Haven

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Solar Powered

I never cease to be amazed by how different I feel when it’s sunny and pleasant out versus rainy or even just grey and damp. I knew this when I bought the property, of course, which is why buying property in what is supposed to be one of the sunniest and driest climates in Canada was important to me. We had a great 2013 summer and I was busy and super active, but it was all grey and rain last year and my activity level really dropped.

This summer is starting off shakily, with the odd beautiful day cut by a stretch of grey. I have been feeling utterly bla the last four or five days and thought I was coming down with a cold. But it started to clear up yesterday and it has been absolutely marvelous today. Guess what? I’m running on about six hours of sleep, absolutely all I needed and being incredibly productive!

I thought I had about 11 hours of work to do today, but it wound up being one of those files with a lot of dead air that goes very fast, so it’s going to come in at about only 6.5 hours worth of work. I started around 7:00 and then took a long break to work on my roof.

There are no pictures of the roof repair because, frankly, I don’t need anyone going YEESH. 🙂 I used a hair dryer to soften the Eternabond and it came right up.

(For the curious, I plugged an extension cord into an outlet in the kitchen, threw the cord out a window, and then threw the cord up onto the roof! I carried the hair dryer and supplies in a bag slung over my shoulder.)

I then scraped off all the Dicor and then washed with rubbing alcohol, which brought everything up. I’ve tried mineral spirits and acetone and the alcohol did the best job, even though it’s not something I’ve seen recommended for this type of project. Hmm. It really was impressive. I had little bits of Dicor that refused to come up and I just had to sprinkle them with rubbing alcohol to get them to peel off cleanly!

For the repair, I used Rust-Oleum Leak Seal in clear. I had a choice of black, grey, or clear and wish I had gone with the grey so that I could see if I missed any spots. This is a very easy product to use, similar to spray paint, and there is no mess. I applied, as directed, a fine initial layer along the entire seam, then I climbed down to have lunch.

When I came back onto the roof about an hour later, the rubber coating seemed to have seeped into the grooves and cracks of the seam, a good thing! I applied a second thicker coat (again, as per instructions), and headed back down to get more work done. I went up another hour later and applied a final coat, as I only had just enough in the can for three coats.

I’m cautiously optimistic optimistic at this point since the entire seam is covered with a thickish layer of rubber. But I believe in overkill, so I’m going to check the home stores in Assiniboia the next time I’m in town to see if they carry this product so I can do another three coats.

If this repair doesn’t hold, I am pulling out all the stops and going up there with more Dicor, screws, and a piece of metal roofing! In fact, I have a piece of ridge cap the right length and width left. Now, wouldn’t that be a redneck solution?! But hopefully, this will work…

The roof dealt with, I came in to type some more, then did some work in the kitchen. I want to add a counter under the window on the driver’s side. I thought of doing that last year, but the money went elsewhere. I think it’ll happen this year.

So that’s all the excitement out of southern Saskatchewan today. Back to work I go since I still have about 1.5 hours left. I don’t even feel daunted by that since I expected to be glued to my computer today rather than having had the chance to knock off a few projects!

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I Did Something Really Stupid

Pulling into my driveway yesterday, my jaw dropped when I realised that not only was my gas gauge light on, but my needle was so far in the red it was in the black! I still haven’t learned to keep a close eye on the damn thing!

I had driven more than 500KM from Scobey, so I considered myself lucky to be home and also stranded since I didn’t even want to chance the 18KM drive back to Willow Bunch, which has the nearest gas station.

So late this morning, I swallowed my pride and called Caroline to ask if they had any fuel or if they could pick some up in town for me. She suggested that I instead borrow her car to go get some some since she didn’t need the car today and she didn’t know what their schedule would be this weekend. I really didn’t have time for a trip to town today, but that was an offer I knew I couldn’t refuse!

I finished up my morning’s work and then went to get the car keys. It’s a little Kia not unlike my Accent (RIP), so it was pretty familiar to drive since most of the controls are where they were on the Accent. But I had forgotten what it is to drive so low to the ground and I might have hit the gas AND brake pedals at the same time once or twice since I haven’t driven automatic in so long. 🙂

I stopped for mail before leaving town and found my Amazon cheque! It comess earlier and earlier every month! I had another cheque to deposit, so a trip to the bank was definitely needed. There was something else in my box, something that always makes me giddy with anticipation when it’s a complete surprise: a ‘you have a package’ notification. I wasn’t expecting anything so I was of course curious. It was a package from John in Santa Fe, a book about Chaco Canyon to whet my appetite for my next trip into the Southwest. That made my day!

First stop in town was the bank and thankfully the teller who knows me was available. Thankfully because a client made a cheque out to Rae rather than my legal name and I’ve been through the whole proving we’re the same person thing with this teller in the past so she didn’t even comment on the cheque being made out to the wrong name.

Then, I went to the gas station and took advantage of there being service. I told the guy to fill the jerry can in the trunk and to add $10 worth of fuel to the car. He told me I needed to open the door for the gas intake and it took me a second to remember that the mechanism was on the floor by the door in my old car, which is where it was for this car! Then, I went in and fixed myself a coffee while the guy did the dirty work.

After, I hit the grocery store since there were some really good deals in this week’s flier. It’s really nice to be in a position to stock up during sales and to have a freezer in which to put extra stuff! Shrimp was crazy cheap for this weekend only, $6 a bag for the Co-Op brand, which is decent by frozen shrimp standards. $12 blocks of Co-Op cheese were $8. The only frozen pizza I like, Dr. Oetker’s Hawaiian, were $5 instead of $8. Low alcohol beer was $6 for a case instead of $9. Etc. I spent over $70 and for once didn’t feel like I got robbed!

Then, it was time to get home because I have 15 hours of work left to do by 9:00PM tomorrow! I look forward to taking Monday off since RV Park Chez Rae has a reservation for Monday night!

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I’ve Missed the Thrift Store

I got in from a quick trip to the Willow Bunch thrift store. I wanted to drop off a bag of stuff and see the changes. I really don’t need any clothes except for rain gear so all I was actively shopping for was some household and kitchen stuff.

The ground floor was a lot neater than it was the last time I was in, but not much had really changed in terms of where items were located. The upstairs had changed a bit and was less of a jumble of stuff, but, really, the updates weren’t as dramatic as I would have expected based on the Facebook updates. It was very comforting for the place to still be familiar. 🙂

Since I keep hoping to stumble onto lawn furniture, I went out to the sheds to see what sort of furniture was in stock and hit the jackpot. No, not on lawn furniture, but on something else I’ve wanted for Haven since I sort of got running water: a slop sink. They are about $40 at Home Hardware new. I asked about the price, was told that they are $150 new (WHAT?!), so I could have it for $15. Rather than argue that they’re nowhere near $100, much less $150, I commented that the sink was quite stained and covered in paint, I was told $10, which was just about right. 🙂

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(Inside is a little basin the perfect size for washing feet, something I wanted for my Isla casita).

I want to improve my laundry set up this summer and this slop sink fits in with those plans. It’ll be a good place to soak things, hold part of the wash load while the other spins, clean paint brushes, wash produce, etc. I just need to find a big stopper for it and it can drain into a bucket. What a find! The little basin was just $1.50, so it was really worth my time to go out today!

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Culture Shock at the Store

I really had my mind set on going to Moose Jaw today to do a big grocery stock up trip, but I was waiting on some payments, a cheque and a PayPal transfer to be able to do so. The cheque wasn’t in today’s mail and I only initiated the PayPal transfer on Friday, so I wasn’t expecting the funds till later this week. Desperately in need of food, I decided to run to Assiniboia for a few things to tide me over.

On the way there, I had a thought about how much it costs me to drive to Assiniboia round trip, $12, never mind the time that I really didn’t have to waste this week. Why was I being such a moron about this? Just go to Moose Jaw, stick to the budget, and use the credit card. It’s not like I’d have to pay interest on the purchases since they would be paid off in days. But most importantly, I still had work to do today, but I definitely had time to go to Moose Jaw and back. The rest of the week was looking iffy.

My decision made, I still made two stops in Assiniboia. The first was to fill up my five-gallon water jugs, which cost me almost $8. I miss my at home delivery for about 80 cents per five-gallon jug! But I do get the next one free… I made this stop in the morning for two reasons. 1) If the water machine was broken, I’d be able to get water in Moose Jaw and 2) I knew I’d be too tired to stop on the way home.

Last year, I was transferring the heavy jugs to a dispenser and actually did that in Mexico just for the exercise, but I treated myself to something on the way home that is crazy expensive, of poor quality, and hard to find here here and the complete opposite in Mexico:

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Next stop in Assiniboia was the Co-Op gas station for a coffee, which was really an excuse to get change for the parking metre in downtown Moose Jaw (can’t believe I thought of that!). The coffee at the gas station is actually quite good and they have hazelnut creamer, so it’s a nice road trip treat.

The trip to Moose Jaw was uneventful, just a scenic hour of rolling hills. Oh, I love this landscape!

First stop in Moose Jaw won’t come as a surprise, DK Sushi! The food was as good as ever and since the last few days have been extremely lean food wise, I didn’t worry too much about my waistline and ordered whatever I wanted within reason. 🙂 DK Sushi in Moose Jaw is in my top five of best sushi restaurants in the whole of the US and Canada, and I think I’ve been to enough sushi restaurants in the US and Canada for that statement to have some weight. 🙂 How lucky I am that they are the nearest sushi restaurant to me… even if they are 3 hours away round trip!

Then, it was time to spend beaucoup bucks. I’d like to share with you how I plan for big shopping runs like these. I use an app on my iPhone called Our Groceries. I have been using this app since I had an iPod Touch (six years) and can’t believe it’s still free. There are ads, but they’re not intrusive and you don’t see them if data is turned off.

I use the app to keep track of everything I need to buy regardless of if it’s to be bought in Assiniboia or Moose Jaw. I have a list for each store and categories that are not list (store) specific. When I lived in Yukon and was doing supply runs for my friends, I would use the categories to keep my friends sorted within each store. But now, I use the categories for things like produce, household, and meat.

Here are some screen shots of the app. First, the main screen, where you see my lists, which are by store. The numbers represent the number of items I need to buy at that store. As you can see, I didn’t get everything on my lists today!

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Inside each list is everything I want to buy at that store, sorted by categories:

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As you can see, I didn’t do too well with dairy and meat. A tub of yoghurt that is 2CAD in Mexico was 7CAD here (SAME BRAND)…

My first stop of the day was M&M Meat Shops to get chicken breasts. That was the most important thing on my list and would determine how much I had left to spend in the other stores. Chicken breasts wound up being $6 off per box, so I got four boxes, essentially getting a box free!

As I shop, I just tap on the items I’ve added to my shopping cart and they get removed from my lists and saved for the next time I want to build a list. But what if a store doesn’t have what I need?

I organized my shopping by likely least to most expensive. So after M&M, I went to Dollar Tree (yes, there’s a Dollar Tree in Moose Jaw!). There, I was able to get household things like freezer bags, plastic wrap, and bleach, for very cheap compared to even Walmart. But there were a few things I couldn’t find. What I would then do is tap the little (i) next to the item to bring up this screen:

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That would then let me select another list for this item. So what I didn’t find at Dollar Tree got moved to my second to next stop’s list, Walmart.

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Some stores don’t categorize things the same way, so I can also change the category of an item:

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What a great app! I would be lost without it when I have to do big shops like these. I just build my lists as I think of items. Over the years, my list of items in the app has grown and I rarely have to type out the entire name of an item before it pops up.

After Dollar Tree, I went next door to Bulk Barn, the most wonderful store on the planet. There, I could buy just as much as I wanted of everything from brown rice to nuts to flours (kamut and multigrain today) and spices. Instead of spending several dollars each for containers of cumin, tumeric, basil, garlic powder, and more, I could spend 30 cents or 80 cents or 50 cents on just the quantity I need to get me through the summer. I normally spend a lot on nuts in this store, but I was on a tight budget, so I restrained myself. I was pleased to be able to buy almond butter and tahini in bulk, too, for much cheaper than I pay through mail order.

By the time I came out of Bulk Barn, I had already spent a third of my budget for the day. On to Walmart, which is just a normal one in Moose Jaw, not a Super Center with a big grocery section. I got paper goods, found Rustoleum rubber coating for my roof (all appendages crossed), and got a bunch of canned goods.

Next stop was Super Store. I usually like to buy my groceries at Safeway, but after hearing so many people tell me how much more expensive they are than Super Store, I decided to try that first. I really don’t like Super Store, finding it overwhelming and the selection in some areas lacking, but grocery prices in Canada keep going up and I really need to start paying attention to my pennies at the grocery store.

My Super Store experience started off shakily since the produce quality and selection was dismal. There were no Brussels sprouts and the onions were worse than the ones in Assiniboia were last year (and that’s saying something). I almost abandoned my cart in the ‘Mexican’ aisle full of Old Paso crap, but persevered for a bit and was rewarded with an increasingly full cart as I started to be able to cross things off my list.

I only had about $130 left to spend at this point, so I tallied everything up as I put it in my cart, switching between the Our Groceries and calculator app on my phone. I stuck to my list, second guessed every decision, and skimped on meat and dairy to come in at $143. Whew. This was in no way a ‘stock up’ cart. I’ll need a top up on a lot of things quickly. But at least the pantry basics of vinegars, oils, sauces, and condiments were in the cart as well as enough dairy and meat (in combination with the M&M chicken) to last me a while. There really isn’t anything I can use to cook up a storm and make up a huge batch of anything. I’m going to watch the Co-Op fliers and get missing items, like ground bison, there. I actually found things at Super Store that are cheaper at the Co-Op. Co-Op does do sales very well and now that I have all my basics, I can look forward to a ‘ten for ten’ sale to get some really good deals on certain things.

My favourite bit of Super Store was their ethnic foods aisle. Tucked into a corner was a proper supply of true Mexican foods, including, almost out of sight, bags of Maseca corn flour for making tortillas! I was so pleased when I found this! The bag was about $5.50 and will make a lot of tortillas, a much better deal than the $5 bags of tortillas I was buying last year!

Next to the Mexican groceries was a Middle Eastern shelf with everything from za’atar to tahini to stuffed grape leaves and more. I was very impressed!

All that said, I won’t be going to Super Store again except to get specific items. I didn’t find their prices that much better than Safeway, their selection was much smaller, they didn’t have good deals on meat, and their produce was dismal. But at least I didn’t come out of there feeling that I got robbed (too badly) or that I had wasted my time.

It was getting really late when I came out of Super Store and I had spent my budget, so I postponed the trip to Canadian Tire and the visit to Safeway for more produce (I did find frozen Brussels sprouts at Super Store, which will tide me over). I stopped at McDonald’s for a black iced coffee, the one thing that is way cheaper in Canada than in the US (1.30CAD here for a medium versus about 2.50CAD for a small in the US!).

The drive home was lovely and I made one last stop in Assiniboia. I hadn’t had any luck at Dollar Tree or Walmart in finding containers for my spices, so I decided to try our dollar store, which is huge. I found suitable containers there at a good price, so the stop was worth my time.

I got in around 6:00 and spent a bit of time unloading and putting things away. I had plugged in the freezer before leaving, so I stashed some things in there even though it’s rather silly to pay the power to run it with so little inside it. I need to get cooking!

As a final note, I was really grateful for my iPhone today. It’s not only Monday, but the first of the month, so I got several client emails today about invoicing and availability, all of which I was able to respond to promptly thanks to the Mail app on my phone. A summer project will be to set up the ‘FileMaker Go’ app on my phone so that I can consult my invoices while out of the office. A client wanted to cut me a cheque today, but I couldn’t send her the invoice right away. She said she could send the cheque without the invoice if I could give her the invoice number, which I didn’t have. I made my best guess about the number, but when I got home, I realised I was two numbers off and gave her the number for an invoice I made for another client. Thankfully, that other invoice hadn’t been sent yet, so I was able to switch the two around. I’m starting to wish I had a PA to handle this kind of stuff for me. 🙂

That’s it for today. It’s been a very long one and I have heaps of work to do tomorrow and in the next few days. Whew!

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Making Tortillas

My neighbour Caroline sent me home with her barely used tortilla press the other day. Today, she came by with a giant container of corn flour and a recipe, so I decided to try my hand at making tortillas!

The recipe for 16 to 20 tortillas is super simple:
2 cups corn flour
2 cups boiling water
1/2 tsp salt

Mix in a big bowl until you get a ball, cover with plastic wrap, and let sit for an hour. Then divide into 1 1/2 inch balls that you press and then cook on a hot griddle/cast iron pan/comal.

So here is her press:

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It has a hinge on the side. You open up the two halves, put a ball of dough in the middle between plastic (to prevent sticking — she uses two halves of a Ziploc bag), press firmly to flatten the ball, peel the resulting raw tortilla off the plastic and plop it into a very hot frying pan (I use well seasoned cast iron, so I don’t add any grease) to get this:

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Rather impressive looking for a first attempt, no?

This was nothing like the tortillas I get at the tortilleria in Maz. Neither is better or worse, they are just different. The main difference is that these are cooked in a cast iron pan, so they are crunchier and have brown spots (the best part). But I usually heat up my tortillas anyway and get close to this result.

The colour is also different. These came out very yellow, like tostadas. The tortillas I get at the tortilleria are beige.

Finally, these were a little bitter. I think the flour might be a little old, or it’s just not the same flour used in the tortillerias. It definitely has a much more pronounced corn flavour. They are going to make killer totopos (fried tortilla chips)! I want to repeat the experiment with proper Maseca brand flour to see if I get closer to the tortilleria tortillas.

But the final verdict is that making these was most definitely worth my time. I didn’t like them much on their own (bitter), but were really good slathered with a little leftover tomato sauce! They are a little fluffy in the middle and feel like wheat bread under tooth (!).

I scoffed at the idea of a tortilla press, but it really is labour saving. Imagine the work and space that would have been needed to roll out the dough into a semblance of a circle!

I only made three tonight and saved the rest of the ball of dough for tomorrow morning. Making tortillas is a lot less work than making flat bread with flour and I look forward to making mountains of them this summer. Considering the price of crappy corn tortillas at the grocery store, the time spent will be worth it!

So yay for Caroline for giving me a chance to try this out before buying Maseca!