I told the nice cashier at Lakeview Market my son’s engaged to a Japanese girl and she (of Japanese descent) said “don’t you already have a Thai daughter-in-law?” I said yes I do, and now I’ll have a Japanese one, too. I said obviously I was such a terrible mother they had to go right outside their own race to get the bad taste out of their mouths.

Nicky and Haruka plan to get married in a very small ceremony, either here or Japan. I suggested they might meet halfway in Hawaii and marry there. All we know is it’s likely to occur in April.

That’s the good news and other than that, the bad news is mainly around the continued broken appliances around here. I got a new washing machine at Christmas, a new fridge in January, and now the water softener is broken, and will be $800 to replace.

But with the amount of minerals in our water all of the pipes’ll be filled with gunk if I don’t buy a new water softener. It took a while for me to realize it’d stopped working, as I thought I was just having an awful lot of bad hair days.

Louie, the feisty dachshund, was barking for about twenty minutes, so I thought he must be seeing the deer, as they always make him bark like that. It went on and on, and so I went out to see. I could hear him down the hill where he likes to shout at the deer.

I walked over and as soon as I did, a bobcat he’d treed saw me and jumped from its perch on a branch and sprang off. He went after it, but the cat was almost flying it moved so fast. We’d seen tracks in the snow around Christmas, but didn’t know what kind of animal made them.

I wonder if that’s the animal that attacked Wrecks, causing the abscess he had a while ago. It’s always hard to know as we also have a large raccoon population and they hate cats, too.

The other week I got a form letter from the BC government stating all food producing businesses now have to complete some onerous forms around food safety. I threw this straight into the garbage, and then yesterday I got a call from someone in the Ministry letting me know about free workshops to help us with these new processes.

As he’d e mailed me the dates, I replied to him saying really? I said I took Food Safe and had a business license which involves a health inspector coming to your place. I said you want more from all home-based food businesses in BC?

So every food vendor at every outdoor market will have a food safety plan? Will every on-line cookie and cupcake business be contacted to do this? It seems expensive, unnecessary if the person has been inspected, and antithetical to entrepreneurs who loathe more forms. Why all the red tape given all some of us have gone through to be in a food business to begin with?

So many questions about our illustrious provincial government, and so little interest in complying with their make-work assignments. I wonder how this will pan out.