Walked over to the other side of the valley and up Gomerich Rd. to the highest viewpoint (maybe 40 ft), where there is now a newly built house facing the lake just up from which another new house in the same style, what I'd call "mini-estate", faces it. Not grossly big, like the monstrosities to the north of town or the big biker-era compounds up the hill down long, hooded driveways. No fuss landscaping, but well kept (wee topiary, "bedding"plants, etc.)--in a neighbourhood where fussily tended vegetable gardens by no means preclude an abandoned vehicle or two on the property, they have carved out an honorable middle way. Their only contemporary indulgence the hunched acknowledgment of the "view"--the little lake, the farm, the coal tip covered with arbutus that obscures our house, the curve of the train tracks--that the older houses, built when the valley was either an open mine or a swamp, were designed to alleviate. Hence the rose gardens and carpentry, the hobby farm, that closed in communal fireside life. But the rickety little barn at the corner of the property, spared into its second century only by a continuing need for the convenient storage of wood, held up by creosote fumes, is now valued for its melancholy aspect, has become a "feature", the way old parks get swallowed up in new suburbs. The way Nanaimo started facing the ocean around the time of Expo '86.