Last week, Chris and I were kicking around the idea of driving the Labrador Highway one day when we have a trailer. This would involve a major time commitment as we would first have to get across the continent.

When I was but a shaver, I lived in Goose Bay for a while. I remembered it fondly for many years, although I can’t really say why. It was cold, grey, and insect-ridden. The brief summer got only warmish, and the last of the snow didn’t melt till school was out. However, we did manage to get into trouble for tobogganing off a roof onto a snowbank. It wasn’t as dangerous as it sounds: the roof was that of a 1 storey rancher at the end of the row, and the snowbank came to within a couple of feet of the eaves.

At the time I lived there, you couldn’t get there by road – you flew. In the summer supplies came in by ship.

Now you can drive there, and I’d like to do the loop in what is still one of the most remote places on the planet. People will probably say it’s unspoiled, but I’ve been there, and you can’t really spoil it. There’s a reason that almost nobody lives there.

Meanwhile, spring has broken full-force here in the Lower Mainland.

I have a colour version of this, but like this one better. It needs more work yet and even when that is done this won’t be a stick-it-on-the-wall image – I have long tried to make a good cherry blossom B+W, but it’s much harder than it looks.

This past weekend was a busy one – HouseApe 1.0 went off to a cadet thing, 2.0 got back from a school thing, and 3.0 went to spend the night at a friend’s, where they ate crap and played many hours of video games.

We, meanwhile, hauled ourselves off to Home Depot, where we bought a power washer. The advantages of the local clime are many, but there are disadvantages too. Left to themselves, things get a coating of mold, mildew, and moss here. In the Okanagan, where I grew up, if you put down a concrete slab, you could expect it to look pretty much the same forever providing you swept it once in a while. Here, concrete gets dark and slippery.

Anyway, on Saturday morning I washed part of the back patio, the basement stairs, and the walkway down the side. Then Chris and I took the New Miata off to Richmond to get a knockbox. On the way back we stopped by a big new spice store and got vanilla beans and strawberry syrup and raw cane sugar (the powdery real brown sugar kind, not the refined-and-then-molasses-added-back kind).

We were motoring back top-down (the rest of Canada is cursing me) when we saw a rainstorm off in the distance. We got home, got in the house, and had just got our shoes off when the downpour arrived. Timing!

It only lasted a few minutes, and then I went out to annoy the neighbors some more. I washed more of the back patio, half the deck, the back stairs, and the front steps before dinner, where we watched The Bourne Identity, which neither of us had seen before.

Sunday we went grocery shopping. The rain had settled in solid, and I cleaned and cooked – I made marinara with meatballs and chicken cacciatore for later in the week, then pork burgers for dinner, and grilled chicken also for later in the week.

We also went to the liquor store to get wine for the cacciatore and while we were there we were looking at vodka when this odd little woman came up and barged between us. She started talking to Chris about vodkas, something about Polish ones and she was Polish, although she had no accent. If you’ve seen elderly Polish women, well, she certainly looked the part, but she was poking at the bottles and talking to us about them. It wasn’t until later that I wondered if her problem was that she couldn’t read and she was looking to us for clues.

Last night was Game of Thrones, then sleep. The sleep of the righteous, the sleep of one who has powerwashed and made meals for the week.