Weekend away
This past weekend we went down to visit some of my family. My wee brother and his fiancée are in the area from Alberta, and we had to go and approve her him before they get married in July. Luckily for them, I hereby grant my approval, with almost no reservations. I just know they were on pins and needles waiting for my decision, so now their lives can go on. You're welcome.
We took the dog since we wouldn't know who to farm her out to, and since my dad made the mistake of saying she was welcome. Actually she won everyone over and was hardly any trouble. Hardly. She even graduated from cage lock-up at night; we'll see if she ends up losing that privilege in the near future.
Our niece Megan loved Daisy as well and shared everything from dolls to juice.
There seemed to be slightly more snow in Vineland than in Ottawa, which I didn't think was fair for Ottawa. Daisy, recently acquainted with the white stuff, had a blast, sniffing and snorting and scampering and shivering away.
Daisy on her first hunt. She's probably not a natural; sticking her in a cage with 15 quail will hopefully be enough of an advantage.
We had a great fondue dinner and gift-giving on Saturday night. When we do gifts among the adults, we like to play one of those games that may or may not net you an unwanted item. Carrie was momentarily in possession of a nice Planet Earth DVD set, but that made its way to someone else soon enough. But Carrie wanted it anyway, so we went to Costco on Monday to see if we could buy the same set. (We tried to take Daisy in the store but apparently not everyone welcomes dogs into their establishments... who knew?) Turns out Planet Earth comes as part of an even bigger BBC Natural History Collection, which is 17 discs for $100. So we bought it; now my collection of original DVDs numbers 18, previously unchanged since 1999.
Some of us went to Niagara-on-the-Lake to wander through town there. We took the dog, which turned out to be a hit for everyone else wandering the streets. She was a local celebrity. We try not to let it get to her head; no one likes a diva.
On Tuesday the weather was miserable. It warmed up and rained a lot so most of the snow melted. The temperature in Ottawa looked to be in the negatives so I imagined that somewhere in between it was a very messy and slick zero degrees.
We left for home just before 8pm. It rained right up to the 401/416 interchange, where it suddenly turned into sleet and the highway was slushy and not well plowed. Maintaining 80km/h proved to be challenging. Soon after that, my wiper edges decided to freeze in an unnatural shape and the sleet froze onto the windshield. I pulled over and fixed the issues, but as we took off again I had to drive through a pile of slushy snow, which might have been the reason the car refused to go into overdrive thereafter. Anyway, I fell in behind a brave transport truck that went 100km/h even though most other vehicles wouldn't break 70. So we over-revved our way home in decent time. Total trip: 5h 10m. And my purchase of winter tires has now been deemed justified.
We arrived home to a foot of new snow. Yay winter!
