The whole concept of wilderness dwelling has been changed by the advent of the Internet.  However, it is a struggle for me to master this medium.  You’ve heard of personal trainers – here is my personal blog fixer!  Tom and Danielle are volunteers I met at the Precipice Cattle Drive party.  Unfortunately, they could stay with me for only four days, but Tom is a software developer and several things were not working well on my blog, so I was delighted when Tom expressed interested in helping on the computer stuff – in fact he was craving a computer-working fix after several weeks without it.  So that suited us both.

The original blog was created by Karilee at Outcome Marketing.  She did a fantastic job and designed a very beautiful blog, giving me a huge amount of free time over her regular charges, but I am not a natural computer person and was finding I could not handle some of the aspects well.  Also the slider, while a work of art, was taking too long to load (at least on my satellite internet system.  I needed something simpler – and I could not afford to ask Karilee to do more work.  Tom has gone into the guts of the thing, found a lot of problems and fixed them.  And all for the price of a few home-cooked meals and some chocolate cake.  Now it’s up to me to try and keep things going.  I would love to have feedback from people – does this work better for you?  How is the flashing that some had problems with before? Any other suggestions? (but get those in soon – Tom leaves early Monday morning!)

The 2014 Slide Show itinerary is now updated.  The books and photograph pages are also functioning properly, and so is the shop.  (I intend to add an art page when I can.)

While Tom was playing in the cool, clean house, Danielle tackled the terrible mess left by the burning of the packrat palace early last winter. (Read both posts.) Most of the debris was melted fibreglass mixed with the tons and tons of nails used in the construction.

I really should frame some of this stuff and ship it to an art gallery.

It was of course mixed with ash and was an incredibly dusty job.

She loaded it into the truck by wheelbarrow.

I helped her a bit, and we took the stuff to the dump.  I wore a mask but got so much soot in my eyes I had to take my glasses off to see.

(My next author picture?)

It is amazing what you can find in the dump!  (Obviously a Chilcotin prosthesis – note the duct tape.)

This morning is day 3 or their 4-day stay, and I thought they deserved a change, so today’s task is that perennial wildernes-dweller’s task – firewood.

   Tom and Danielle are bucking up the trees and loading the truck as I write…

A last point: I have been corresponding with Nicole Lischewski for some time.  She lives where BC, the Yukon, and Alaska join, 80 km from the nearest store, which she reaches about twice a year by kayak.  Her blog posts are wonderful.  Great photos and very well-written content.  Her and her partner’s lifestyle is so familiar to the way I lived at Nuk Tessli.  If you enjoy my blog, consider signing up to hers.  She does a lot of her writing in German so speakers of that language might be particularly interested.