Mysterious but welcome weather in Ottawa: 22°C in October! All the better to make my transition to rookie builder, though so far I’m just a fetch-and-carry slave and a puny one at that. I am learning several new terms, a few of which I can use in sentences. Yesterday I moved a giant woodpile and demolished an old outhouse with a crowbar. Today I assembled a complicated Malaysian wheelbarrow and got ready to move the washhouse fifty feet south to make room for the glorious winter cabin. My trusting nature comes in handy:
Q: But how do you move a washhouse?
A: Oh, you just jack it up and push.
Tim is learning to fell trees and stalks the property in chainsaw chaps and hardhat like a Village People refugee. I haul and dig and get my first fix of CBC radio, which I couldn’t get at Lake Superior. It’s a delight after years of threadbare, grovelling NPR(National Public Radio) in the US. The kind of radio I like only gets produced with government funding, it seems. Fine by me. I’ll happily pay taxes for decent news and arts coverage, on radio at least. (And I’m enough of a pinko to consider contributing towards healthcare for all children while I’m at it.)
The geese were in fine form on the river tonight, flying back and forth in lopsided formation and honking monogamously. On the opposite bank the neighbours were chopping and mowing and playing. There are at least four million giant dock spiders in and around the cabin, but apparently _no mice_ on the island, which alone is worth the canoeing. It feels decadent to leave a bag of sugar on the kitchen table.
Dervala.com 
The spiders have eaten all the mice?
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These ones are big enough to try. I’m growing fond of them; there’s intelligent look in their eight eyes.
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