Day 10

Merry Christmas! Welcome to the brown north!

Whoever disclaims that Global Warming is happening should be looking at our weather here in the boonies of Donald, Ontario (Koshlong Lake Road, off Haliburton County Road 1). We've had rain the past couple days, temperatures in the low single digits (metric...this means it's in the 40's-50's in fahrenheit), and nearly all the snow we've had here has all but melted away. The lake is breaking up to a certain extent (wasn't ever solid enough for people to go out on the ice either...so much for Michaelea's wish to go ice-fishing while we were out here), and if all that wasn't enough...we're getting so much wind that we've had power bumps pretty much all day and a 4-5 hour long outage. Not quite long enough to warrant getting the generator out of the garage, but long enough to make us think about what needs to be done to get the residence ready for a longer outage, in weather that's potentially just as ugly. In any event, I'm thinking we'll be getting appropriate stuff done tomorrow to make sure we're ready for such a potential eventuality.

Dial-up internet remains a hate for me. Web surfing is pretty much out of the question, and downloading 308 spam messages over dialup is painful at best. At least the home-brewed router (using the iBook G4's modem bridged to the airport connection was easy and reliable) works!

Had a few of the Oshawa based Harrison's (and Chaputs) up to see us today. Nice to visit, right in the middle of the power outage. :-)

Couple days ago, did up a few logs into wood suitable for the wood stove downstairs (thus the lack of worry about heat in the house) with the hydraulic log splitter, and yesterday, Michaelea officially named "Hazel"...that is, she applied the late Aunt Hazel's signature to Dad's new John Deere tractor which he's using for landscaping stuff and snow-blowing. We also did it's first oil and transmission fluid change. Only one broken socket in the ordeal of getting the oil pan drain plug undone! (Doubt we'll ever tighten it up that much again to need a breaker bar and a sturdy socket to get it undone!)

Other than that, life is progressing out here. We'll be posting photos and so forth when we've got broadband internet once again...

Until next time,

Jon