This weekend's guest labourer.

Last week was cool and the leaves were half raked.



This weekend we had a guest raker who, although initially nervous on the tractor, proved adept at driving, towing fallen trees, chainsawing and the rest of the country chores.



She brought gusto and enthusiasm to manure manipulation









So much so that it disconcerted Dixie



It was a very nice weekend but it ended, alas, with white stuff falling from the sky. This was the deck on Sunday morning.

Enough with the cats for the moment.

The seasons have moved on. No frost yet but it's definitely cooler and there are more leaves on the ground than on the trees. A couple of evening pictures from the driveway:





A stormy afternoon, somewhere between home and the day job.



When the weather's wild with big clouds and the sun poking through as if imitating a work of religious art there's a real feel of bleakness on the high plateau where the windmills are. It's not quite like tornado season in Kansas but there's something of the same menace about it. It's enough to make one consider raising the roof on the Beetle.

We're not done with the kitten pictures yet.

Though the stock of kittens is diminishing. This is adventure kitty on a vertical stroll:






Here he encourages another one:





Some more traditional kitten pictures:

A different kind of weekend.

This weekend we took the course required for a gun license in Ontario, or perhaps Canada, it's all a bit confusing. Some surprising facts about guns in Canada emerged:

Only 4% of gun related deaths in Canada are accidental and yet, in 1978, before mandatory safety courses, 151 people were killed in gun related hunting accidents in Ontario alone.

Canada's gun laws are thought repressive by some and yet it's lawful to carry a pump action shot gun with an eight shot capacity and the required ammunition in your car so long as the ammunition isn't in the gun. In fact, it's lawful to leave an "unrestricted weapon" such as a rifle or shotgun in the bed of your unattended pick up so long as you throw a blanket over it.

Handguns are "restricted" and machine guns "prohibited" but in the seventies and before there were no rules and anything owned then can lawfully be held by the then owner or his or her descendants. Some people in our class were teenagers who were inheriting a gun collection and who needed a license, whatever that collection includes is lawful in their hands so long as the mechanism on any fully automatic weapon has been mechanically limited to five shots in the magazine and one in the chamber. It's also lawful to have any number of guns so longs as each of them holds only 5+1 rounds (semi-automatic) 8+1 (pump action) 10+1 (handgun) or unlimited (rim fire). The thinking (if any) behind the law seems to be that 15 shots in one gun is a problem, fifteen guns each with one shot is a collection.

One thinks of most guns in Canada as being illegally held and smuggled in from the US and yet there are over 80,000 guns lost or stolen from permit holders in Canada and unaccounted for.

All of this was mildly worrying but nothing like as worrying as the long term gun owner who had grudgingly come to get a license. He could barely walk and had a twitch. He swung the weapons around wildly in the course of loading and unloading. He needed the proper shells and bullets for each weapon sorted out for him as, even with glasses, he couldn't read the writing on them. He wasn't just applying for a routine permit but also one for "restricted weapons", if granted his twitching hand could be holding a handgun.

In the unrestricted class we hated the lever action rifle and repeatedly "fired" it while trying to work the safety (fired in quotes as the ammunition was dummy stuff for the course). We didn't like the semi-automatic shotgun as the snapping action seemed set up to chop fingers off but we liked the bolt action WW2 era British 303 rifle and the break action shotgun. We, like everyone else, loved the pump action shotgun and ejected the shells loudly across the room. Among the handguns we were surprised at how awkward the semi-automatic was to operate, we liked the double action revolver.

There was an astonishing amount of paper to be pushed, forms, forms, forms. Earlier in the week Anna had become a permanent resident of Canada seemingly with less administivia. Anyway, the course and exams are over, we'll shortly have licenses covering all the weaponry we're ever likely to need.

The course, by the way, was in Rexdale. That made me smile as, while the area is renowned for the heavy use of firearms, one imagines that few of those fired from moving cars belong to permit holders.

A couple more kitten pictures.

More unsuitable food, cheese rinds this time.




We still have all of them, come on cyber people, you know you need something furry and warm for the winter; grab a pussy!

Perhaps the penultimate kitten post.

Someone is coming for black kitty this week. This was to be the last set of pictures of them all but blogger's having some troubles and we can't add the last couple of them getting into everything; they do though, they get everywhere. Grey kitty is lucky the raclet machine wasn't turned on.



This is Canadian Thanksgiving dinner, for cats:

Not Hot No More.

Cold and damp all of a sudden. This is the place to be:

Stranger Stuff

This is a bunch of kittys on the couch where they should not be (please to be ignoring the laundry). We've had offers to adopt the black one (the one I wanted to keep) and the grey one (the one Anna wanted to keep). The black one is on his way out. Offers on Adventure Kitty (see below), Pig Kitty (copyright Anna's Mom) that's the white one, or Runt Kitty, the grey and white one, welcome.



This is a mantis, preying on the tack room door.




This is Adventure Kitty, boldly climbing my leg so as to be able to jump on the keyboard. He's much the boldest kitten.




These are a bunch of huts west of town. One's just being built. It's far from clear to me what these are about. It was mentioned at a dinner we were that they belong to people of some cultural group, which one I've forgotten, the tone was that used towards Gypsies in the UK or Mexicans in the US, but I don't know that people live in these huts, maybe they're used as cottages and it's like the all-Jewish cottage resorts on the lakes north of here. Anyway, a hut in a field to live in or a hut in a field for weekends seems an odd carry on.




These are windmills. I'm coming to hate windmills. They themselves are weirdly attractive but the wires and poles and the rest of the infrastructure are fiercely ugly. There are plans to erect very many more and, if the province is covered in them, they may meet 1% of the local power needs. I can't see the benefit, I'd rather send an extra spent fuel rod to a reservation every few years.





This is a source of primitive delight. Not many neurologically typical people get to play in a steaming muck heap.

Mild, isn't it?

Not to tempt fate but I'm shorts and sweating buckets after cutting the lawn. In October!

This morning we went for a bit of a ride under the Autumn leaves. That was really nice even if it was marred by Austin's decision to roll despite my being on his back. Note the dirt on him in the last shot, he was brushed before we went out, honest.