One more nephew

Congratulations Karin & Hank! My sister in Smithers just had a baby boy. Little Aaron took his time... wasn't he supposed to be a Christmas baby? He hasn't even met me yet, and already he procrastinates as well as I do.

I have many more nephews than nieces... almost 2 to 1. I guess that's to make up for having too high a ratio of sisters to brothers in my own sibling pool.

Nothing else new, except that spring sprang early this year. It's been raining for a few days and a little too warm... topping out at something like 12 degrees. A week ago I was considering shovelling the deck again, but yesterday the last bit of snow succumbed to the torrents of rain and warm air and the deck is clear. What used to be beautiful 3- or 4-foot snowbanks along the road are now 1-foot poor excuses of snow "piles". Very sad indeed. Let's hope there's a little bit more winter afoot. Else Ottawa's Winterlude will sport a 7km swimming pool instead of a rink.

update

Well, happy '08 everyone.

It's been a couple of weeks since my last post, but just when I think I'm scot-free and no one's visiting the blog anymore, someone leaves a comment just to keep me on my toes (thanks e.h.).

I've managed to get out and go snowboarding a couple of times already. Since I've only gone night-boarding so far, the trip to the hill is super long because of Ottawa rush hour traffic (read: five minutes longer); I timed my trip home once and it was exactly 20 minutes. Talk about convenient.

Being from BC, I happen to have certain standards when it comes to ski hills, but the one nearest our place is granted leniency on three counts: (a) it's 20 minutes away, (b) going on 2-for-1 Tuesday evenings puts the lift price at a laughable $12.50, and (c) after so many years of hardly hitting the slopes at all, this is certainly better than nothing (especially after a good powdery snowdump).

The second time I went was with some buddies on Christmas Eve. The drive up was fast, in part because no one else was heading the same way. I soon learned why: there was to be no night skiing on Christmas Eve. The hill could have at least called us and let us know... or, you know, we could have checked the website.

[Aside, while my adrenalin is pumping: Two minutes ago I heard a siren outside coming awfully fast and I turned my head slightly to see what it is. I was a little surprised to see a fire truck barrelling along at what must have been well over 100km/h in a 50 zone. That NEVER happens right here, since there's an intersection right there as well. A minute later I heard another siren approaching so this time I decided to go to the window and look. This truck was encountering a red light (the first must not have) and slowed considerably (sort of) for the intersection. Good thing too, because a suddenly a 5-ton truck went through its own green light unawares; the fire truck literally locked tires and skidded laboriously to a halt to avoid t-boning the 5-ton. I fully expected to see bits of 5-ton all over the road, but fortunately this didn't happen. Although I would have had some spectacular photos for a blog post...]

Back to the less exciting. The hill was closed. Obviously when this happens you go to the next one and hope it's running. Okay, we phoned ahead this time. Another 20 minutes and we were at the next hill (a slightly better one). So that's at least two hills ridiculously close to home. Things just get better and better.

Hmm, what else. I bought some junk on usedottawa.com (like craigslist but around here it has a much bigger audience for some reason). The junk included some stuff I really didn't want, so I turned around and sold a couple of items for what I initially paid for the whole lot. If I can magnify this sort of dealing a hundred-fold, I can start thinking about quitting my day job...

It's -22 out this morning (or so my sister in Smithers tells me). I did go out to put out the garbage but it didn't feel very cold (under the carport). The silly thing is that the forecast for sometime next week is a full 33 degrees higher! Why can't it just stay below freezing until April? No one likes the mess of melting snow, so it may as well just happen when it's expected to.

My sister Marian, hubby Brian and young'un Levi came over for the turn of the year. Levi is one cute little guy and I found him surprisingly manageable for being at the age where I'd expect him to touch and break stuff just for kicks. But what do I know? And he's pretty smart with stairs (of which we have plenty): a good number of feet from the stair he wants to descend, he drops to all fours and crawls backwards to the stair like a careful driver--not hitting too much on the way. Very amusing to watch. Poor Marian had a cold, so she was perpetually tired and stuffed up and couldn't taste all the good foods that go with the season.

On a good day, our complex has all of three visitor parking spots available. These days were not good days, since the snow from the last couple of dumps had been plowed to those spots and not yet removed. For a day or two Brian could park their Jeep in an absent neighbour's carport, but after that he had no choice but to park next to a big pile of snow that really shouldn't have been there. It snowed a little that night, and the next morning some unimpressed lazy snowplower had decided that the Jeep was in his way and had pushed whatever snow he could gather and piled in front the Jeep. Yay for 4WD... we didn't even have to use shovels.



On New Year's Eve, Brian cooked a wonderful fancy dinner for us. I generally take pride in my culinary abilities (I make a mean slice of toast) but this achievement almost put my own to shame.



Levi didn't appreciate good cooking quite so much, so he got to eat his favourite dish all by himself: yogurt. And no, that's not a print on his shirt.



At 6:57pm, to commemorate Ottawa being chosen as the capital city in 1857, a 17-minute display of fireworks was held near Parliament Hill. From our balcony we couldn't see the lower stuff since there's a building in the way, but we got to see enough anyway. The 3-second sound delay was interesting as well. At midnight there was another 400-second fireworks display to salute Quebec City's 400th anniversary this coming year.



A good time was had by all. Marian had brought Settlers (board game) along since we haven't bought it yet. Quite a good game (more so if one wins). Luckily we're not too tempted to buy it since you can't play it with only two players.

some more snow

Well, all the weather forecasts agreed on some semblance of a storm, and they happened to be fairly accurate for a change. Sunday morning I looked out the window and thought it had been yet another overenthusiastic forecast. But I guess my third-floor view can make even the snow cover seem puny.

We headed off to church through at least a few inches of freshly fallen snow. Everyone was driving was pretty slowly. Except maybe one car. On the freeway (and all other divided roads), everyone seemed to stay in the right lanes, but since the plow trucks tend to throw snow right rather than left, the leftmost lane was in the best shape. The car seemed to tend floatily toward various incorrect directions but after some time I realized that was the doing of the wind and not a slippery surface.

We got to church only 6 minutes late and rounded out the morning's attendance of 25 souls (a third of the usual). After church we had to reschedule a planned visit due to the weather and did a less rural visit instead. The snow kept coming down, so to wait for it to be over would be futile (or at least rather lengthy). Heading home later that afternoon, the freeway was almost invisible due to drifting snow. One thing I'm not crazy about seeing glimpses of in those rare bare patches of road is the solid white line on the left side of my car.

The drive home wasn't terribly fast, but again the leftmost lane was the best of the bunch. (Oh, and I've reaffirmed my belief that the sensation of speeding is relative: it felt rewarding 'zipping' by all the other cars at over 70 km/h.) More than once we'd 'zip' by a freeway on-ramp, and there would be 8 or so vehicles lined up and stopped; a handful of people would be pushing the lead vehicle through the mounds of plow-displaced snow until it could carry on under its own steam, after which they would get behind the next car in line and push some more...

We disturbed some snow mounds getting through to our off-ramp, and then stopped to help a minivan that had gotten stuck. Then off to home, adventure over.

Or not. Our common paved area on the condo grounds hadn't been plowed yet, so we got hung up fairly quickly. I had suspected this would happen, but there was no harm in trying. So off I went to trade my Sunday shoes for boots. A few friendly neighbours were outside shovelling, and they came over to help. Another neighbour took his all-wheel-drive Subaru and broke a trail to my carport, and without too much effort we had the car parked in very little time. Yay for nice neighbours!

By the time it was over, it was a 37cm snowfall. Not too bad in my books, although it's still a little short of the 95cm we had in a single snowfall four years ago in Halifax. Good times, good times...

Accumulation on some garden furniture in our backyard...


Some blurry pics showing accumulation on the deck...


So Elaine, I imagine your hubby wasn't as impressed as we are... :)

Pictureless update

Okay, I couldn't do a completely artless post... bear with my fantastic drawing-with-mouse skillz...

Life's been relaxing and fairly routine. Carrie's mom was in town for a conference so she stayed over for a couple of weekends. Our first out-of-town visitor... and after living here only a month!

I got a little addicted to websites for used stuff over the last few weeks. I tried to sell some things online but have managed to sell only one item so far. Buying stuff, on the other hand, goes a lot easier. Among the things I picked up is a fake Christmas tree. (Let's face it -- being from where I'm from, I couldn't very well stoop to paying for a real tree!) Our first tree! It's a little bare but I have big and exciting plans: each year buy $5 worth of junk to hang on it, and within a few decades it will be as well decorated as the best of them. My only regret is that our living room is 10 feet high and I only bought a 7' tree. But I guess that means we can take it with us if/when we move. Oh, and if I come across a big fat 3-foot star it will make a great tree-topper.


Last week Saturday we thought we'd go cross-country skiing in Gatineau Park, which is just across the bridge on the dark side in Quebec. It's maybe a 20-minute drive so rather convenient. But it turned out that the rental place there wasn't renting skis until this weekend, so our other option was to go snowshoeing. Unfortunately the footwear I'd chosen for the day were my Nike runners since I expected to be changing into ski boots. And though I've heard often enough that my shoes could double as skis or snowshoes, I wasn't eager to test that theory. By being a little cautious and staying on the semi-packed trail, I didn't get too much snow in my shoes. The outsides got very wet, but I was surprised to find that they were quite waterproof indeed.


After a short excursion we went for a drive to see the area. We drove along Meech Lake. (I heard of this back in current events classes in school back in the olden days, but hadn't--and still largely haven't--a clue what that was all about.) We had an old disposable camera with us that was a relic from our Europe trip, so went about about filling it that day. No sooner was it full than we had several up-close deer sightings. Oh well, we now know that there's some sizeable wildlife not far from the city.

Once we get the film developed (wow that sounded strange and old-fashioned) we'll finally get to see how our pictures turned out from the Cinque Terre, five villages on the northwestern coast of Italy. These towns are connected by rail and hiking trails, and we found that area to have some of the most beautiful scenery we would encounter in Europe. And I had to go and forget to take my real camera that day.

Our minister and his family have moved to Taber, AB so there were multiple Christmas-program-slash-farewell evenings to see them off. Ottawa was his first congregation and he's been here nine years; it's clear they will be sorely missed.

It's been snowing off and on so there's a fair bit of snow and it seems to be here to stay. We thought we'd take advantage of this and go snowboarding on 2-for-1 Tuesday evenings at a local ski hill in Gatineau Park. We had driven by the ski *hill* on Saturday and I must say I wasn't exactly eager to hit those quasi-slopes, but Carrie's mom managed to bring both our snowboards from B.C. when she visited, so we're quite determined to use them one way or another. A friend of mine quit work early and headed over to our place; sadly the fact that it was snowing out (and people must still not be too steady on their winter legs/tires) meant a usually-40-minute drive took him two hours! Meanwhile Carrie had headed out with our car to the hill with a coworker; what should have taken maybe 25 minutes took over an hour, and that only got them to where she hit the ditch. Another hour wait for a tow truck (a booming business that night), and finally off to the slopes for a couple hours of fun. (Since they ran aground not 3 minutes from the ski hill, it was a no-brainer to decide to carry on with the original plan. Plus on 2-for-1 night a lift ticket costs $12.50 a person so that's not so bad.) Since the 2-hr-drive friend's tires were even worse than our car's, we decided to enjoy the après-ski beer and pizza without the ski (or board) element.


Our inside-scoop unofficial weather guy from church has me pumped for the snowfall expected tomorrow. I expect many feet of fluffy goodness. Okay, maybe half that, but hopefully lots anyway. It will interesting to see what the driving conditions will be.


Well that post was way too long.