You may find you enjoy cities more when you live elsewhere - you visit them for specific reasons, to see particular people, attend some event, do a work thing maybe, always in limited time so you cram in what you can, with full awareness ... i really miss Montréal sometimes ... also parts of el DF ... Vancouver, not a bad town in many respects ... La Paz BCS ... Dunedin NZ - small, more of a town really, but some fantastic people around it, cultural centre of Godzone ... never saw Trawna, had a traumatic experience in Pearson airport one time on the way through to Heathrow, that's all -g- ... London and Newcastle, ah .... didn't like Ottawa, glad the people i knew there moved ... got to see Québec city, Halifax, Newfietown etc one day ..... fine places and it's nice of the folk to keep them running for my visit, but live there, no way, feels like too many rats in the cage after a few days
You mention heating - wood is the only way imho ... you have to live it as a lifestyle though, thinking ahead always ... this winter you cut wood for next winter while burning what you cut last winter ... none of this JIT delivery ... twenty-one years ago next month i moved [the first time] into this house, it's supposed to have electric heat with 'wood backup' officially, well the electric heater wires are still sticking out of the walls, never got around to buying the fixtures -g- .... i know an old guy who goes around collecting firewood among other things with nothing more than the sharpest set of handsaws you ever saw and a pickup made out of an old japanese car [by the application of a sledgehammer, some scrap metal, and duct tape, looks like], he always has dry wood, which is no mean feat on the wet coast, and he'll prune your fruit trees so fast it'll make your head spin ... got to watch he doesn't overprune though
Wine - one time this incredible bottle of Beaune [sp?] was opened for me before i could object, ninety-dollar bottle of wine and this was twenty years ago maybe ... well that was something, it really was ... guy who did that is an amazing man, a livonian whose people had been in what is now Latvia or Lithuania for four hundred years since the war against the protestants in Germany, one day he's six years old or so and the german army comes and says all you people have one hour to put together twenty kilos of personal effects and get on the trucks or you will be shot by the russians who are about to move in - this was when Hitler and Stalin had the deal to carve up Poland, but it affected more than Poland ... anyway he went on to an incredible life, ran a postal operation for the british army and still speaks english with a bit of a brit accent, managed a hotel in Haiti and had to learn french real fast to do it, was a albertan cowboy for a while, other fascinating stuff, logging among them -g- ... well now he makes wine over on the island ... never thought about it before, but i just put his name Harry von Wolff into google, and there he is - bcwine.com ... he was going to plant some reds, don't know what come of that ... i cannot enjoy a white wine, or one with any discernible hint of residual sugar ... it's not necessary to drink with the fish course when you can simply have a beer before and a beer after
National is getting pumped more than X-Cal lately, with russ hot to trot on it ... and it's a fine high-leverage play, no question about it ... there may be concerns about the perceptions of the locals, and Fear Of Financing of course as they all have now ... but i do think of them together for some reason ... Shawn Kennedy will make xcl work, he's built in a lot of survivability to hold the exceptional Sleeper property for when the bull comes along, or for when the majors decide it's a good idea to consider the future ... with more current attention it's quite possible the ngt moves first, but they shouldn't be too far apart, i like em both .... cheers |
