Sunday November 8th 2020

Hard to imagine a week ago we enduring blowing snow and sub freezing temperatures … and today we are sitting on the beach at LHR enjoying a 20ºC sun filled day … I am enjoying a craft beer from Cameron’s Brewing in Oakville Ontario, and Miss Laurie is walking the beach in search of the ever elusive beach glass.

And as odd as it may seem I have been able to get one bar of LTE on the Rogers network today down at the beach so I decided to throw together a little blog. It has been an amazing week here in Ontario, temperature wise with lots of warm, mainly sunny days, the only draw back has been the strong south west breeze that has been steady up until today.

We moved “Thunder” today, pulled around to dump the black tank at the dump station, and then made the big move from site 89 to site 217. It sounds like a big move but it was actually just across the road. So we now have a water supply connection from under the guest house, so after a today at the beach a long hot shower is top of the list for tonight’s activities … just saying

• 

• 

Miss Laurie decided to take advantage of the lack of breeze this morning to rack up leaves from number of sites and burn them on the road. It appears most of the leaves are down now and with a few warm dry days they burnt quickly …

Today’s navigational entertainment was provided by a few dozen Canada geese that obviously decided to float south this winter instead of that whole flying thing. I hope they are aware that they will still have to fly across the border because of the coronavirus restrictions.

November 8th 2017 Miss Laurie and I were enjoying the beach and sunshine at Panama City Beach in Florida, they certainly different times then, nobody had heard of Covid-19 and no one could have imagined how a virus would have killed nearly a quarter of a million Americans to date and still climbing.

Well yesterday it was officially announced that Joe Biden had defeated Donald Trump to become the 46 president of the United States of America. Donny has not conceded yet, as his team wants to drag it out with a lot of seemingly unfounded charges of voter fraud … you got him credit for sowing the seeds of doubt months ago when he first found himself falling behind in the polls. I think his first problem now is that most of the Republicans are trying to distance themselves from what’s left of Donny’s gong show. The really sad thing is that he maybe had some good ideas, but when you have only ran a family business he just didn’t have the expertise or finesse to present it in a form that the majority of people could accept. Yes in my humble opinion he should have spent a little less time trying to tear apart every thing that Obama had put in place … like the pandemic response team that he did away with … when you think of what his legacy will be, I am hard pressed to see much beyond the 250,000 plus deaths from coronavirus, it won’t be the wall because it never got built, I could be the trade wars that has cost Americans millions of dollars, or all the jobs that never returned from foreign manufacturers. The reality is that as long as we want to by cheap, factory jobs are not returning to North America!

Well that got a little deeper than I was going for when I started, what started with a beer on the beach on a sunny November afternoon has turned into a very deep, rambling of today’s thoughts. It’s going to different not having the easy target of what has Trump done today, so now I see my next target as being some of the special people in Ontario … like seriously over 1300 cases of coronavirus today … we need to be better than this … just saying

Be Safe, Be Well, and Be Smart!

Thursday November 5th 2020

Well we spent a hour on the beach this afternoon, the only problem was that the beach was on the east shore of Lake Huron, usually by this time of year we would be on a beach in one of the southern States. But Miss Laurie did find some beach glass, and I enjoyed a craft beer from a Thunder Bay brewer, and all seemed well. The sky was overcast for the most part, but the temperature was 16ºC (61ºF), and for November that was quite warm, but with a 23 km/hr breeze from the south, it was cool enough that blue jeans and sweatshirts were required.

It’s been two days since the America election and still we have no declared winner, the voter turn out was one of the highest for a number of years. The number of mail in ballots has caught many states understaffed to get them counted. I’m sure that has been complicated by one of the candidates telling their supporters to vote twice, not something that most normal people would do, but when you know that you have comprised the countries postal service by installing one of your own supporters that knew nothing about the post office. This is the kind of stuff that leaves normal people scratching their heads, now with all the legally received mail in ballots being counted, the chants of fraud are being rolled out by one of the parties, along with a chant from the other party to count all the votes.

My expectations are that in the next few days there will be a winner declared, and then there will be all sorts of frivolous legal battles waged until the loser finally admits defeat.

In the mean time today the United States exceeded 100,000 new coronavirus cases and over 1,000 deaths for a one day high, yes I know the only reason the cases are that high is because of all the testing … but if there weren’t any coronavirus cases out there it wouldn’t matter how many test were being done … why is that so difficult for some people understand? And I don’t now what corner that someone thought they were turning with this virus, but I thinking they are a little lost when it comes to coronavirus, in fact I’m pretty sure they don’t even any kind of a map, let alone know what corner they are at … just saying

Here at the park, trees have been the big topic, with many trees being removed by the Bayfield Tree Service staff, most are the poplars that make such as mess, but a few are left over ash trees. After the big wind storm we had last weekend, we have lots of branches down all over the park, but only one tree was blown down and only damage to one trailer. Lots of barbecues blown off of decks, and lots of items blown around, it will be like a big game of hide and seek for some people in the spring. We have been burning leaves for the past week, which should be appreciated in the spring. More work is being done at the lookouts, and the park has suffered considerable damage at the beach access, but we have more beach and sand now than we have had all summer.

We are now eight days with only a hydro connection, and will most likely have to reload fresh water and dump the tanks this weekend while the weather is still good. We seem to have worked out, our boiler issues, a new fuel filter, cleaning the nozzle, and purging the fuel system and now we have uninterrupted heat for those below freezing nights. I have been preparing to winterize the water system on the coach which I have never done but will need to do in about ten days.

We are also preparing to move into a house on the fifteenth of the month, so our plan is to drive the coach to the house to move our supplies into the house, then return the coach to the park to be winterized. We are also moving to a different site at the park, to give us a little more privacy on out days off, so we are preparing the new site now as we seem to have some extra time on our hands and some above average weather in the forecast.

As I’m trying to finish this blog president Trump is on the news, alleging illegal ballots again, voter fraud, and that the election is being stolen from him. Now it is not news to anyone that I’m not a Trump supporter, I think it is criminal how he has handled the coronavirus pandemic, which now has caused close to a quarter of a million deaths. I also think it apprehensive how he has coined the term “fake news” and who had heard of alternate facts before he became president? The reality is the man lies constantly, in fact if you read his book the “The Art of the Deal” he brags about lying and intimidating, the difference between business and politics, is that someone will call you out for it as a politician, in business it just gets to the stage only crooks or the mafia will deal with a lying businessman. And it doesn’t matter how many times you tell the same lie it’s still just a lie! Oh the special people may start to believe it, but anyone that has a grasp on reality, or can think for themselves, doesn’t believe anything without proof, and there is where president Trump is caught falling short. There is never any evidence, no just a lot of verbal diarrhea, with no substance, no proof, just nothing to back up any statement, no it’s alway “everybody says” or “good people say” but those people don’t exist in the real world.

If this election has proven anything, it is that there is a huge division in the States, there has been a divide for years but never to this extent. I understand people hear and read what they want to hear and read, but when someone feeds that divide it just grows deeper and harder to bridge. There is a growing civil unrest, in fact I couldn’t help thinking as we watched businesses boarding up windows before the election to avoid damage and looting, of third world countries and dictatorships.