I can relate to Charlie Brown....

I get him: The existential angst, the wondering "what it's all about," looking forward to things that end up turning into crap...

Just when the fireplace fiasco is behind us, we find ourselves mired in yet another swirl of frustration. The painter we fired is still beaking off. She mailed Lorenzo a long letter that only served to prove how ridiculous her final invoice was. There it was on paper, how each day was spent. Thirty hours in total  painting a seven-foot hallway & one short stairwell and...it's still not finished. Hour after expensive hour...day after slow-as-molasses day....one hundred and fifteen hours...and not a single room finished. The main floor has only been primed. This is headache number one.

Shortly after Lorenzo terminated her, and after he was sufficiently healed from the insult of being called a strange little man, he was told about another painter on the island. I was ready to pass out. Did you ever watch the series "Northern Exposure?" This is what passed through my mind: some guy in a plaid jacket with leaves and twigs stuck in his hair, lumbering up the driveway with a paint bucket. And a bong...

 But Lorenzo, the eternal optimist sunny-bunny that he is, took a chance on another islander. He came highly recommended, and he said he could finish the job in a few days and his quote was excellent. So he began working...

This weekend, Lorenzo stayed in town and we were almost giddy about it. Friday night, we went shopping downtown and then went out to our favourite Italian restaurant which is just down the street from our house. Red wine, flickering candle, all is right with the world. This was our anniversary dinner, six days late.

Saturday rolls around. Lorenzo's cell phone rings...I hear, "Oh no....you're kidding?"

When Lorenzo ran out of paint doing the ceiling, he went to Home Hardware and they colour-matched our Benjamin Moore paint to their Beauti-Tone paint. Their website guarantees a perfect match. The painter said there was a marked difference. Then I hear my husband suggesting that he come over with some Benjamin Moore paint. I felt this was ridiculous, to blow $150 on ferry trips just to deliver paint. So he called Home Hardware to explain the crisis that was unfolding.

The person in charge of colour-matching wasn't there. So, Lorenzo told the painter to continue with the walls. Problem is, he's running out of wall paint as well.

The next day, a brilliant solution appears: a Mayne Island courier will pick up the paint for us for a nominal fee. Great. We email him the colours, and everything is a go. But then...
Hurricane Dunderhead blows in and all the power goes off in our cottage. The winds rip through the island with such force that trees are down. A branch gets snapped off our maple tree and makes a bee-line for the painter's truck. It misses his bumper by an inch. My uncle's boat canopy gets launched into the air like a frisbee and ends up trapped upside down against his house.

Paintus interruptus.

At this point, all professionalism is gone. My poor Guido whines to the painter, "Are we cursed? Is the entire universe aligned against us? Will my cottage ever get painted?" Calmly, the painter explains that power outages happen all the time. Don't worry dude, your cottage will get painted.

In the meantime, a molar that I've had root canalled twice was starting to act up. An excursion into dental hell unfolds and I'm applying every home remedy in my arsenal: tea tree oil, peppermint oil, seal-salt compresses....  The lovely cozy weekend we envisioned turns into a black swirl of pain. The rain is pounding down, the kids are making noise, my son is hammering on his drums, the dog wants to go for a walk. And then everyone wants dinner...

Today, I saw my dentist and the tooth has to be extracted. Here is my prediction: in the not-so-distant future, we will regard root canals with same disbelief that we imagine blood-letting, or arsenic cures from the 18th century. Root canals fail at least 50-percent of the time because anaerobic bacteria is almost always present in the root. Left trapped, without oxygen, it mutates. Years go by, and then BOOM. I will never have another root canal. They are being linked to many auto-immune diseases.

If you grew up in the 1970's, there's a good chance your mouth was drilled to smithereens. My brother, sister, and myself must have had the most sadistic dentist who ever lived. All of us have been told that our molars were drilled beyond anything that was reasonable or even ethical. Did our parents notice? They were too busy watching Carol Burnett...

My kids have never had a cavity. But we were always being told that we had cavities, and now I think it was all a pile of BS. So there's a good chance that I'm going to have serious problems with my overly-drilled molars. So I went to the library and started reading these books... I've learned a lot.

 

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So that's the scoop.
The good news is, Lorenzo and I are always able to come up with " what if " scenarios that leave us doubled over in hysterics: a massive pine tree is going to squash our cottage. The painter will get attacked by a bat. He'll slip on a frog. It's a glorious sunny day on Mayne Island but there's a gloomy rain-cloud suspended over our cottage. The neighbours are having a pleasant barbecue while Lorenzo does battle with a plague of blood-thirsty locusts.

Our cottage starts to decay before our very eyes, like something out of a horror movie...

It felt good to laugh, even though it hurt my infected tooth.


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Here is one really exciting thing to report: I was determined to learn Oscar Peterson's "Hymn to Freedom." So I went to Long & McQuade and dealt with a really dumb guy who thought it was spelled "Him." Then he typed in "Peaterson" and "Oskar" until I nearly wept. Finally, I got the book ordered.

When it arrived and I began to play it, I quickly realized that it was a cheesed-down version and it lacked all of the snappy piano licks that I was desperate to learn. After doing some snooping around on the internet, I found out that many years ago, Oscar Peterson put out a book called "Note for Note" which featured exact transcriptions of his pieces. Yay! All I have to do is get this book and I'll turn into a wicked piano player. But the book is out of print and is being sold on Amazon and Ebay for upwards of $900. I was deflated. On a whim, I checked the Vancouver Library data base and....oh my god, they have a copy. This is the best thing to happen to me in so long - I can't wait until my request comes in.

What else? When I felt like I wanted to drop a canon-ball on our cottage, I escaped into house fantasy and downloaded pictures that cheered me up. And gave me inspiration...

What a beautiful house. Our cottage has the same Dutch colonial design...with a few tweaks, it has potential and maybe it could end up not looking so much like the Amityville Horror House...

What I hate most about the exterior are the blue deck railings. They are such an eye-sore and they're an obstacle to enjoying the nature that surrounds us...

We're thinking of replacing them with cable-wire. I love this - your eye passes right through the railing because the cable-wire is almost visually transparent. With all of our surrounding trees, it would feel as though we're suspended in a tree house...

Stainless steel cable wire is very expensive, but there are much cheaper options. Lorenzo says this will be very time-consuming and tricky. I have faith that he can do it! 

I also find myself pondering our small deck on the south-side of the cottage. I want this to be a very special spot, because I love the sun and I think it could be made very pretty. Here is how it looks now...

And here is how it could be!

Our plan is do board & batten siding...

add some decorative accents...

and voila! Our little engine-that-could, our sad Charlie Brown tree of a cottage, could end up like this. Seriously, it could...

And here's what else I'm excited about. Our cottage is on a corner, and sits atop a hill...

This presents many landscape challenges. We have a third of an acre to play with - right now your eye just travels downward. A giant slope is only good if you`re planning to buy a toboggan...

and currently, it's not very pretty...

But it is going to be a glorious, magical piece of island property. We're going to terrace the land, add plantings, have sneaky little areas to sit and read a book, and when it's done...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It will be a lot of hard work, but I'm looking forward to it. I already know what I want to plant, and once the inside is finished, we'll be itching to get going on another project. We are incapable of sitting around doing nothing. So I did some reading on grass, because in the summer grass typically looks burnt and ugly. Here is the typical west-coast lawn in summer...

 We keep planting the wrong grass. You need grass with deeper roots.

Lorenzo wonders what I do on the computer. I research stuff. Check this out:

A guy spent eight years developing a grass seed that has won awards and was featured in This Old House magazine. It's called Pearl's Premium...

Requires no chemicals, guaranteed to be lush and green with only one watering and one mowing per month. Think of the carbon footprint of the typical stupid lawn: gas mowers pumping pollution into the air, noise, fertilizers, thousands of gallons of water...it's insane. I'm going to plant Pearl's Premium seed in between flower beds. The pictures are terrific...

And it's guaranteed to thrive and flourish in the toughest of conditions...

Well, that's my blog for tonight. I need to take my penicillin now...