Flax Bread

Five cups whole wheat flour, half cup bran, half cup ground flax, tablespoon of flax seed, four teaspoons of sugar, four of yeast, one salt. One and three quarters cups of water. Rise time one hour, four hundred degree oven, thirty minutes, time to first slice in bellies about three minutes after that.

Pink Elephants

Little one on day three of his cold weather pain killers, it's an opiate and we believe he is seeing a fair number of pink elephants about the place. He has brightened up a bit, being a bit silly at times, but is still the just William that we are used to.

Changes

A man in another truck arrived this morning and corrected the Tricklebrook road sign (one end of the road was spelled Tricklebrook and our end Trickelbrook) - all fixed now.

Behind the curtains weekly

Today, after a week of cutting down the smaller "weed" trees a digger has arrived on the Wakefield work site across the road. Strangely enough, fives minutes after arriving the delivery dump truck and float, and the driver of the digger who had arrived in the silver pickup truck, vanished into thin air leaving the digger on the land.

This afternoon he turned up again and was doing digger things, pulling up stumps, moving big logs. All exciting stuff from behind the curtains.

Little Bill

The boys will be seventeen years old in a few months, which according to the charts is about 85 years old in human years, Ben has his hyperthyroidism under control, Bill is veering in that direction but also suffers (like I do) from Arthritis.

Times have changed from the days of "All Creatures Great and Small" and Siegfried Farnon's cottage veterinary practice. We took Bill to the vet yesterday, just to see why he was grinding his teeth sometimes while eating like a three toed sloth. The young vet, who was off on vacation next week, was tiptoeing around his grumpiness, even at one point donning what appeared to be oven gloves while trying to look in his mouth.

The vet said "let's start by doing this, that and the other" and retreated to the back room, within two minutes his lovely assistant arrived with a piece of paper, demanding approval and a signature. I did not have my glassses with me, but even my old eyes spotted that the bill was almost five hundred dollars. Sixty of which was for the inspection, the bulk of the rest was for bloodwork.

We settled on the inspection and a trial course of pain medication for the little one, days of bloodwork and numbers on a piece of paper mean very little now that the only thing we want him to be is comfortable.

I'm not knocking the system as times have changed from James Herriot's world and we people are more likely to litigate our vets than bake them a cake. Yet, I do yearn for those "try this" days when a vet would send you home with a bottle of tincture and a smile, and a hopeful "lets see how that works"

Marine Drive

The last leg of the walk to Gramma's Pub, this is some of the Squamish Nation land that is being developed for the rich and famous, waterfront property with the North Shore mountain view, along with a bit of decent shoreline.