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August we stayed close to home and worked on the property.
Towards the end of the month we generally worked in a bit of a panic to winterize the fifth wheel trailer and prep it for the trip south. Winterizing? In August? Yep. It seemed that Paul might not be back to Meadow Lake until it was time to head south in late October and there can be severe weather in October.
Also if Paul didn't come back to the property after the scheduled Alaska cruise all the summer projects had to be brought to a reasonable stopping point and anything that needed doing on the property or with the vehicles that stay in Canada for the winter had to be done.
Some of the tasks included:
- Build, roof, and paint a woodshed
- Re-roof the storage shed
- Paint the storage shed
- Paint the outhouse
- Repair and stain the park bench
- Add gravel to paths and around firepit
- Add supplementary framing to side walls upstairs in the shop/studio
- Grease wheel bearing on fifth wheel trailer
- Celebrate Kohen's third birthday. How cool is that to have a fire engine show up?
- Cruise the dub and check out the cars.
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Our property is on a grid road about a mile east of a highway headed south. Across the grid road from us is the Northern Provincial Forest. There are no occupied properties or towns on our side of the highway for many miles to the south of us. One consequence of this is that we have had many visits from bears in the last twenty plus years. We are now on twenty acres of the original forty we owned. Our old house is on the other twenty acres. At that location we had many visits from individual bears and bear families of a mother and two or three cubs.
The most memorable of those we captured on video tape. It is a good thing it was taped, because I'm not sure anybody would believe that a Siamese cat could chase a bear up a tree. This happened on two occasions. The first with a larger bear and another time when it treed two cubs at once.
In our present location we have had a younger bear climb on our screened tent to eat bugs. We took the tent down to prevent further damage as the bear grew, but we didn't mind it licking the bugs off the truck grill. Another bear was a bit more annoying. It decided to mark "its" territory by scratching the corner of our fifth wheel trailer.
Late this August I had been up reading early while Juanita kept the bed warm and had returned to bed to see if I could catch another hour of sleep. As I lay there I heard the sound of footsteps in the gravel around our trailer. I got back up to peer out the window over the desk to see a bear sniffing at the cover on the barbeque on the deck. I dug out the air horn from the cupboard across from the outside door, but before I could use it there was a massive crash from the bear pulling the barbeque off the deck. I looked out the window to see the bear standing about twenty feet back from the upset barbeque looking a little wary. I opened the outside door and fired off the air horn a couple of times. There was a sound of crashing through the forest as the bear ran away. Juanita was now up too.
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