spice-the-cat

Well, isn't it a long time since I last posted? Seems like having a blog and not making the slightest effort to add new entries is the height of fashion these days. Or, to put it another way, not blogging on your blog is the new black. Well, you see, I haven't been blogging because I've been blah blah blah...

I've been doing other things, ok, so just get over it. Not that anyone really takes the slightest bit of notice of what goes on here. I could confess that I like to spend my Sundays jumping naked into a barrel full of live monkeys and absolutely no one would notice or even challenge the authenticity of the statement. In fact, that is exactly what I like to do at the weekend and the twin benefits of massage and exfoliation, obtained from the sessions in the barrel, are well worth the time and money spent maintaining a healthy lifestyle and habitat for my simian amigos. You should see my skin after a Sunday monkey tumble - the word smooth barely describes it. And the glow - well, the glow could just be the result of a coating of monkey pee, but I like to think it's a sign of the health and vitality that results after a bout of primate wrestling.

But I digress from my intentions of this entry being meant to have no purpose other than to allow me the opportunity of venting my spleen - not that I have a spleen to vent since it was removed back on March 1st 1979 and which I only remember because March 1st is St David's day and - coincidently - I'm a saint. OK, no I'm not, but I do share the name David and so it makes it a little bit memorable, that and the rather long scar I was left with.

Anyway, on to the venting of the non existent spleen - and by the way, here is a diagram of where the spleen lives for those whose knowledge of anatomy begins and ends with the word McSteamy (and no, I don't understand the reference, either. It's just another example of my gifted ability to bluff my way through current popular culture and appear far more in touch with the modern world than I am in reality).

But the venting. Where is the venting, I hear you ask. No I don't, I just hear the sound of digital tumbleweed blowing through a cyber void. But I have to find some kind of tenuous link between my pointless and inane gibbering and the purpose of why I opened up this page in the first place and so I'm placing a question on your lips.  The venting, you ask. Since you ask then I shall tell.

It's about Ebay, or at least, to be more precise, it's about one of my recent experiences on Ebay. I used to like Ebay a lot. There was a time, many years ago, when it was a good and easy place to find interesting things. It was the collector's marketplace - for a brief moment in time. Like all things in life it doesn't remain static. It changes, it evolves and it eventually becomes - as Monty Python might say - something completely different. Now it's become predominantly a marketplace for anyone and everyone who thinks they are an entrepreneur and who wants to make a quick and easy buck or two - usually at the expense of quality and efficient service. I still buy on Ebay but not nearly as much as I once did. If I want to buy new retail items online I tend to go to somewhere like Amazon where I know the service will be good and efficient, where the despatch times will be almost instant and where I also know there will be no hassle if an item is defective or not as described - none of which can be applied to large numbers of Ebay retailers.  But there are things that Amazon doesn't have - obscure music releases or the occasional spare part or accessory for something - things where Ebay is often the only accessible source.

And so it was that I threw a few auction bids in recently to grab a handful of items which are on my wanted list. All of them were auctions, not buy-it-now items and all of the bids were made after closely looking at the items, the descriptions and the reputations of the sellers. No problems appeared to be lurking in the gloom surrounding any of the target items other than one seller's detailed feedback indicated he wasn't the fastest of shippers. OK, so how bad could that be? I was about to find out.

Shipping from outside of Canada works out at around a week for items coming from the USA and around seven to ten days for items from the UK or Europe, so when my item hadn't arrived from the US after two weeks I started to get a little concerned. I made allowance for a long weekend in Canada and the fact that we're in the middle of the summer recess where it's quite possible Canada Post and the Canadian Customs are understaffed and things get backlogged. When there were still no goods after four weeks I began to get annoyed. On August 7th (remember this date - it's relevant) I contacted the seller regarding my shipment - I had paid him, via Paypal on July 9th and all I asked, politely, was for him to confirm that he had mailed them and to tell me the date of despatch. Here's his reply - verbatim - from August 8th

Sorry for the delay been having problems with my computer over the last few weeks. I make my living with it and without it am a fish out of water. I just got my computer back and this is the 1st chance I've had to check email etc.

Your package left the other day, hopefully you get it Sat. or early next week.
The issue was that I was looking at all of my completed auctions and noticed that yours wasn't paid for, or at least I thought as I'm so used to paypal as almost everyone pays for them that way. Yours was a problem because I got it in the mail and the envelope was stashed under some papers. That's the whole reason for the delays.

Thanks for your patience!!!!

I appreciate it big time!!!!!!

On receiving this I very nearly collapsed unconscious on the floor, overwhelmed by the noxious fumes from the incredible overloading of the amount of bullshit packed into a single communication. A quick reply pointing out that I'd paid using  Paypal on July 9th - 29 days earlier - produced another reply telling me he's mixed me up with another buyer and that my package had been sent and would arrive soon. After that excuse I was beginning to have visions of fumigating my computer to get rid of the smell.

The package did arrive - on August 15th - a full 36 days after paying for it.  This is the longest I've ever had to wait for a delivery from the US and it's not the fault of the postal service. While I'm not one for leaving negative feedback for sellers on Ebay, this guy deserved it for the blatant excuses he made instead of just coming clean and admitting he was at fault. If he's been honest and just said he's screwed up I may even have let him get away with me just not leaving any feedback at all, but he just couldn't take the honest option and so didn't really leave me any alternative.

And so I left what I think is a moderate negative comment "I paid July 9th. Seller Mailed August 7th. Disappointing" Not totally undeserved and not insulting like some of the negative feedbacks I've read - mine just stated the facts. But have we done there? Not quite. After posting the negative feedback I then receive an email from the seller, obviously wounded that I've just busted his 100% feedback record (although his detailed feedback rating isn't quite so good), which says;

"Re Feedback. Just how would you know it was mailed on August 7th?" I can almost hear the petulant stamping of feet in that sentence and the only reply I have is to say... er, Harlan! - for that is the sellers real name - What's the date on this label?

Duh!

A nectarine is nothing more than a shaved peach.

So, there we are, mrs spice & I, heading off on a two and a half hour drive to pay our second visit to a potential new location for spice acres. It's raining - not unusually, since it always seems to rain, storm. downpour* (delete as applicable) whenever we go and view a property. I have no real problem with that, if for no other reason that it means we are going to be very unlikely to buy a house that floods, or one that has a leaking roof. It also seems to have become something of our property viewing signature, as in oh, it's raining, must have a house to see, today.

Anyway, we arrive, the owners have left the building, our realtor is some way behind us and won't be there for another ten or so minutes and I need a bathroom. Well, it has been a long drive, we did stop for coffee and I didn't go when I should have gone. OK, so what's unusual about that.

As it happens I only need to pee, the house we're looking at has 22 acres of land and is on the edge of a forest, there are a lot of plants and bushes around and there are no neighbours for a very long way. No problem, then. I'll just head down into a bushy area of the forest and away we go.

I'm standing there, exposed to the world - or the tiny little bit of it that can't possibly see me - sprinkling the daisies, or some other such euphemism and feeling a great sense of relief, when a dark cloud rises from the bushes. A huge, mean, vicious, hungry and very determined dark cloud of... mosquitoes. And there were a lot of them. And by a lot I mean every mosquito that lives north of the Mason-Dixon line... Along with their cousins, aunts, mothers, grandmothers, sister, half sisters, adopted daughters, nieces, housemaids, hairdressers, beauticians, exfoliators and leg waxers (assuming mosquitos wax their legs, that is).

And they bit. Oh yes, they bit. Not the obvious, dangling out of my shorts, pink and exposed part, because I managed to keep that part moving and out of harms way. They bit me everywhere else, though. My arms, my legs my back and they even bit me on the top of my head. I hurried through the act of watering the garden, tucked myself away and bolted for the safety of the porch - fortunately just as the realtor arrived to let us into the house.

And what a nice house it is - only, we won't be making an offer since I don't really want to spend my future summers hiding away indoors away from the beasts in the bush. And after sitting here for the past few days watching the itchy and irritating, egg sized lumps adorning my body gradually grow smaller and begin to fade, I'm more and more convinced this is the right decision. I've also grown to have a real hatred of mosquitos.

Busy! That's how we've been these past few weeks... or perhaps it's months, I'm no longer sure. The days and weeks seem to fly by with the rapidity of a fly flying by and there is much that has happened since the last post (cue bugler playing The Last Post...) So much, in fact, that I have no intention of writing a huge essay and posting it here just so people can ignore it and pass on to more interesting things. What I will do, though, is rattle through a few headlines of the salient points.

So here is the gnus...

Right, so now that I've got the oldest joke in the world out of the way I'll get to the point.

• House is on the market and although we've had a good number of viewings, we haven't yet had an offer on the place.
• We've looked at a good number of houses with property ranging from 2 acres (nice house, not enough land) to 130 acres (fantastic land, terrible house) with a couple of very nice places in between - including 22 acres in a forest in a very private location. This one we're going to see again next week. Who knows, perhaps spice acres will really be an acreage.
• mrs spice has completed work on another book - this one is number 11 in her Argeneau Vampire series.
• Winter has turned into summer and it's very warm.
• Emma the cat caught a baby bird on one of her daily walks when my attention was distracted. (she goes for walks on a leash, like a dog). Emma is a very bad cat.

• I found two baby squirrels in the garden. One of which seems to have been separated too early from it's mother and was struggling to eat. I tried to feed it with milk and crushed food , but sadly it died. The picture below is from when I first found it and it actually seemed OK at the time. It was a few days later when it started to deteriorate.
• Did I mention it was hot.
• The hot weather has brought some very violent thunderstorms with it. Bad enough that the power was knocked out the other night and that there were several lightning strikes close by - including a tree which was brought down in my neighbour's yard.
• I have lots of new music and new books - too many to mention.
• And I haven't posted on the blog for a while - but that's now been rectified.

So, until next time, here's to the memory of the poor baby squirrel.

Yes, it's alive, as actor Colin Clive exclaimed in the 1931, Universal Studios production of the movie Frankenstein. Said at the moment the monster, played by Boris Karloff, first twitched into life, it seems an apt analogy to use when I finally post something in this space after what is probably my longest cyber silence since I first took the plunge and shuffled on to this immortal toil that is better known as writing a blog.

The reason for the silence - and I've only just realised the appropriate nature, or inappropriate if you have a generous disposition, of the song playing along with this entry - is simply that I'm busy. I am, as the English would say, and I can't for the life of me explain the origin of this phrase, currently running around like a blue arsed fly.

The great Canadian winter has suddenly ceased to be and has been rapidly replaced by an almost instant raise of the temperature to summer levels. In the space of around three weeks the world around me has transformed it's ambient nature from double digits below freezing into becoming an unseasonably, take off all your clothes and dance naked with the garden hose, 25 degrees C (77 Fahrenheit).  How strange all of this appears for a relatively inexperienced resident like myself, can be illustrated by mentioning that, in the past week, I've seen patches of unthawed snow and ice still lying in shaded areas along the road side at the same time as, in the areas catching full and direct sunlight, I can feel my exposed skin actually burning.  Canada really is a strange, and unpredictable country. Eh?

Anyway, as I was saying, I'm busy. Busier than a bumble bee, buzzing on a bustling, busy, bee activity filled, busy day. Since the winter has ended by stopping on a dime and spring has sprung itself upon us with an abrupt determination that knows no limits, so the garden has responded and has gone into an overdrive of growth and greenery. To almost paraphrase an Ethel Merman song that I don't even know, everything is coming up snowdrops, daffodils, poppies and... well, just about all of the dormant plants are determined to prove there is life after death by harsh North American winter. And so the season of garden work begins, takes up a significant part of the day and steals away some of my internet time.

Even as the garden grows and demands attention there are a number of other jobs to do on the house in preparation for selling. We have a few areas where the external brickwork needs attention. I can happily do this myself with a fair amount of confidence, particularly after seeing the areas which I repaired before the winter set in have all survived intact. As a very definite amateur in the house maintenance game I probably spend too much time on the job and waste huge amounts of my resources making sure it's done exactly as it should be (I'm a Virgo) but the payoff is that I can be happy knowing that: a) it's done, and; b) it's been done correctly and won't fall apart.

So, even while I'm up to my neck in grass, last year's leaves, growing plants. soil, sand, mortar. brick debris and hungry squirrels there is still a burning question demanding my time and requiring an answer. The problem is one of deciding exactly where in the province mrs spice and I wish to relocate to. And, therefore, in between the jobs we know need to be done at home, we've been taking time out to try and answer this question and have been heading off on road trips to explore the potential of areas where we may possibly choose to live.

We've headed north, we've headed south, we've been east and we've been west. I don't think I've ever been at the wheel of a car for almost ten hours without a break before, but I have now that we're house hunting. In the days before I arrived in Canada I suspect that if I'd ever driven for ten hours then much of the journey would have been in, or under, water, Living the general area of the centre of the UK, I doubt there would have been ten hours of road in any possible direction in which I may have chosen to point the car.

The days spent checking out towns and districts do take up a considerable amount of valuable time but it's something that needs to be done if we're going to make sure we're making the correct decision when we buy the next house. Even if we end up looking at places that turn out to be totally unsuitable, at the very least, we can cross them off the list. And, for me, travelling around looking at places I've never seen before, there is the added bonus of there always being something to see that I haven't seen before. Today's specific novelty being a couple of wild turkeys hanging around at the edge of a field.

And so, in my defence, there are good reasons why I have huge gaps of time interspersed between my posts. And also why there will be still more gaps to come. It's why I'm missing in action for much of the present time, it's why I'm not commenting on other blogs and it's why so much of what's on here isn't being updated.

It's simply that I'm lazy busy.