55: June Update

It’s June! Almost halfway through 2021, so what have I been doing with my time? Here’s an update:

I finished the Indigenous Canada course I was taking online, and have been working on learning more about the history of my own ancestors, as well as the Indigenous history of BC specifically. (As a side note, the enrolment in this course has increased significantly in the past couple of weeks since they discovered the remains of the 215 Indigenous children at the residential school site in Kamloops . I think a lot of people had no idea that Canada has such a terrible history and very recent past, so it is really helpful that this course is a free and convenient way to start educating yourself.)

I signed up for a free trial on Ancestry.com and traced each branch of my family back to when they arrived in Canada as settlers. I am not good with remembering dates and what significant events relate to those times in history, so I still have a lot to look into, but at least I have a framework now for approximate years and where they all came from.

I also took a primer course in Permaculture. It was just a basic overview of what Permaculture is and I found it really fascinating. There are a lot of free online courses available on this topic and I am planning to learn more, but I am not currently in the middle of any of them.

In related news, we have a few food items planted in our garden now: raspberries, haskap berries, garlic, arugula and rhubarb. It’s a small step towards a ‘food forest’ but it’s still exciting. The front garden is starting to look quite established, and we added our butterfly garden on the boulevard, as our contribution to the neighbourhood initiative I mentioned in my last post. The backyard, aside from the patio we put in, is still pretty wild, but it’s good for pollinators, so even if it looks like a disaster, it’s doing necessary work.

Our house deficiency list is a lot shorter than it was. We finished the kitchen ceiling and put in lighting over the island, which is a huge improvement from the unpainted mess with a light bulb dangling from the middle that was there before.

We have mostly stalled out on the list though as we’ve been focusing on the outside lately, but the leftover bits are nothing major and I am not going to forget about them. If I paint a section of trim every few weeks at least I am making progress.

We had a week off in May and we mostly used it to work on our garage. My dream is to turn it into a studio space and I’ve been saving all my money to make it happen. On our vacation, we replaced the roof! The old roof was in terrible shape but was somehow not leaking; we discovered this was most likely because the shingles that were in really bad shape were over a layer that wasn’t too damaged, over plywood, over cedar shingles…

We took off the top two layers of shingles and replaced any plywood that was rotten and then installed the new roof, plus two skylights! It was a very satisfying project and turned out surprisingly well considering we had never done any roofing and were just learning by reading the instructions on our products and watching Youtube videos.

During our week off, we also did some “fun” stuff. (I put that in quotation marks because the fun stuff pales in comparison to the satisfaction of getting that roof done by the end of the week.)

We went out for our first breakfast at Angelina’s since the pandemic started. We had tried picking up take-out from there once, but breakfast food just doesn’t travel well and it’s not the same as sitting in and enjoying a coffee and a good hot meal.

We also went downtown to the Van Gogh Experience. I learned some things I didn’t know, and it was something different to do after over a year of not going places, but I didn’t think the exhibit itself was all that spectacular. Riding the Skytrain and walking around downtown Vancouver after such a long time was probably more interesting than the actual show.

We’ve met up with a few long lost friends on our patio over the last couple of months and with summer coming and both of us close to being fully vaccinated, it seems like an increase in social interaction is within reach. I don’t miss big parties but I do look forward to being able to get together with small groups again.