holidays

I guess it's been long enough and I can write another wee post. We went to my parents' place for a few days. The dog came along (and only did one oopsy indoors... note to self: once she starts don't lift her up in the air to discipline her).

We'd given my dad a 4000-piece puzzle for his birthday a couple of years back. It was worked on, but it was a little much to do in one attempt, so Dad had carefully saved finished sections to continue another day.


That other day came more than two years later; we worked on it and didn't quite get it finished before we left again, but they persevered and finished it off recently.


Nephew Levi enjoying yogurt.


On the farm, quail eggs need to be collected daily. On weekends and certain holidays, a day goes by without any collection, so the work is doubled for the following day. I helped out with egg collecting, dropping only a few (give or take a dozen) in the process. I'm much slower than the regular workers, but hopefully it helped. While collecting, bad eggs have to be tossed and oversized or undersized eggs have to be set aside. Here is a range of the egg sizes encountered. Compared to a chicken egg (bottom), only the centre of the remaining three eggs is an acceptable size... but not acceptably clean.


We went home after Christmas. On the drive home, the Burlington skyway was closed due to high winds so it took an extra hour to snake along underneath it. Then the 401 was closed right beyond where we had to leave it for Ottawa, so we were fortunate there.

We picked up Goldie, who is a sister to Daisy from a previous litter. We took over babysitting her for a few days. Daisy was thrilled to have a bigger buddy to pick on; her diminutive size didn't deter her for a minute. She wanted to fight almost constantly and we had to step in plenty of times to enforce timeouts. Poor Goldie...

Goldie could hold her own...


...but Daisy's persistence had her winning often enough.


I have to say, our mutt is a devil... click for close-ups of that face!




Fortunately no blood was shed, so I mostly let them maul each other until it got too loud.

tag, we're it :(

Here's a perfect Christmas gift: a ticket for having an expired license plate tag. Why does it always expire just when I'm not looking? Okay, so it's been expired for three months, but who's counting (besides the cop). When we moved to Ottawa, I changed a whole slew of addresses, but it turns out I forgot one so I didn't get the notice. And since government departments don't talk to each other, that translates to minus $110 for us. Lovely; guess I'll just have to forgo that weekly pedicure...

So what does one do when one has an expired tag? One gathers as many varying types of documents one can think of (since one cannot recall the last time a motor vehicle bureau visit went smoothly) and heads over to the department of motor vehicles office. Sadly, even an armload of important-looking papers does little to cause my emissions test status to be current. Sigh. So I now have a beautiful temporary tag on my license plate that lasts for ten whole days. And a hole in my wallet the size of a fifteen-dollar bill.

We plan to drive down to Vineland this afternoon but the forecast is for freezing rain and an upward temperature swing... great timing. (All this awesome fluffy snow is going to either turn into gross wet stuff or disappear entirely. That's why it should stay below freezing until April, people!!) Guess I'll see in a few hours whether to go ahead or wait a bit.

Merry Christmas everyone!

butterflies and daisies

Weekend before last, while visiting family, we took Daisy to meet my sister's blog dog. At first Creemore was tied up in the back yard; once she got wind of Daisy, she bounced up and down on her hind legs at the end of her chain tirelessly; it was quite amusing. Once free, little Daisy the chasee certainly got a lot of exercise. They both got to come inside later, where Daisy was mauled to death in short order.


Well actually not. Daisy was a big tease and kept attacking Creemore's ginormous head with her paws flailing. Good times... and good thing Creemore was a good sport.


During our gift swap game, I ended up with a wiener dog boot scraper. Daisy was not impressed...


...especially on realizing she was being replaced! (hmm does that mean we used her to scrape our footwear? Not a bad idea at all... she may have her uses after all.)



A bunch of us went to the Butterfly Conservatory in Niagara. I wasn't sure what to expect; does a butterflies-only zoo sound that exciting? But it wasn't too bad, I guess.

There were friendly butterflies.


Hungry ones.


The nursery.


Up close and personal.


This blue variety was very difficult to get a shot of because they never sat still with wings open.


Action shot.


Mangled.


Silhouette.


Blogging is so much easier with one-word sentences.

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!