight unseen – hazarded a cautious guess at what the problem might be (servo motor gearbox). They even gave me a ball park (and somewhat heart-stopping) figure for fixing the beast…
…if we could get the Mobiliser back to the UK.
Now – this thing folds in half and we sensibly kept the big cardboard box in which it came, but when packaged up the thing has dimensions of:
length: 46″ – breadth: 27″ – depth: 9″
…so – it isn’t small – and it weighs 40lb!
Canada Post were helpful – but quoted us a figure of around $800 dollars for the one-way trip. I swallowed hard, but that was as nothing compared to Fedex who quoted me double that amount (and are probably amongst the cheaper carriers). Canada Post man also suggested that I try Air Canada Cargo – which I thought was a good idea. They would have been happy to help, but pointed out that getting the box back to Heathrow is only half of the battle. Once there one has to hire a broker to get the thing through customs.
“The cheapest option” – opined Canada Post man – “would be to take it there yourself“.
Now – as it happens The Girl and I are heading to the UK in about two and a half weeks time. The trouble is, we are not going to the south east – where the company is based – but to Scotland. If all goes to plan we should be at Heathrow for about six hours as we transit from west to north. Perhaps there is a way of arranging a hookup with some helpful person who could relieve us of this weighty package and see that it gets to the manufacturer… then, three weeks later, could get it back to us on the return journey!
This is the sort of plan that works fine in practice but contains all sort of traps and gotchas that can throw the whole thing into chaos and confusion. “But surely” – I sense you thinking – “air travel these days has become so routine and prosaic that all such things must be feasible“. All we need to do, you might think, is to cast our minds back to our recently travel experiences to set our minds at rest… Oh!!…
Contemplation and negotiations continue. We are determined that we must come up with some solution, because The Girl is sorely (see what I did there?) missing her regular treatments.
Look out for further installments….
Tags: Canada Post, Health, Mobiliser, The Girl, Travel
“There is such a thing as tempting the gods. Talking too much, too soon and with too much self-satisfaction has always seemed to me a sure way to court disaster. The forces of retribution are always listening. They never sleep”.
Meg Greenfield
Just a few short posts back – in an offering entitled ‘Make it beautiful‘ – I ventured a short disquisition on the subject of permanence and impermanence. I wasn’t being particularly provocative – or so I thought. Apparently the fates saw things differently and no more than a couple of posts later I found myself having to relay the tale of our exploding (or more likely imploding) shower screen in a post titled ‘Synchronicity‘.
That particular mess is going to take a while to clear up (figuratively speaking!). The manufacturers of the screen rapidly ‘fessed up to what was most likely a manufacturing fault by the simple expedient of sending us, in short order, a replacement under warranty. I got in touch with our excellent contractor who had overseen our original renovation and came away with a list of contacts to get the bath re-surfaced (lots of pits and scratches from the falling glass) a man to install the new screen and another to put us in a new hot water tank (not directly related but I did mention it in the first post above).
The problem is that these things must be done in the correct sequence… nothing can happen until the bath is restored, and the bath restorers clearly have enough work on to take them through to next Christmas. I am still awaiting a call-back…
I had hoped that things would now settle down on the bad news front. Sadly, it seems that the gods are not finished with us quite yet.
A little over a decade ago – whilst The Girl and I were still resident in the UK – we purchased a device that the manufacturers describe as a ‘spinal mobiliser’. It is a sort of massage machine upon which one lays and which – by means of a system of rollers – stretches out the vertebrae whilst simultaneously massaging the surrounding muscle tissues. We came across this thing at (of all places!) the Windsor Horse Show. Horsemen and women are, it seems, much in need of such treatments after a heavy day’s competing in the saddle.
Now, as long as I have known her The Girl has suffered from Sciatica. There at the horse show she hopped (gently) up onto the demo device on the stand and immediately fell in love with the relief that it provided. The machine was an expensive beast – costing several thousand pounds even back then – so we hired one for a month to be sure that it was worth the outlay.
The answer being greatly in the affirmative we scraped together the monies and made the investment. When we later came to Canada the machine came with us (there being no equivalent over here, apparently) though we were obliged to purchase a big step-down transformer because the device only ran on 220V.
It would be an understatement to say that the Mobiliser has served us well and it has more than paid for itself. The Girl uses it most days and it is quite common for those visiting us to jump aboard as well. It was, thus, was a considerable shock when – just over a week ago – the machine emitted a plaintive rattling sound and gave up the ghost.
So – we now have something else that requires fixing. I shall have more to say on the subject in my next post.
Needless to say – The Girl is not happy.
Tags: Home, House, Mobiliser, permanence, The Girl
A few more images from the City of Glass!
All of these photos – as well as the images in the previous post – were taken from the window of our hotel room in Coal Harbour.
Cool – huh?!
To Vancouver last weekend for a work event…
That is one of The Girl’s work events, of course. I only work from home these days – and more power to that – but The Girl’s new venture is sending her darting about hither and thither just at the moment and on this occasion I went along for the ride.
We were kept pretty busy eventing (which all went pretty well, as far as I was able to ascertain) but we still had time to dine out in a manner to which we are no longer as accustomed as once we were (probably a good thing!)
We didn’t get to do much more than that in Vancouver (unless you count a fairly brief visit to IKEA on the way back) but given that the weather was pretty terrible (blowing half a gale in the Georgia Strait) that was a good call.
When the cloud cover blew away late in the day I thought I would take some photos from our room of the early evening light playing on downtown Vancouver’s signature glass edifices. Herewith some examples:
A couple of posts back I was musing upon the permanence/impermanence of things – including those items of domestic appurtenance with which we surround ourselves.
My last post concerned the domestic refurbishments/renewals we have recently effected to enhance our living spaces.
What odds then that this next post must needs concern a matter that touches on both of those last two topics. As the saying goes in London (on the subject of the London omnibus):
”You wait fifteen minutes and then three come along at once!”
Last weekend The Girl flew off to Prince George (for non-Canadians: in BC but way up north and still in the middle of winter) for a work event. She did not return until late on Wednesday evening.
The day before her return I had, in the morning, attended my regular fitness class – and had upon my return home made myself a cup of coffee, the which I was enjoying whilst checking my emails at the very peninsula in our kitchen at which I am writing this missive.
All of a sudden there was an almighty crash from somewhere close at hand, though I was unable to ascertain immediately whence the sound had emanated. Naturally I at once set off around the house to see if I could discover the cause of this loud report. The Master Bedroom was clear, but when I entered the en suite bathroom I came face to face with this:
Wow! The inner fixed glass screen of our bath/shower had shattered into a gazillion fragments, most of which had fallen into the bath. There followed an extensive and delicate operation to remove all of the glass debris from the room. Naturally it had gone everywhere.
The very next thing to do was to question the InterWebNet as to how such a thing might have happened. We had the shower screen installed when we renovated the house in 2017, so it is not that old. Google informed me that such happenings are not exactly rare – though the odds of being hit by flying glass whilst in the shower are apparently a fair bit less than those of being struck by lightening.
There is – it seems – always a cause for such a calamity, be that a manufacturing defect or damage caused to the screen during installation. Tempered glass is, of course, effectively under constant tension and a small flaw can spread suddenly and explosively… as we have seen.
Now, of course, we will have to battle to get the screen replaced. Sigh!
I was just very glad that The Girl was not at home – and certainly that she was not in the shower. I am also very glad that I was at home. I don’t go into the en suite (the which is The Girl’s bathroom) except to hoover it – and had I not heard the crash the first we would have known about it was when she arrived home at 11:30pm from Prince George and went into her bathroom to prepare for bed. That would definitely not have been a laughing matter.
Phew!
Tags: Accident, Home, House, Renovation, The Girl
The home is a human institution. All human institutions are open to improvement.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
As we wait for spring to arrive (today the sun shone – then it hailed, whilst the sun still shone – then it clouded over and big fluffy snowflakes started falling. We are now left with what is, I am assured, termed a ‘dusting’!) our thoughts inevitably turn to matters inside the home.
The Girl and I are very fond of our dark-wood furniture – a fair amount of which followed us here from the UK. One ensemble that did not was our rather fine twin pedestal dining room table and matching chairs – the which we acquired here in Victoria from some folks who no longer had room for it. For a reproduction suite it was and is really pretty splendid, with the exception of the rather tasteless fabric with which the chairs had been re-covered. Having lived with this for a couple of years we decided that it was high time to get things upgraded.
As is often the way here in Canada we rapidly established that the perfectionist friend of ours – who did all the difficult painting when we renovated our main floor some years back – was also a wiz at re-upholstering chairs and benches. Cool! She has just completed the task – perfectly as ever – and we thank her most gratefully.
Whilst we were at it we thought we would buy a couple of nice stools for the peninsula between our kitchen and dining room – and a dark-wood plant stand for our over exuberant spider plant.
Anyhow – I thought you might like to see a few photos…
Tags: Friends, Home, House, Photo, Renovation
“The beautiful journey of today can only begin when we learn to let go of yesterday”
Steve Maraboli
My last post to this journal ended with this sentence:
“Anyway – I feel that it will not be long until the news here, at least, takes a turn for the better“.
The very next day…
Quite enough has been written in these postings over the last ten months concerning our abortive attempt at a trip of a lifetime, featuring an all bells and whistles safari to Botswana. If you somehow missed the saga of how British Airways wrote off our epic adventure (along with a considerable chunk of our savings) then simply use the search feature on the home page. A search for “British Airways” or any one of a number of expletives should return the information that you seek.
Back in December – shortly before Christmas – this post brought regular readers up to date with the current status of our long (out)standing insurance claims – by means of which we hoped to recover at least some of our outlay. At that point (back in November) the girl had received a partial payment from our main insurers but I had heard nothing. The post ended thus:
“We must, of course, needs be patient yet and wait and see what happens…”
So – back to where we started:
The very next day…
…I received in the post a cheque from our insurers. It was for the full amount of the claim (actually by a small but discernible margin rather more than I was expecting).
Hoo-bloomin’-rah!
Delighted as she was for me, The Girl was understandably put out that she had been left out of this little bonanza.
However – the very next day (again!)…
…another missive arrived from the insurers, this time including a cheque for the residue of her claim.
Hoo-bloomin’-rah-some-more!
Where does this leave us? Well – all the claims that could be met and all the payments that the various parties could not avoid making – are in. We have, between the two of us, recovered something in excess of $24,000 (CAD). That might seem impressive had we not laid out just slightly less than $40,000 (CAD) on the trip and the recovery operation as a whole.
Well – we did get a (hugely expensive) week in the UK, though much of that time was spent either on the phone to British Airways or being unable to sleep because of a growing sense of panic.
No matter. ‘Tis over and done and we have all the closure we are going to get.
I promise that I will do my damnedest not to mention it again.
Tags: Africa, British Airways, Holiday, incompetence, Money, safari, Travel
“I’m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in. I’m here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.”
Hala Alyan
I find myself sitting here – on a blustery Valentine’s day – gazing from my studio window at the grey, choppy sea and the distant mountains – pondering questions of (im)permanence.
There is no question – regardless of anything that we might do – that this sea and these mountains will exist long enough to register as permanent (certainly by comparison with our measly four score and ten)… whereas the cherry blossom which is just starting to bloom on the tree at the bottom of our garden will be gone in a few short days (weeks at most).
A few years back – shortly after we came to Canada – I wrote a song which bore the title – ‘Cascadia‘. The lyric started thus:
Where I come from we are rooted in the land
Sinking where we stand in the slow sand
We know who we are – we’ve been here for so long
That even when we’re wrong we don’t care
In new found lands – where cities tremble on the brink
Closer than they think to Armageddon
Machines turn to rust and tremors shake the crust
Dominions of dust are blown away
The song came about because I was fascinated – having just moved to Canada – that in a country in which everything was considerably inflated by comparison with its north European counterparts (distances greater, climate more extreme, animals wilder, terrain more difficult) and subject to all manner of extreme events (snow storms, earthquakes, heat domes, avalanches, wildfires, arctic outflows, etc, etc) – domestic construction is, as far as one can tell, a good deal less robust than that to which we ‘old-worlders’ are accustomed.
Back in the UK I owned – at various times – portions of several houses constructed in the 1740s. Such buildings may have their short-comings by modern standards but they were clearly intended to last and tend to be fairly firmly embedded in the dark soils upon which they are erected.
Here in British Columbia most residential properties are constructed primarily of wood (no surprise there) and sit lightly upon the land. They are also considerably less valuable than are the plots of land upon which they are built. In many instances – should one see a house of maybe thirty or forty years of age for sale – one is not surprised when the purchasers simply tear it down and build a new one.
Even the fabric and fittings of these buildings seem destined not to be long for this world. Our house dates from the late 1970s and is thus positively ancient by Canadian standards. We were advised upon purchase that it had had its roof replaced some twelve years before our purchase – the which was therefore around halfway through its expected life (the shingles at least). The slate roof of our apartment in Buckinghamshire in the UK dated was back to sometime in the 19th century! The hot water tank here (powered in Canada by what we Brits would call an immersion heater) was replaced (cheaply!) when the house was put on the market in 2015. The Girl assures me that it is thus nearing the end of its useful life and must needs be exchanged for something more robust. I am sure that she is not wrong!
I am not entirely sure why I am musing upon such matters at this point – though the long wait for spring might have something to do with it. Yesterday and today have been particularly blustery and we were without power for a number of hours overnight – though fortunately all was restored by the time we awoke (thanks BC Hydro!).
Anyway – I feel that it will not be long until the news here, at least, takes a turn for the better.
The deep roots never doubt spring will come
Marti Rubin
American author Lionel Shriver wrote:
“February is for curmudgeons, whinge-bags, and misanthropes. You can’t begrudge us one month of the year or blame us for being even crabbier, it’s so short. There is nothing good about it, which is why it’s so great”.
Ah – ha! Not so short this year… this being a leap year!
That aside it is not altogether difficult to agree with Ms Schriver. By the time one has finished exhaustively cataloging all the reasons why February in so darn cheerless (Six Nations Rugby aside) it is almost over.
Hmmm!
However, what we all know – of course – is that under the forbiddingly dark, dank, semi-frozen soil, all of the tender young shoots are working out – gathering their strength ready to burst forth just as soon as spring gets the go-ahead. It may not look as though too much is happening right now – but it is all just waiting for the call to arms.
Now – as it happens this is not too bad an analogy for how things appear chez The Girl and I. To the casual observer nothing much might seem to be happening – but that would be misleading. We are currently both working (so much for retirement!) from home.
Having spent a considerable amount of time (and money) over the last few post-COVID years, driving into one or other of the College’s Victoria campuses, I find myself this year co-ordinating an online course from the comfort of my studio. I say co-ordinating – rather than teaching – because this course is entirely asynchronous… which means that I prepare course materials, make little videos, post all manner of resources on our learning platform and wait for assignments to roll in for marking. It is a not altogether unpleasant way of going about things, though I do miss the face to face teaching a little. It does seem to be – however – what the students require nowadays.
The Girl is also beavering away in her home office, on the project that cannot yet be named. Her endeavours actually also involve some travel (concerning which I am less keen) – but she does have a sparkle in her eye, which is good to see. Let’s hope that it stays there!
So – for now we just ‘sit back’ and wait. Spring will soon be here!
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