We had some visitors for the past several days. Irene’s cousin Anne and Anne’s husband Lester spent a couple of days with us as they travelled east through the province on their way to Alberta.
We had a really nice visit. I’m not exactly a social animal, but once I get going I probably can talk the ears off of a brass monkey. We had some good chats about a number of things we can’t really control: economics, politics, artificial intelligence, social media, and health. Good meals were prepared and eaten and a few drinks were consumed. And we had some lovely evenings sitting on the porch chatting as the light of the day dissipated.
I went into some detail early in 2024 regarding Irene’s cancer diagnosis and how the treatment had progressed to that point. Back then we were still figuring out our ‘new normal’, and although the outcomes were positive it was still a very uncomfortable situation.
Not much has changed medically since January but I thought it was appropriate to give an update on how our life with cancer is progressing.
We live in a forest on the side of a small mountain. But our house is also just five minutes or so from the Castlegar’s downtown, so sharing our acreage with wildlife still seems rather surprising to me.
Recently we’ve been visited by a few reminders of where we live.
I had planned on posting something new about our stairway construction by now, an upgrade that was already delayed from 2021. Unfortunately that still isn’t done despite being ‘in progress’ since the beginning of May.
Instead, I’ve decided to post some pictures from around the house and a few words about how the year has gone. Most of the pictures have already made an appearance on Facebook- apologies for folks who follow me there as well. But the words are mostly ‘new’…
The snowfall this year in Castlegar has been a bit…much. I’ve given my lawn tractor’s snowblower a good workout.
But memory is a fickle thing: our brains edit and generate content to create a story. So I decided to post a few comparison photos of our new Kootenay winter life.
Sometimes smoke really does mean fire. And in our case, it was an ‘interface wildfire’ that came within about a kilometre of our new home on July 1 of 2021.
