A Day of Sunshine

If there is anything I miss from my time living in Calgary, it is simply that, even in winter, the sun is frequently visible in the sky. That’s not to say there aren’t gloomy, grey days, but they are usually broken up by days of sun every few days. It’s rare for the grey to last more than that.

Ontario, and specifically Northern Ontario, is prone to far more grey weather and longer bouts of cloudiness. The last few weeks have been no exception. Cloud and snow, (and even some rain for good measure), but ever grey clouds, which show no signs of letting up or even tonality, have covered the skies here for the better part of 3 weeks.

I truly believe I get a version of S.A.D. (Seasonal Affective Disorder), and it’s often triggered by these periods of dark grey sunless days. Despite this, Sandy and I have managed to keep ourselves motivated and actively working just about every day, with the exception of the oddly timed rain downpour.

We got about an hour of sun one day after a week of grey, and then literally nothing for nine days. This means that the camper batteries don’t charge, The power stations don’t charge, and because of all that, our phones don’t charge. This build up, and can be quite stressful. One is left wondering if we’ll ever see the sun again.

I should note here that we don’t get any real form of cellular connection out here. On particularly cold days we may get a weak 5G or LTE signal, but generally on our land we are far off from communication. We rely on Starlink to connect us even for texting or phone calls.

So you can imagine that after 9 days of barely any charge on anything, everything is running low, including our spirits.

And then came one Sunny Day.

Unless you’ve experienced the soul crushing of losing all power to everything slowly, you may not understand the joy a sunny day can bring. Besides lifting spirits, seeing things like the camper charge come up is immense.

We took as best advantage of it as we could and continued our work on the build out with a little more gusto and enthusiasm.  We even took a short while to appreciate the beauty of this land in the sunlit snow.

It was indeed a well timed day of sun. Sadly since then it has again been mostly cloudy, and we managed a final, white-knuckle drive into town, possibly for the last time this year, or maybe even spring. We are still fighting for charge on power stations, although with minimal use of things in the camper, it seems to be maintaining well for the moment.

Otherwise work continues on the build out, and after much preparation of pieces and parts, we’re actually at the assembly phase, which is certainly a good motivator. There is much snow and cold in the forecast right now, as expected, but we’ll do our best to keep everyone posted, and hopefully in the next post on this blog we will be able to share some of the construction we’ve been doing. With our limited power, filming, editing or uploading to YouTube is virtually impossible. But we hope that will improve in the coming weeks.