As I wrote earlier, the last post was interrupted by the postmaster hand delivering me a phone message. Turns out the folks hankering to reach me, staff at the Willow Bunch museum, had lost my email address, knew I live in the hamlet, and figured that the postmaster would be able to get a message to me. Got to love life in a small town!

I needed to get to town to pay my property taxes and get more fuel for the generator, so I decided to close the office early and go to town today rather than tomorrow

First stop was the RM office where I just had to say I was there to pay my taxes; they knew who I was. Scary. 🙂 I also asked about my promised water bill, the missing piece to establishing SK residency once the insurance matters are settled (not likely any time soon), and paid that too even though it wasn’t due till the end of September. Property taxes were about $24 and the bill for water and garbage collection was about $116 for three months.

So not counting fuel for my generator or propane, it will cost me about $250 to summer here, or about $43 a month. Way more expensive than boondocking down in the States (even factoring in dump fees), but crazy reasonable for Canada!

My next stop was the museum to talk with the president. I offered to do some translation for them in exchange for publicity and they sent me home with a thick file to work on! The existing translations are actually pretty decent, just need a little tweaking, so two to four hours a week should get me pretty far. I haven’t done a volunteer project in way too long and this will be a great way to give back to my new community.

Museum business done, I went to the Co-Op to fill a jerry can. The manager pulled in behind me and did the fill for me, yay. I don’t know why, but I hate filling jerry cans! Gas prices are much better than they were at the beginning of the summer, about $1.25 when it was $1.35 to $1.40 earlier in the season.

My final stop was a treat. I usually get my treat on Friday, but I was in town today and have no treats at home. So I popped into the variety store for a chocolate ice cream cone (it was either that or mint and I vetoed them bringing in vanilla). Mmm! Today was a very rare ice cream weather kind of day, so the timing was right!

The drive home promised to be tedious as I was behind a grainery that took up the whole width of the road, but they were able to pull over when the road widened just a tad so that I could squeeze through. Phew. I don’t think I could have done 18KM at about 30KM an hour in that heat. I need to get the AC fixed on the truck!