How I purchased a new rain jacket

Can you see it?

It rained most of the day yesterday. I have a rain barrel but it is not really big enough to get through a prolonged dry period so I thought that since I had a few empty plastic garbage bins I'd put them out under a few eavestrough downspouts. I have a total of five downspouts, one already goes to the rain barrel and I placed garbage bins under three others. One of them filled up very quickly so I got some pails to bail it and when it filled again I reattached the part of the downspout that directs the flow away from the foundation. Now I have lots of water for the gardens.

In the process of doing all that I realized that my Gore-Tex rain jacket has outlived its usefulness; I was getting wet. I went online to see if I could find a replacement. There's a shop in town that deals in that sort of thing but it's kind of expensive and I haven't seen anything there that I liked. I looked at the Mountain Equipment website which is currently offering free shipping, but again, I didn't see anything I liked as much as my old jacket, even at double the price I was prepared to pay. So I went to the website for the shop I got my old Gore-Tex at and they still sold them for more or less the same price as the old jacket (on sale due to Covid) but not free shipping. The shop is in Vancouver, they don't have any other locations, but all their jackets are made right there in Vancouver. I know the quality is good because I have had two of them before (first one purchased in 1998).

I couldn't decide about size. The size tag has long since worn off my old jacket (it is 12 years old) and my measurements are at the high end of one size and the low end of the next size. I looked up their phone number and called. No answer. Tried both the local and the toll-free numbers, no answer. But they had a Contact Us page to fill in your info and send a message, so I did that. The page warned that it could take up to several days for them to get back to you, but I had hardly hit Send when my phone rang, it was the shop calling me.

The caller identified himself as Paul, said he didn't know why my call hadn't reached him, maybe he was away from the phone at that exact moment. We discussed my size issue. In the end I decided to go with the smaller size since Paul told me that the jackets tend to be quite roomy. So then we went through the process of making a phone order. English is not Paul's first language, he apologized for asking me to repeatedly spell out my billing and address info but I appreciated his effort to get everything exactly right. He told me that he would have to calculate shipping and taxes later, then asked me what the sales tax was in Nova Scotia. I told him: 15%. He was flabbergasted, couldn't believe it was so high.

What can I say, it is what it is and when you've lived with it for long enough you just suck in your breath and pay the bill. A local friend pointed out to me that what takes away the pain is the fact that all of it, every last penny of it, goes toward provincial healthcare. I don't know if that is still true or not but I know it used to be. I once went to a local Dairy Queen and when told the bill for whatever I had ordered I muttered something about exorbidant taxes and the owner of the DQ just about leaped across the counter at me, reprimanding me for criticizing a tax that paid for my healthcare. Alright! Never do that again!

Anyway, the jacket is ordered, I got an email confirmation of the total cost and a postal tracking number, it's on its way. And it was a pleasure doing business with Paul in Vancouver.

The rain stopped and I took Hapi to the Reservoir. Someone told me there was a baby owl in a tree near the trail and I saw it and took a picture. It is the little blob in the middle of the photo above. It is only about a foot tall and it is a Barred Owl which is actually quite a large owl, so this one has to be a youngster. It seemed happy to be photographed, sitting quite still and staring down at the various cameras pointed at it. Barred Owls are common around here.