I believe I've mentioned the people who live upstairs from Aunt Barbara. They are an immigrant Russian/Israeli family and have been working very hard to fix up the place, which we found slightly surprising as they are renting. But overall they seem like nice people.

One of the many things they are doing is to buy boats and motorhomes, fix them up and sell them. Nothing unusual about that, it seems like nearly everyone here has a small home based business. I will say that it seems like they are really good at the buying and fixing. The selling though is not going so well. They have amassed half of a dozen boats which some of the neighbours view as an eyesore. Several of the neighbours also got a bit miffed about the chickens. Not that chickens are a problem, the area is zoned for light agriculture after all. It's just the rooster crowing at all hours is a bit annoying. Then there's the huge radio antenna. They are HAM radio people and they've erected a mast in the back that looks to be at least 100 foot tall. There's nothing wrong with it but it is a bit, oh I don't know, imposing if you happen to live in the shadow. There is also a string of lower wires strung all over the back 5 acres. And then there's the trees they've taken out to park the huge motor home they're trying to sell along the road. It's not that they are doing anything massively illegal, or even unsafe. It's just been a string of slightly petty annoyances. A drip drip drip of things, but being Canadians we all tried to let it slide.

I think the breaking point was the row of boats. The neighbour was adding onto his house. He talked to Dave, the person who actually owns the house, and got the OK to run trucks through the parking area to the back of his lot where the construction was going on. It wasn't many, one every few days or so but the Russian's didn't like it. They were trying to paint and the dust was an issue. So they lined up all of their boats to block the access. This is the kind of petty neighbour squabbles that go on all the time but it was just one thing too many. The neighbour went to the city of Lantzville and filed a complaint about all the derelict (in his eyes) equipment, and whatever else he could think of.

So early in the week the city inspector came out and met Dave. They looked the property over. There were in fact a number of code violations that the Russians will need to take care of. Then the inspector dropped his bombshell. "You know, in Lantzville it's not legal to divide a single family house into a multi unit rental. The downstairs unit is illegal and must be vacated." Dave was shocked. He tried to argue that it had been divided when he bought the place six or seven years ago. No dice. He tried to argue that as an existing tenant of over 5 years, Barbara should be grandfathered in. No dice. The best he could do was to get the eviction order extended from ten days to two months.

So we are all having a fit over this. Mike meets with the Mayor on Tuesday (Mike has known him from the days when he was a struggling lawyer just out of school. It's good to be gregarious.) The rest of us are trying to come up with alternative living arrangements for Barbara.

And Barbara? Barbara is not worried about it at all. "They aren't going to throw an 86 year old grandmother and her cats out in the street."

And she's probably right about that.

On another topic, you might have noticed that my letters the last couple weeks were a little weaker than usual. At least they seamed like that to me. Well, the reason was that I've been working on another project. I've done a few short films that I put out on YouTube. Some are better than others, the quality is slowly improving as I learn to use iMovie. Some are from these letters, though a few were essays I wrote specifically for the films. I think, Memorable Sights, The Paint Incident and Testosterone, are the best so far. There will be more down the road.

http://www.youtube.com/user/TheMrGeoduck

One thing I have learned from working on videos is that they take a hell of a lot of drive space on the computer. My MacBook is filling up really fast.

HAPPY EASTER,
Doug and Marsha