It’s that time of year when I have bouquets of my gigantic dahlia blooms about, and that’s good as I need something calming upon which to focus.  God knows I faithfully do my yoga every morning, and this always involves mindful breathing, but sometimes one has to go beyond yoga and flowers for inner peace.

Why?  Because mom, Luke and Jan are currently cohabiting and it’s going to end in some kind of a Waco Texas event if we’re not careful.  There could be mayhem and then the police will have to be called in to break it all up. Remember when we all went hey, that’s so great Luke’s going to live with his 96-year-old gramma?

A brilliant solution came which involved putting a nice little modular home on mom’s property, then Luke and Jan could live there, caretaking from a few meters away rather than right in the house.  I began the process of attaining a building permit in February.

I got the building permit checklist and felt my blood run cold as I’ve never done this before and checklists that involve words like “Effective thermal resistance compliance method” with boxes for me to check.  Huh?  I knew I needed help, and was fortunate to get it all along the way.

Finally everything in the checklist was done, and it was somewhat more onerous given mom lives in the Regional District, not the town, yet I had to also go to the Town of Osoyoos for permits for water and sewer hook-up as they provide that along mom’s road. Then as the lot is still in the Agriculture Land Reserve, it had to be less than 1000 square feet and had to be a specific kind of modular home.

On June 21^st I drove to Penticton with my completed application and just as I was about to go in a man walked ahead of me, so was next at the desk, and I had to wait.  He was on a rant about how no one had told him he needed some specific thing, and now four or six weeks later he found out so was this far behind in his building project.  They calmly explained to him all he had to do was call or look at their site, so he left in a huff.

I was scared as I walked up to them as I thought dear God, I must’ve forgotten something too, but no.  Each department came out and gave it a once-over and said yes indeed, it’s all good to go into the queue, and we’ll let you know in six to eight weeks’ time if you got a permit or not.

Last week I got an e mail saying yes indeed, I got it, so now we wait as Lakeridge Homes said due to supply delays thanks to Covid it won’t come until December 22^nd! Hence the double Caesars followed by the double Margaritas as we wait, hopefully without incident.

The ligaments around my knees have been acting up and I have no idea what I’m doing to cause that, but for the last three days the pain has been extreme which is so annoying.  Saturday night I was in Osoyoos and I think I might’ve finally fallen asleep at 4:00 due to the knee pain, then imagine my annoyance to have Frieda’s wet cold nose pressed onto my closed eye at 6:00 AM.

Another excellent reason for self-medication with tequila, though I had to resort to Tylenols 3’s last night as the pain is akin to a screwdriver being stabbed into the inner part of my left knee.  Oh well, into every life a little rain must fall.