Welcome, New Residents!

Today around noon we went down to the Point Roberts marina to cheer on the arrival of three brand new residents.  All ladies, all well-mannered, all reasonably happy to take their first look at their new home.  They are not new to the Pacific Northwest, since they all began their lives in the Blaine area, but they had never been here before and they had never before crossed over Boundary Bay in a small boat.  A very exciting day for three  pygmy-cross-angora and mohair goats.

The reason they'd never been here before (a sufficient reason, anyway) is because of their border crossing status.  Goats, it turns out, can't freely cross the border between the U.S. and Canada.  This is surely the result of some kind of Dept. of Agriculture rule, not the dealings of the Dept. of Homeland Security.  But, in its own way, it, too, is related to homeland security, just not the terrorist kind.  Beef, lamb, goat (and, presumably, parrot), none of that is going to come to be among us without some very involved border dealings.

My friends who brought them over today had tried all the standard options: talking to the border people, talking to the people who ship things through the double border with bonds (i.e., such business people are bonded in order to announce to the world their trustworthiness with respect to not letting their cargo out anywhere in Canada or picking up additional cargo in Canada that is not covered by the bond).  'No!' said they each, one and all.

We got involved when the idea was to bring them over in the helicopter.  But we didn't turn out to be much more useful than the border or bonding people.  It's a pretty small helicopter and it was clear that all three goats could not go at once; indeed, it seemed to involve three separate trips from Semiahmoo.  Which gets to be a little pricey in the helicopter rental world.

So, our friends ended up bringing them over in their boat, which is normally in Salt Spring.  That meant a boat trip from Salt Spring to Blaine; a simultaneous car trip from P.R. to Blaine to pick up the goats; then an overnight on the (small but covered) boat with the three goats keeping the two people nice and warm; followed by a car trip back to P.R. along with a boat trip from Blaine across Boundary Bay to the Marina.  On a couple of cloudy and rainy days with anything but a clear wind and a following sea.  A very large effort went into bringing these ladies over to be among us.

Although the goats had never had the opportunity for ocean travel before, they weathered it well, I am told, except for the rough parts on the boat which brought out some concern among them.  Baaaaaaa!   (They were traveling in large dog crates, offered up on loan, ever so kindly, by readers of Point Interface, where a request had been published a day or so ago.)  The boat driver took a longer, slower tack in order to reduce the goats' distress, and just as we arrived at the marina, there they were getting off, immigrants to a new life, apparently as happy as goats could possibly get.

Really cute ladies: all under a year; all as soft as down; all smelling a little goaty, but then what can you expect from a goat?  Friendly, lively, soft and kind of cuddly if you don't think too much about their hooves.    They'll be living down on the west side of the Point on the beach, so they can look out and remember their big adventure.

And the next step, the new owners report, is to find a llama to guard them from coyotes  So, if you know a responsible llama with a passport who's interested in travel and an adventurous life, get in touch.

Low Points and High Points

The ever-useful, ever-informative Point-Interface email list in Point Roberts has today brought us to a summer low point (which in itself is informative and, perhaps, useful): someone has absentmindedly (?) left a mattress in the parking lot of the Trinity Lutheran Church and someone else has absentmindedly (?) left a dead sea lion on the beach in Lighthouse Park. Is this the natural pathway of a spectacularly downhill-sliding trash collection problem? And if so, what is next? Non-functional ferries left on South Beach (rather than over in B.C. near Deas Slough, where they rightly belong)? Cargo containers gathering up on the baseball field (instead of Mitchell Island) as a result of Americans' failure to buy enough from Chinese manufacturers? Perhaps we’ll start finding excessively amorous Republican office holders cluttering up the corners of the Post Office, creating their own dead letter office.

Hard Times, indeed.

On the other hand, there are high points. I, myself, have just watched a son and daughter-in-law leave after a wonderful visit in which the absolute pleasure of their company was absolutely amplified by their generous willingness to help us along in our twilight years by rebuilding a cement block pathway; doing a lot of maintenance on the frog pond; providing us with a pair of perfectly-engineered hummingbird feeders; and giving me and teaching me how to use a Kindle. All those years of childcare repaid in a flash!

And now I have to go read my new book, walk on the new walkway, admire the much cleaner and better arranged frog pond, and feed a hummingbird before they leave, too. And mop up a few, discrete tears.

Big Trash Day

The Canadians have an event that I’ve never experienced anywhere in the U.S. where I’ve lived: Big Trash Day (although I don’t suppose that is it’s official name, but it’s how people I know refer to it). On Big Trash Day, which happens only one time each spring, you are allowed to put out some amount of big things (washing machines, couches, chairs, 4,000 plastic plant pots, etc.) and have it taken away by the trash collection department at no extra charge. You get to put it out several days in advance of the pick-up and everyone roams around to see if there’s anything they want to haul away in advance of the trash collection. It’s a pretty funny event, just seeing what is being thrown out and what is being carted off in advance.

Here in Pt. Roberts, we don’t have a Big Trash Day because, more or less, every day is Big Trash Day. Here, anyone can take some large item out and leave it near his/her house and next to the road in hopes that someone else will want such object and the original owner will not have to pay to get it to and in the dump collection. When I was last here, thirteen days ago, there was what appeared to be an old-time xerox copier sheltering in a blue tarp a block or so away. Haven’t been down there yet to see whether it’s found a new home (either someone’s house or the dump), though it’s hard to imagine who needs an old xerox machine that handles both letter and legal sized paper. Certainly no one had needed it during the two weeks I was here in April.

We don’t do much of this large disposing but about a year ago we did find ourselves with an oversized mirror in a horse-shoe-shaped wooden frame that we neither needed or liked (it came with the house). Eventually, during a spate of good weather, we put it out by the road and after a few days were pleased to see that it had disappeared. Good work! It had found a place in the world.

Today, Ed was out making a bed delivery (explanation below) and when he returned found that that horse-shoe (not exactly good luck here) mirror was returned to the place by the road where it had originally been put out…a year ago. It had not been there when he left to deliver the bed, a task that had not involved more than twenty minutes. Nearby was parked a car and a woman in the car. There aren’t any other houses right there, so it’s hard to know what she was doing other than unloading the mirror. Ed pulled in, engaged in a little conversation with her in which she nervously noted that she had been driving by and seen the mirror and was looking it over but thought it was too big for her use. Ed was pretty sure she had just unloaded the mirror, not least because her ‘driving by’ involved leaving by making a u-turn. Well, if so, there’s a lady who doesn’t understand the Pt. Roberts-style Big Trash Day.

Ed was delivering a bed to someone who had announced (on Point Interface, the local email list for residents) their need for such a bed for a visiting relative. We had a couple of extra ones up in our Canadian house, so he contacted the needer and arranged to bring it down with us today (atop our car). I hope this person understands the rules, though, because I surely don’t expect to have that bed turn back up at our house once the relative has returned to whence he or she came from.

And should anyone out there need a horeshoe-shaped-mirror with a wooden frame, get in touch. Better yet, just drive by and pick it up.

Interfaced!

In clothing construction, the interfacing is a piece of special fabric that goes in between the outside and the inside fabrics in order to stiffen slightly a particular part of the garment. So, for example, a collar or a lapel will have interfacing in the middle, attached in some way to both inside and outside fabrics usually, so as to emphasize the shape of the collar or lapel as well as to give it a little more body and make it able to resist wear better. I mention this because there is an email list on the Point called ‘Point-Interface,’ and it is an inspired name, because it does exactly what an interfacing does for an item of clothing. It gives Point Roberts a little more shape, a little more cohesiveness, and in the long run will make Point Roberts wear better, I think.

The person who presides over Point-Interface does so somewhat by accident, as I understand the history. It started as a list for the Red Hat Group, and then over time, other names were added and now it has several hundred names. Anyone can ask to be added to the list and if you do you will get maybe 8 emails a week with a remarkable range of information. Perhaps you would like to buy a lovely carpet that someone on the other side of the Point needs to have out of their house; join a group that is coordinating neighbors who are able to provide one another occasional transport to the airport; locate your missing cat or your missing drill; rescue a pet whose owner is not findable; be told about the latest gallery show at The Blue Heron or a concert on Sunday at the Lutheran Church; be reminded of the meeting (and the meeting's agenda) of the Taxpayers or the Voters Associations; or hear about a new book of poetry that a resident has published; or be brought up to date on a new transit program that Whatcom County is offering to those of us on the Point. It’s a wondrous grab bag of emails, some of which I file away, some of which I delete, all of which I am glad to have seen and know about, even if I don’t respond specifically to them. It's a little like a tiny, kind-of-daily newspaper.

Last year, when I thought that the Point Roberts Community Association might reasonably have a website , I thought that such a mode of communicating might be a feature of that website, but I didn’t know then about Point-Interface. And I suspect that eight months ago, it didn't have as wide-ranging a series of community announcements and information as it now has. Currently, the list-keeper has a large enough base of people interested so that Point-Interface has enormous potential for providing community cohesion without anybody having to attend meetings or be made the president.

The key to making this all work, I suspect, is that the person who runs the list has only two main jobs: One, maintaining the list of email addresses, and, second, receiving information and making a judgment as to whether any particular request should go out to everyone on the list. All replies come back to the person who wants the information posted. So, if you want to locate your missing cat, you send the information and a picture to the list keeper, and your message with your reply information then goes out to the list. If you want to engage the help of others, point-interface is a great place to start. I'm working out the possibility of starting a hand sewing/embroidery class for kids on the Point, and once I get the preliminaries worked out, the point-interface list is where I'll go to find out if there actually are any kids interested in learning hand sewing/embroidery. There's simply no other way I could effectively get that information. Great thanks to the list keeper! By contrast, if you want to fulminate about Obama, or the Whatcom Council, the All Point Bulletin's Letters to the Editor is the place for that information.

If you want to be added to the point-interface list, send your name, phone number, and email address to point-interface@pointroberts.net. Try it, trying being a part of the connected part of the Point.