I must say I am feeling pretty special and very lucky to have been one to receive the second dose of the covid vaccine. Here in BC there are multimillionaires who are breaking the law in order to get the vaccine.

Josh, our son, got his yesterday, and sounds like he had a rough night with fevers etc. We both got ours this early because we both work in LTC. I guess it is a “perk” of the highest order. When it boils down to it, it is NOT to protect us, but to make us less apt to inadvertently infect those in Long term care.

It was ironic (and very sad) to have lost a friend to the disease yesterday. https://www.post-gazette.com/ae/2021/02/03/Anne-Feeney-obituary-folk-singer-political-activist-death-69/stories/202102030167

Anne Feeney, to any who attended any of our house concerts back in Bandon, was a frequent guest. In fact Anne is the one who convinced me to begin the concert series. She had survived Lung cancer to everyones surprise (including her own), but I am sure that the damage done from that left her more exposed to the more severe form of Covid. Someone just posted on facebook that 100,000 Americans had died of the virus just since the beginning of the year, and I guess Anne was one of them. So sad, the article explains a lot about her activism and what a wonder she was.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, our area (our province and even our part of the province) have fared quite well in that we have not seen a lot of cases, but the past few months the numbers have gone way up in our area, and our nursing homes have had outbreaks and even deaths, and now we have a large outbreak of 91 at our closest hospital. Ken and I have essentially hunkered down and pretty much stayed home since before Christmas. This has been mostly because we have so much to do with the house, and also because there is very little to do safely anywhere else. I guess we have been doing this for a year or so, but it is more apparent with winter, the whole isolation thing. This picture is quite amazing… a phenomena that we have noticed when there is a cloud over the lake and a calm lake, you can see the reflection of the other side of the lake on the water, but you cannot see it directly. Kinda sneaky.

The thing about living on the Northside of a mountain, is that there IS a part of the winter that you do not “see” the sun for a period of time before the solstice and after. It is hard for us to know exactly how long that time frame IS, because around here, NO ONE sees the sun for long periods of time. A few weeks ago we got a glimpse of the sun in the morning, and then yesterday it was a sunny day and we had sun for several hours. We finally eked out a few KW from our solar panels.

We try to do a big loop of all of the properties up here every morning. With all the freeze melt, freeze melting, our driveway is solid ice, so we are thinking next year of just letting nature take its course and having a skating rink

we did finally get all the outside siding done and this is what it looks like from the front. A bit odd?

We have been working hard at getting a shower finished, but with all of the details we have put into this, it is taking forever. We purchased a large thick glass window from a friend (the kind you use on out door decks), and then Ken (with some help) was able to create a frame for the window (with cedar finished with the vinegar/steel wool solution), and lift it into place.

Ken made the funky little cabinet on the side of the mirror (there is one on the other side) from these window we hav been packing around for years that came from a ???ship?

I must say we ARE having fun seeing a need for some THING ….. and then rummaging though what we have to create that THING.

The showers were not intended to have tiles on the floor of them, however… the concrete did not work out as planned and so we opted to tile the floors to cover up the ?weird? concrete. So we ended up with a lip where the tiles end. Likely a good place to stub your toe. So I hauled out my polished rocks and created a more gradual landing… from the shower.

and then the OTHER shower……

So we needed someone to check out his Dad’s work… he seems OK with it?? This is Talon our grandson, his dad, is our son Dylan… and he is a plumber.

We do not get quite as much done on the days we have Talon, but we have LOTS of fun.

I must say we are totally loving our house and feeling very grateful to be in a house that is so far removed from town.

We are loving our house more all the time.

Much love to all. Janet, Ken and Tucker…