Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Charlotte

A long term member of our Pottery Club is moving away. Charlotte is retiring and moving to Victoria where she owns a condo. We had a luncheon for her today a the shop. These pot luck meals are terrific. I took my video camera along and taped about a half hour of the event. I hope it turns out Ok. It's sad to see old friends move along ... but then I guess we all move along eventually.

Charlotte was a teriffic potter. Her bowls and mugs always came out picture perfect as did her specialty items like Holiday decorations etc. She was always helpful with information and shared her knowledge with all of us beginners as we came along.

I have to get back to the pottery studio soon and get my hands back in the clay ... it's fun.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Fencing

Summer projects have begun. Two fences have to be built this year at the houses I take care of for my friends and landlords. The biggest one is almost done. I pre-painted all of the boards before putting them up and will give everything a second coat once it's all finished.

There are eves to clean and a parking lot to be built behind one of the houses which should increase revenue a bit. I will convert one of the garages into an office and rent it. As interest rates are going up the revenue has to be increased accordingly and these are passive ways of doing that rather than raising rents.

I'm looking for two more room-mates for my house and hopefully they'll come along soon enough and will be interesting and responsible people

The oil spill in the Gulf is terrible. If I had some extra funds I'd go and volunteer to help clean up the beaches ... but that's 4,000 miles from here and I'd need to find a room to rent. I figure each of those States struck with oil slick should be given $1 billion each from BP and without having to go to court ... this should be upfront money handed over to the individual states to do the clean up.

This is an indicaton that we really need to downsize the use of oil in N. America and find greener solutions for fuel. If we kill our oceans we'll make our lives pretty tough indeed.

An unusual spring here in the Okanagan, however the extra rain will help cut down the number of forest fires that happen every summer I suppose.