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Good Morning.

Starting things off we are in the midst of some clouds this morning which kinda looks as if we are in for a shower or two. Which we sure could use being so dry an all.

Highway 522 is very quiet this morning, traffic-wise, but truth be told, it has been quiet for most of our summer. And I think part of the reason is pretty simple: our powers that be have us strapped in so tight with taxes that the working man can hardly afford to do anything or go anywhere anymore.

Right now, they are taking damn near half a man’s paycheck before he even gets a chance to spend it. That’s something they shouldn’t be doing at all. They already get plenty of our money through all the other taxes we pay on just about everything we buy.

So there they sit in their offices, wearing their fancy suits, while you and I go out and do the work. They aren’t the ones getting up every morning and earning that money, yet somehow they figure it’s warranted to take a big chunk of it right off your paycheck.

It makes me shake my head sometimes and wonder what the hell Canada is becoming.

A free country, they say.

Yep, it is , as long as you do what they say.

On another note being so dry our vegetable garden is or has been struggling this year. We do have enough for ourselves which my lovely wife has been putting away for winter. We used to sell our surplus out by the road but this year I don’t suspect we will be doing much of that. At an rate it is what it is not much we can do about that. Just have to be happy that we have enough for ourself.

But all in all, we have had a pretty good year with our gift shop, with lots of people dropping by and picking up some of our one-of-a-kind items.

The biggest sellers this year were my wife’s paintings. She started off with fifty of them and has sold well over forty, in all different sizes. Her painted gift cards were also a hit, along with her other paintings on wood.

Next on the list were my books. I have twelve now, to be exact. I finally managed to get my latest one, Strange Occurrences, finished. It is a hard-boiled private-eye mystery with science-fiction and supernatural elements, and it is the first in a series called The Clay Moretti Files. Folks seem to be liking it a lot, which is sure nice to see.

With the help of my wife, I also put out two children’s books. One is Elmer, the tale of a small pig I raised many years ago. The other is Untold Tales, a story about my grandfather, who used to survey for the railway down through the United States many, many years ago.

In that one, my grandfather and his guide, Jeb, stop at a small cabin to get in out of the cold. What they find inside is a woman and her two children in a bad way. It’s one of those stories that has stayed with me for a long time, and I’m glad I finally got it down on paper.

And that’s not forgetting my other books, each one filled with more than fifty short stories. Those are made up of all the stories I’ve been writing for my newspaper columns, which come out every Saturday through Postmedia, the largest media company in Canada.

I write fifty-two columns a year for those folks, and I’ve been doing it for more than twenty years now. It keeps this old mind of mine on the straight and narrow, which is something you need when you get up there in years.

I also managed, in between all the writing last winter, to make twenty new Native American wooden flutes. Every one of them is made with different inlays of different kinds of wood, and they are all tuned to the pentatonic scale, in the keys of D, E and F, with some in between.

That’s just one more thing I’ve added to my list of life’s projects. And for those who don’t know, I’ve been making these flutes for more than thirty years now.

An old Native friend of mine, Grey Wolf, taught me how to make them many years ago when I was just a boy. Over the years, I perfected the craft, using his way of doing things along with some of my own ideas.

I’ve sold a pile of them over the years, and every one is one of a kind. No two are ever exactly alike, and I suppose that’s part of what makes making them so enjoyable.

So other than that not much else happening in and around our old homestead. Have a great day.