Another Canada Day weekend has come and gone… and this one was a very nice, relaxing and yet productive weekend.

The weekend started off with my darling letting me sleep in on Canada Day… actually, it was less about letting me sleep in than just leaving me alone. At some point in the middle of the night, my darling woke up, and then couldn’t get back to sleep because of my snoring. (Who me? Snore? Nah, couldn’t be!) So she took herself off to the spare room to sleep… then, when the sunlight woke her again, she made herself a cup of tea and sat out on the deck. This is not something that she does a lot of, so it was a ‘good thing’. By the end of the weekend she was quite relaxed, able to sit quietly, contemplatively, without twitching.

It wasn’t quite a ‘rush’ to get up, showered, dressed and off to the 11 am Canada Day celebrations, but it wasn’t exactly a leisurely pace, either. G. wasn’t really interested in going down to the park, but I absolutely insisted; it was her staff organizing the event, and I felt that she should at least put in an supportive appearance. In the end, she was glad that we did go… we spoke with the Mayor, a couple of council members, were at least recognized by the local MLA and MP, and gave the organizing team a pat on the back for all the work they had done. We avoided the outdoor farmer’s market, however… it would have been a little bit much!

Feeling just a wee bit guilty about having slept in, we scooted over to J & A’s to drop off the tools needed to get on with their deck railings. I needn’t have felt so guilty… they were having a very leisurely morning, themselves, having slipped off to the gym for a morning workout. Dropped the tools and left, quickly, not wanting to get involved in their building process, when I had my own tasks to deal with…

My own task went well… I scrubbed the deck, getting it ready for staining. (And I’ll cut to Monday, shall I?) When I did manage to be able to start the stain job on Monday am, I screwed up, somehow… not sure how, but the job is terrible! Now let me just clarify a couple of things. The deck is a 14′-0 x 5′-0 cedar plank deck. It was washed down with SuperDeck Deck Wash, and left to dry for 48+ hours. Beginning at about 10:00 am on July 3, I began brushing on SuperDeck Transparent Stain, Redwood. By 4:00 pm I knew we had a problem. The temperature when I started was +27C… by mid-afternoon, the temperature had risen to slightly past 30C. Almost as soon as I finished I realized that there was a problem… it wasn’t absorbing. If anything, the sun was wicking it back to the surface of the wood where it has pooled. We now have a orangish red deck with small tacky areas on it. I have tried spotting a couple of the areas with paint thinner, which kinda worked, but I’m not too happy with the idea of scrubbing down the entire deck with paint thinner… although I am seriously considering it…

G. watched me through the entire process (part of her zen meditation exercises for the weekend?) and assures me that I did nothing wrong during the application. In fact, she was getting impatient with me, wondering why I didn’t just slap some stain on the thing and get on with it… but I wanted to be careful to put it on sparingly, with great care… and to do what the lid says: Do Not Over Apply. Well, it appears that I did over apply for the conditions. Damn! Damn! Damn!

Okay, so back to Saturday and Canada Day. After I scrubbed the deck, we lounged in the sun and readied ourselves for dinner. Dinner was a ‘special occasion’ at J and N’s… to celebrate G’s birthday, ’cause they will be out of town on the day. They even gave G a new Lafluma (spell that how?) deck chair. Gee, at least this year they phoned me in advance to find out if I had one hidden away for G… Luckily I hadn’t picked it up yet, so, what the hell, G will get more significant jewellry this year.

Sunday we ran out to Hole’s Greenhouses and found a very nice hydrangea for the front of the condo… which I got to do the planting on…and then entertained my older brother, my uncle and his wife over dinner, for which I got to do the cooking/barbecuing. It was a lovely, relaxed evening.

S’s mother (S is wife of the uncle P) had a radical mastectomy on this past Thursday as a preemptive strike against breast cancer. She lost her older sister to the disease at this time last year, largely, so she says, because they dicked around with lumpectomy after lumpectomy until the disease killed her. So she chose the more drastic approach in an attempt to save her life, or at least make the rest of it more about her and less about the disease.

Now all this talk about breast cancer gave me the impetus to keep pushing to have G. phone our friend C. in England… a recent breast cancer survivor… and insist that she visit us later this July. The mental health is what is at issue… she’ll give us an answer shortly.

Being the good consumers we are, we decided to go and spend money on Monday, this time at one of our favourite gadget shops: Lee Valley Tools. We picked up a couple of self watering bulbs to test on the roses in the containers, and an IV drip system for the lavender and the hydrangeas.

G’s birthday is tomorrow. So far she will be getting a small watering can for in-condo use, a large watering can for outdoor use, and a lovely diamond and tanzinite bracelet, from me. J., our eldest, is flying in from Victoria as a surprise, and will just sorta turn up at G’s office for lunch. It should be another good day…