9th August 2009

Thought it was time to make time for an update.

STILL house hunting. I found couple more and put a bid in on a 3 bedroom 1920's log home, but missed it by about 5 minutes. Still playing a "chess-game" with the bank on the home I put an offer in weeks and months(?) ago. It is a bank repo, so patience in that cat-and-mouse game is a virtue. I just wish they would hurry up and say yes to my offer so I can do repairs before baby gets here and winter hits with all the rains. Replacing a floor in rainy Oregon, doesn't sound too cool.. I did it before, including floor joists at my former homestead in Oregon, but that happened during the summer months.

There is also another 5 acre bare piece I am working with the state and county government on as it is all tied up with paperwork. THAT would be my 1st choice, the bank repo the second for land quality. I don't really care what the house is like, it is the land which it all boils down to for me... you can always burn down the house but you cannot change the land very well. I lost track of how many places I have looked at, well into the hundreds. I just don't want to settle for something I will be unhappy with.

The heatwave here almost did me in. I am not used to the heat or the humidity anymore. One day at mom's it was 111F for about 20 minutes in the afternoon and well over 100F each day. It was setting new records. The heat waves lasted about a week I think.. maybe 9 days.

To escape from the heat and relax a bit from all the madness of moving, househunting, living out of a backpack, driving back and forth to Canada, paperwork on both sides of the border, a friend came to visit me and another friend and we went into the mountains to seek a hot spring ironically. I stayed in the cool end which was 78F and which had a cold water divert from the cold mountain stream, while others, played in the various temperature pools, some of which were more than 110F that day. It is always gorgeous and surreal there.

That night we took two tents and tent camped it and as long as my hips were well padded, I sleep fine on the ground. 'Cyrus' went with us  and he had fun too. There was a doe deer who came through our camp  and was nose-to-nose with 'Cyrus', not once, but twice.

Campfires were allowed in the firepits, so we had our dinner cooked in a cast iron pan over the flames. I fell asleep listening to the river rumble by.

Photo Above: Seven months pregnant and camping in a lovely spot in the Cascade Mountains.

I slept better than I have in weeks, as it was cooler than the bedroom I have been staying in with the cats and no city noise. It is not helping my hips are starting to ache constantly so I have to rotisserie myself often while sleeping (I am only supposed to sleep on my sides.. preferably the left side for better blood flow), horrible leg cramps and swollen feet with the heat and driving amounts.

The next morning found us in the hot springs for a quick soak after a good breakfast of french toast, apple/chicken sausage and fruit, before we met my family at the beach for 2 days. It was so much cooler there as well. My friend had not been crabbing or clamming before, so we procured a crabbing ring since there were no minus tides that week for clamming and we set out to get some crab.

Photo Above: Soaked in my favorite hot springs this day. I barely made it around the edge of the top pool without getting wet as it was 111F in the top pool that day, which was too hot for me. I stayed in the bottom 87F pool most of the time other than for this photo. The hot water comes out of the cave to the right of me.

We had a blast although we only caught Japanese Red Rocks. That elusive Dungeonous male crab of the legal size was being shy. All told we probably caught and threw back over 100 crabs.. we kept 4. I showed how to cook and clean crabs and we had a feast later on. We also caught alot of PINK starfish (I have never seen a pink one before) and a couple eels.

Photo Above: Some of the crabs caught down at the coast. We only kept 4.

Too soon I had to toss my friend back on an airplane and then myself heading back to Canada from the airport with 'Cyrus' as a traveling companion for me.

Wildfires were horrendous even in the lower mainland of BC and $400 fines for any campfires. I saw many firefighting camps with helicopters, tankers, temporary housing and other vehicles. Smoke was harsh and visibility was 1-2 miles.

Everything is going well with the baby at my appointment. My swollen feet my doctor is not concerned about as my blood pressure is very good. She said it was mostly from the heat and driving so much. Then I had to go to the hospital for various blood tests again and wait around and then have more taken. Now that it has been cooler, my feet have stayed their normal size. Once or twice, they certainly did not look like my own and I was getting pitted edema.. which looks horrible, but is fun to play with to see how long one can stay 'dented'.

Due to the length of my tests, I was late starting back south and so I was lucky that I had not taken my new tent or sleeping bags out of my vehicle. I just decided to tent camp it at the halfway point. I knew I survived tent camping a
few days earlier. Wildfires and backburning made visibility due to the smoke from wildfires even worse than the day before. One spray painted hand painted sign on a post proclaimed 'Firecamp #1020'.

Fire activity in British Columbia is at the highest level ever seen before, with more than 2,300 started this season, 800 more than at the same time in the horrible fire season of 2003. Thousands of British Columbians were/have been ordered out of their homes over the last month as fires threatened several communities, from Bella Coola on the central coast to West Kelowna in the Okanagan and Lillooet, north of Vancouver. Whole towns have been evacuated.. some more than once. Poor people!

I set up my new tent in about 5 minutes in the dark (thankfully we set it up a few days before, so I knew what it looked like.. I just retired my old tent of 18+ years and decided a new one was in order). Morning woke me with roosters crowing from somewhere and about 6 helicopters taking off into the air for fire related things. Still I slept very well, then packed up and continued south.

Made it back and immediately started house hunting again. Thankfully the weather is much much cooler.... by about 20 degrees cooler.