Week 7: Company Comes - and Now We are Eight

Week 7

Company Comes – and Now We Are Eight

The younger guys went caribou hunting to mark the beginning of this week.  Departure held such promise.  We had plans for caribou roasts, caribou steaks and souvenir antler charms. ”...everywhere you’ll find pieces of Cupid and Komet”.  We were really in the mood for caribou! They returned from the ‘out-cabin’ three hours later, a rising tailwind hurrying them on their way back home.

Gilbert told me that there were such clouds of bugs that trying to search for caribou using the rifle scope was hopeless – everything was one big ever-moving blur. And their dog, poor Timber, was covered in insects “like a blanket”. 

One of the new arrivals is Dick, our new plumber. Seemee and Gilbert will be assigned to him to help reconstruct the heating system, and to address issues with the domestic water system and drainage. 

laundry room shelves

This pretty well guts the productivity for most of the items on the work list, and in truth, the most important items on the list are all plumbing issues – so I am staying in close contact to facilitate that work.  Susan is pretty much taken up with kitchen work since the growth of our group. As a result the several of her woodworking projects which are in progress at the moment are drifting slowly to completion.

After a week - we have another caribou expedition, and this time – again – no caribou. They travelled 35 km each way this time.  And found clever places to hide, I suppose.

Timber loves a drive in the truck

The non-hunters stayed behind at the lodge, and it did feel like a day off.  Susan spent her morning in the kitchen (some day off!) and I in the shop – fixing a small issue on an all-terrain loader and changing to a ‘tundra tire’ on the dump-truck. Dick spent his morning studying the domestic water system. After lunch we sat in the ‘great room’ and chatted. Susan noted the quietness and we agreed that we were experiencing a version of ‘empty nest syndrome’. We could get over that in a hurry with no problem.

Dick invited my opinion on how the domestic water system ‘worked’. I had looked previously and concluded that if M.C.Escher had been a plumber then this would have been his greatest work.  We looked for about an hour, tracing pipes until they disappeared into holes in the floor and noting that several different heat exchangers had been connected to the Domestic Hot Water system in what constituted a continuous loop with no clear source of pressure.  Then Dick found a valve.  It was hidden behind other valves and appeared to be closed off. In fact it was only slightly open, just sufficient to pressurize the domestic hot water system by injecting cold water into the distribution manifold.

         At that stage we gave up. This latest discovery was going to necessitate ‘thoughtful redesign’. We spent a while discussing the options, the simplest of which seemed to be simply removing the whole mess and starting fresh. When ‘the boss’ phoned us, later in the day, that is what he suggested too!

We have a firm departure date in early August and the likelihood of only one supply plane before that time.  With this expansion of his scope of work, Dick is probably going to have too many projects going.  Sue and I decided that we might as well perform all of the 2” steel pipework in parallel with the plumbing work being performed ‘by others’. The original plan had placed our work as an element of Dicks projects (to pipe-in a remote wood-fired boiler). The chance of him finding the time to do another boiler seems to keep getting slimmer. 

As the week progresses, we are spending a lot of time with the others – making sure they can do their jobs.  Our ‘headline’ project was originally deferred until the arrival of the plumber – and it now looks like the rather large landscaping project is eclipsing all previous priorities.

The youngsters are having a wonderful time fishing and boating. Another teenager, Louis, joined this working ‘Y’ camp.

 From time to time, one of the young guys would come and find me and declare me to be his ‘boss’. After my denials, if he stays around, I inevitably find something for him to do.

This is now the ‘job’. 
Since the last blog the bears have moved on. We haven't had a siting for several days. The commotion, the dogs, lack of food could all be contributing to lack of bears. Whatever it is we are grateful that they have gone. Last year was the same, bears at the beginning but no sitings while we were here. They arrived again in the fall.

We are starting to look forward to our summer ‘holiday’ which starts in August. A few e-mails from cruising friends reminds us that we have a cruise to join while other e-mails from some of you remind us that we have a winter cruise to plan as well.