Recently, technology has driven me crazy.  Rather than making life easier it has created it's own set of problems requiring a lot of attention and energy.  Our phone still doesn't work.  Not having a phone is an inconvenience, but dealing with the large corporation is far more aggravation than having no phone.  I have to repeat myself in my emails to "Cleve, in Montreal" continually.  He doesn't appear to be reading them.  I think he scans it quickly, skips down to the bottom and presses a button that gives a canned reply.  My difficulties with ABC Communications, my internet provider, are different, but similar.  While the people I email (because I can't phone) are less patronizing than Cleve in Montreal, still I find they do not actually read the whole email, as they suggest trying things that I have already tried, and said so in the email.   To add to this our expensive Bose soundock just quit working.  Just like that.  Dennis emailed the "help" people at Bose.  He told them what we had done to troubleshoot the problem.  Yup.  They wrote back and suggested we do exactly what I had done!! 

So with all this I finally said to Dennis that maybe we should just move into the bush with no power, no phone.  Dennis wasn't all that keen but read the signals that it was time to change the pace around here.  He went over to the beach in the forest service campground, built a fire, brought beer, wine, cheese, crackers, hotdogs and camp chairs.  While I was up bringing the ewes down to their over night paddock and making sure Ben was still on the right side of the fence, Dennis made all things ready on the beach.  We sat and drank wine, roasted hot dogs and watched the sun go down. 

We discussed the merits of living in the bush without conveniences (and there are many, believe me!), and the merits of status quo.  We even discussed moving to another place altogether.  We pondered what life would be like in a small town in Spain, Italy or Portugal.  Somewhere not too hot but not cold either.  However, we are here and that will not change any time soon.  We finally concluded that the best way to deal with these annoyances was to just not let it get to us (me).  So the phone is out.  Does it really matter?  Well, yes, in that I am paying for a service I am not receiving.  The internet is intermittent so I will just work around it.  After a bottle of wine and watching fish surface in the lake in front of me, I realized how unimportant Telus and internet were.   I refuse to let Telus or any other large, greedy corporation control how I feel.  In the meantime I am exploring other communication systems. 

Here are a few more shots of our pleasant time on the beach last night.  The roadway is the path that connects our house with the campground.  As you can see I am walking from East to West.  We see beautiful sunrises from our house but have to go to the campground on the other side of our little peninsula to see the sunsets.  A one minute walk:

 

 

The sunset was coloured by smoke blown in from the fire out at Morice Lake.  

Today I am going to work on the foundation for our generator.  Right now it just sits on the grass but it needs something more solid.  We want to build a permanent cover for it to keep it out of the weather.  We need a generator as we get a lot of power outages here, summer and winter.  In the summer it is usually caused by beavers cutting trees down which then fall on the hydro lines.  In the winter it is usually from the snow, or people slipping off the road and hitting power poles.  Bye for now.