The downside of the part-time rural lifestyle

After each having had the 'week from hell', we managed to scoot out of the city a little earlier than usual, leading to a very reasonable arrival time of 10:00 PM Thursday night. The light-sensitive zillion-watt lamp that watches over the property from dusk to dawn was out. Since DD and SIL were the last ones at the cottage, we figured they had been star-gazing and had forgotten to plug it back in.

DS learned the power was out when she tried to switch on the outside light after unlocking the door. There had been some rainstorms on the way up, with significant winds, so we weren't that surprised. Then DS opened the door to the house. One whiff and she thought "there's something dead in here, and it's bigger than a mouse." She wasn't far off. The smell in the house was horribly putrid. I reached into the chest freezer and felt nothing but softness. Yuck. The power had obviously been out for a while.

A call to Hydro connected me to a snippy woman with attitude. She checked and commented that something had happened on Monday, had we been gone this week? 48 hours or more. Well, that explains the smell. "Go to the main switch on the panel, turn it off, wait 10 seconds, then turn it back on. I'll wait if you want." Damn straight you'll wait. I waited 15 seconds just to be sure. Nothing.

This result left her a little perplexed, until she dove further into the layers of our connection details. "Are you the only ones on your transformer?" Yes, it's right outside the house. An accusatory tone, as if I've been a naughty child: "You must tell us when you call that you are alone on your transformer." Now, how am I supposed to know that? I have dealt with a live person at Hydro several times, twice for power failures, and no one has ever mentioned this. Ms. Customer-Service-of-the-year puts me on hold to check something else, at which point I begin to explain to DS what is going on. The Hydro clerk returns and quickly says something that sounds to me like 'Monday morning'. Monday morning??? Are you &^*% kidding me? I think but "Excuse me?" is what I say. DS thinks I'm talking to her, so she repeats what she just said at the same time as Ms. Clerk repeats herself. I still hear 'Monday morning', and am trying to process this. Clearly, I am not reacting as quickly as she would like as she testily says "Madame?" I explain that someone else here is talking at the same time and could she repeat again? "One o'clock in the morning." (in French, they sound quite similar if spoken quickly) Ah, okay, thank you. Click, she hangs up. No explanation, nothing.

DS and I are left to try to figure out what to do. No power means no running water. We have two choices: get the corn roast propane burner out of the garage, get water from the lake, and start cleaning while we wait for Hydro to show up, or make the bed and try to sleep. We opt for sleep. I find some essential oils and place a couple of drops of Bay on my pillow and Eucalyptus on the bed between our pillows. We open up several windows and pile the blankets on the bed. The breeze from the patio door means we get only an occasional whiff of rotting flesh and dairy products. Even the dog finds the odour too much and abandons his familiar, comfy sleep locations for the floor next to the bed.

In such a situation, you can either laugh or cry. We choose to laugh and try to make the best of it and we're still chatting when Hydro pulls up next to our transformer, but leaves without doing anything. A few minutes later, we hear the faint 'beep, beep' of a truck backing up, and the lights come on seconds after that. We start a fan to keep the smell away from the sleeping area, close most of the windows, and drift off to sleep.

The next morning, all we can muster is coffee, which we drink outside on our ritual morning walk. We don masks and elbow-length rubber gloves and empty the fridge and freezer, wash them out and haul the garbage bin to the road. Thankfully, garbage pickup is the next morning. Once all is clean, the smell is gone. Phew.

All this unplanned activity has put us off our work schedule, however. There is nothing to eat in the house, so we head out for breakfast, then pick up some groceries. By the time we get home, the day is pretty much done.

Friday morning, I get busy removing the latest installment of the beaver dam. It's been two full weeks and the water level is fairly high. This beaver is using rocks and is clearing the bottom of the lake of deadwood. We don't mind, but the fish probably do. It's not a huge dam, though, and I'm done in an hour.

The woodstove guys are scheduled to arrive and show up at 10:00. Thirty minutes unloading and setting up, and two and a half hours later, they are pretty much done. I had asked them if they could remove the top two sections of the old chimney, and we had some cash on hand to pay them for this job, as it was not included in what we paid for. They do it, tape the open top every which way from Sunday, and refuse payment. By 1:00 PM, they are packed up and gone.

We proceed to light our 'break-in' fire, and of course, record it for posterity:
We have a family dinner to go to, but when we get back at 9:00, we put in a real fire. At 11:00, we throw a hunk on the fire and go to bed. We're burning the wood left by the previous owner, very dry, but softwood, so it is consumed fairly quickly. I wake at 2:00 AM and the glow of flames dancing on the LR ceiling is gone. But when we get up at 6:00 AM, the top of the stove is still a bit warm. One burn and we can tell that once we have learned how to use this stove properly, it will serve us very well indeed. The stove is a Hearthstone Mansfield, and cost us about the same as a significantly smaller, full enamelled cast-iron stove would have.

I also spoke with the municipal inspector on Friday. He was curious as to the placement of the discharge pipe from the second septic tank to the stream. I explained about the micro-hydro and he thought we were seeking approval for that now. When I cleared up this misunderstanding, he said he would go ahead and prepare the permit.

Saturday the first order of business was the damn dam. Again. Very small, though, took me about 15 minutes. After that, we moved on to the bulldozer work. We needed to get started on lowering the level of the clearing where the septic tanks will go. We also needed to scope out the path the discharge pipe will take, because we need to fell all the trees along that path for 12' wide. It took us a bit to get used to working with the 'dozer, but once we got the hang of it, it went well. Typical for us, we forgot to take before and after photos. I did get a photo of DS in action, though:
About halfway through the afternoon, after a bit of a jolt, the 'dozer just quit and wouldn't restart. Turn the key, nothing was happening. We know next to nothing about engine mechanics, but we guessed it had something to do with the battery or the starter. We fiddled with this wire and that, and reconnected two wires that seemed to have been broken or cut, but no go. DS called her brother who confirmed it had to be something electrical. I have a multimeter, but as of yet, haven't the faintest idea how to use it. We decided to take the battery out and put it on the charger. That would at least tell us if it was dead. The needle kept going end to end, so DS disconnected it. While she did that, I cleaned out the battery compartment, which had been filled with pieces of old rubber innertube. Once they were all out, I learned why: an old battery had leaked and there was a hole in the bottom of the compartment. I put everything back tidily, and in a manner to keep the battery from bouncing around too much. Then, for lack of something else to do, I proceeded to clean the battery lead connectors. One seemed dirty, the other not, but I did 'em both anyway.

Reconnect the battery and voila, the 'dozer starts. We were amazed, and still aren't sure what the problem was. I worked for a bit, then turned the key to turn off the dozer to let DS take over again. Now the 'dozer wouldn't stop! I ended up stalling it to get it to stop. We disconnected the wire we had reconnected, figuring that was the reason for the new behaviour. It seemed to be because the 'dozer responded normally after that.

Yet another adventure. We look forward to many more.