Friday, October 12th - it will soon be time to turn on the heat

It's a cool 6' this morning, heading for a high of 11' later with a chance of showers in the afternoon. Yesterday morning it was a balmy, but windy 16' when I left for work but it cooled off to 9' by the time I was on my way home, with some rain in the morning but very high winds all day long.

Lloyd picked up whatever bug I had last weekend and was off yesterday and given the high winds, I was glad he wasn't standing up on a ladder somewhere. He was feeling much better when I got home after sleeping most of the day, so it seems to have run it's course, through our house anyway.

I'm hopeful that the chimney cleaning fellow will be here this weekend. He was meant to come last Saturday but something must have come up, or his other stops took longer than expected. I've been holding off using the wood stove so it will still be cold when he gets here - but he better get here soon!!

I had an unusual email the other day, from a lady who stumbled upon my blog and has taken it upon herself to read the entire thing from the beginning. She sound really nice but I'm seriously wondering about her mental state!  It's really quite ironic that she found me because there are so many parallels that it's almost scary.

She's a southern Ontario girl but her husband was born and raised here, although he's lived in Ontario for a very long time. They're building a summer home here, little bits at a time, although I did look at her blog (yes, she also has a blog) and it's quite a lovely spot and much more a project than our little summer home was. Theirs is beautiful. In fact, when I saw the artist rendition of the finished project on her site, I recognized it right away as one of the plans that I really liked when we were looking at plans to build ourselves.

Her name is Patti and so is my daughter's. She lives in Caledon but is familiar with the Guelph area, at least the Stone Road Mall part of it! (My Patti had a really good friend in high school who lived in Caledon so many trips were made to Caledon during those years).
They plan to move here permanently when they retire.
Now this is the part where it gets really weird!  It seems she and I took the same program at the same College in Oakville. She started the year after I graduated back in the early 80's! How bizarre is that?

So I can totally understand why she found my blog of interest as she will be doing the very same thing. She does have one advantage in that her husband's family is all here on the island so she at least has some connections when she gets here.

I read most of her blog yesterday and saw the pictures of construction as it progressed.  Part of me was a bit envious as we were planning to build a new house. But then I also could see how frustrating the whole experience can be at times and I think that is probably normal for any mostly do it yourself project. I think I'm glad I missed that. We have enough of that just getting the garage built and it's nothing compared to building a house. It's especially difficult when you live in Ontario and you only have little pockets of time to work on it - everything has to fall into place when you need it to, and that's not always the case. So I guess I'll have that experience vicariously through her blog. I do admit it was nice to just move here, unpack everything and then just get on with my new life - and I do love my old house, even with all it's warts and wrinkles.

They won't be back on the island until sometime early next summer and I'm hopeful that we can get together. I'd love to see their house and hear all about some of the challenges that aren't in her blog - and I'm sure there are many!