gazebo Archives - bc-bog-trotter.com

A morning view from my desk. It is a very much like an E.J. Hughes painting. I live here!

On Sunny mornings I look out from my desk and realize that my view is a stunning live E. J. Hughes painting. The hard morning light on sparkling water, greening leaves, several varieties of fruit blossoms, bird songs, boat traffic and a hidden water tower on the ridge that glints in the light. I think of all the poor folks who never have the luxury of even thinking of a scenic view and I wonder at my decadence with such a panorama.

Our front yard welcomes you. We’re very fortunate.

As if we don’t have enough flowers outside there are a few inside as well. Our sinus’s scream.

Downtown in the evening. That’s me in the room with the plywood in the window.

Isn’t it funny how one thing leads to another? Last blog was about the new gazebo. There’s more. I can’t abide having something completely generic. I need to add something or modify things to make it uniquely mine. First I installed some overhead hanging lights. The eves of the new edifice neccesarily tuck themselves beneath the soffits of the house. You know what happens when it rains. A gazebo with runnin g water. My solution was to install rain gutters beneath two sides of the edifice to direct the runoff overboard from the deck. They had to be innocuous. That meant installing them as high as possible which in turn meant cutting down a drill bit to fit the narrow gap I had to work in.

Rain Chain. The end of a process that involved assembling a gazebo and then finding a new window. I think of the child-slave somewhere who assembled this lovely copper spirals.

That process sent the severed bit pinging off like a bullet, right through my shop window. Fortunately the old window was tempered glass and in slow motion collapsed in a heap of jagged crystal shrapnel. I had trumped myself.The gutter job slid to the back of the stove while I spent a very long time collecting all the crumpled bits of glint. It is not good for the dog’s feet, or mine.

The new doowindow. It almost looks meant to be. That extra workbench outside is a grand idea. It helped sell me on the house.

Then began a quest for a replacement glass. God forbid I spend more money! Amazingly I found a pair of sliding French doors a few blocks away free for the picking up. Git ‘er gone. Now I have the sexiest shop window in town. With all its small lead-framed glass panels it is much safer from the whirling mad blacksmith inventing stuff inside. “Like a bull in a sex shop.” Of course after all that, with the next rain, the gutter leaked. I fixed it.

There is one more anecdote about this online-ordered gazebo/shelter/pergola/pagoda. The shipment came in two awkward huge boxes weighing about two hundred pounds. One box finally arrived, sitting sadly on its own on the front step out in the rain. Days later, we finally called to inquire.The other box was out there in the ozone, we were not having an uncommon experience apparently, it would arrive. Jill employed a high charm setting and were subsequently told an entire replacement unit was going to be shipped. “No, no,” we responded “all we need is one only, box 2 of 2. Apparently that does not compute. A second order was being expedited at no extra charge, don’t worry about the missing box. Hmmmm!

Several days later, box 2 arrived, lugged to our door by a lady driver working alone. Next day, gazebo 2 arrived. Both of those boxes were each carried by two burly men. (Just making note!) To bring this story to a conclusion let me simply say that a nice lady is now the happy owner of a brand-new gazebo at a very fair price. Of course so are we! I am still waiting for an invoice for all of the entertainment.

Almost paid for. This mid-sixties Mercury even has a complete second for spare parts. Damn! They were ugly!

High water slack. Both vessels are beginning to turn as the tide goes to ebb.

Spring is indeed in the air. The lilacs are producing an industrial-strength perfume that tingles in my sinus cavities and leaves me gasping. The dogwood blooms are suddenly everywhere, flourescent day and night. The sun now rises almost forty five degrees further north than in winter. Each day begins with the soft chanting of morning doves, swallows pelt through the air and baby birds hop across the lawns. Still people bitch. There’s always something to find wrong but I like to point out to folks that if you’re truly unhappy here, the nicest thing about our country is that you are still free to leave. Piss off! It’s that simple. Maybe should you go spend a week in Gaza or the Ukraine or Iran. They’re not free to leave and the notion of a holiday is totally abstract, a decadence beyond imagination. Interestingly, while the price of fuel is a howler, folks still drive like demons and burn fossil fuels as quickly as they can. As Donald Trump said on a Sixty Minutes interview last night, “There’s a lot of crazy people out there.”

Knotweed. It is so a bloody weed! It is insidious, very aggressive and relentless. This a fully severed 2″ piece of root that survived the winter and then began to sprout. I swear you can watch the stuff growing and trying to strangle every other plant.

Bikes and boats. Once in a while I get out on the trail. I am trying to teach myself to ride again after fifty years away from it. I’m not intrepid any more but you can’t take the boy out of me.

Trying to prove to yourself that you still have full mojo is tough when your joints feel like this!

Fawn Lilies. Beautiful but fast and fading.

God is a name we give to the blanket we throw over mystery to give it shape.

(Quote attributed to an AC/DC roadie)

Deep in the dark woods as usual, raining as usual and, as usual, a trillium shows its exquisite delicate beauty.

Sea lions! 03:00 Yelping, barking, growling. I need to be near the sea almost as much as I need my sleep. This pushes the limits and I was not invited to the party. Geez boys, just take our herring and leave.
They stayed. Groggily I shuffle out onto our deck and get to work. Our deluxe 10×10 all-metal Gazebo has arrived from China. That ordeal ended. One huge box arrived weeks before the other. Now it’s here. I lug the two huge parcels onto the deck and lay them down, carefully extracting the contents, removing all the protective foam. There is a mountain of that. Inside each taped bundle there are parts mecifully coded. I find the instructions, hardware and tool kit. I know plenty of folks take advantage of the free entertainment that comes with assembling this monster mechano kit and they succeed. Lets see how this old wrencher manages on his own. Let the cursing begin.

Lemme see now. Safety first, then we take a break. Chinese universities must offer degree-granting courses in how to pack a box. There’s a whole wee house in these two boxes!

With everything set out, there were roof trusses hidden inside the base legs, the process of assembling tab A into threaded hole Ea. Do not attach inverted.

Now we’re getting somewhere. The neighbours must have wondered if we were planning a hanging.

Once at a previous home, I built a back yard shelter from local driftwood and named it “The Temple Of Jill.” Now I have to secipher someone else’s imagination. The instructions list some recommended extra tools to the ones provided including three people to help. I don’t want anyone getting in my way and besides, I can’t speak Cantonese. I put all the screws of different size in individual bowls. Easy to access, harder to lose. These kits are packed precisely. Often there is an exact number of pieces, don’t lose even one screw. Fortunately I have a large clear space to work on. I lay out all the parts and begin the tedious job of putting together various sub-assemblies. The objective is turn this Chinese puzzle of a thousand pieces into a single functional unit. By the first day’s end I have completed the main frame which is amazingly rock-solid.

I fight with the urge to keep looking ahead in the manual. One step at a time dude! The drawings provided are very accurate except for sections they’ve missed. All one does is complete each step as shown. The precision of all these pieces is amazing, the fit is perfect. The little bolts are of poor quality and it seems Chinese metric hardware is very slightly different from standard tool specs. The metal roofing panels are like very large razor blades. Gloves would make it safer but I need to be dextrous to handle all the little bits like the tiny bits to screw everthing together. Each one is covered with a thin, sticky, fragile layer of protective cellophane. Removing it from the panels is the worst part of the whole job. Once it is gone you can see the scratches beneath the protective layer.

The hardest part of the job, peeling the protective film from the roof panels. Then you could see all the scratches hidden underneath. Jill was a tremendous help with this dreary chore and provided indispensable assistance at other critical times.

All’s well that ends. We’ll spend many happy times here. C’mon over!

In the middle of the job there was a severe wind warning. Everything was tucked away and the main structure was lashed down. What wind? All good things come to an end even if they never begin. The deck furniture will be moved in and then it is time to light the fire table and drink something with a little umbrella in it. There is no calculation for the free entertainment value of all the hours spent on this grand puzzle. There are a few slices on my hands but I still have all my fingers; it is not a recommended weight loss program. On a final note and perhaps a good omen, while having breakfast this morning and looking out through the new edifice, I saw a large male orca swimming in the harbour. Now that’s a bonus!

It is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.
– Jim Collins

(Clearly he never put a gazebo together!)

Tag: gazebo

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