I suppose you might call it "bonding"

Charlie and Brigid are no longer eyeing each other from a distance:

The pictures fail to convey the great amount of tail thrashing and rolling around. They also give no idea of the noise. Brigid wouldn't end up stuffed in Charlie's mouth at risk of being chomped like a chicken carcass if she didn't bite his ears. And then go back to do it again. But she does.

She's doing better with Sid, he seems to have made his mark and she doesn't chase him as she does the other cats.



It will calm down. She will sleep through the night. I will be a calm and well adjusted person.

No more Samsung for us.

A shelf in the fridge door fell apart:

depositing the contents on the floor:

I wrote to Samsung pointing out that a gently used plastic shelf less than two years old ought not to fall apart and received a response I suppose to have been mechanically translated from the Korean. Ir reads, in part:

"We apologize for the inconvenience you may be experiencing with your RB1855SW.
Please note that as per our warranty policy, any physical damage to any of our products is not covered whether it could be accidental or not."

I think this is crap, the machine is not of merchantable quality, the company doesn't stand behind its products and it's not worth suing over a shelf. I suggest that one should buy appliances from other manufacturers.

Ah, Spring.

So now it's April 25th, three days after the last snow. It's 80 degrees, 100% humidity and there's a violent thunderstorm in progress. Before the storm broke I was working outside building chick boxes and flies bugged me. I hold that this is, at best, a three season climate, Spring is just that moment between it being freezing and the government issuing notices advising people not to breathe until it gets cold again.

This year we're going to put the chicks in the empty room downstairs, the one with the remarkable wallpaper. One box is built, it's 5' square with 2' walls and lined with garbage bags:




Another is in progress but the saw's outside and it's bucketing down. These should hold up better than last year's cardboard boxes. They should also be able to accomodate a serious number of chicks.

Meanwhile, upstairs, we have car parts littering the living room. (Nothing really changes, does it Mum?). That's a new bonnet for the Beetle, it needs a surprising number of parts moving from the old one on to it.



Earlier there was a crisis of cat food, probably because dogs ate it all. I gave the cats puppy food, I rather enjoyed them shutting the puppy out while they noshed.

Lovely floor that!

Fitting in with the household.

Here Brigid helps Charlie with a stick,

there's an unhelpful size differential, Charlie doesn't even notice when he's swinging the stick and the puppy

perhaps she was sent to pick on someone her own size because here she attempts to get Sid to play. Predictably that resulted in a string of swats to the head.

Perhaps the best thing about puppies is that they're easily exhausted:

Maybe it won't settle, maybe it's not heavy

but that, folks, is falling snow

on April 22nd.

Getting into everything.

Of course, that's what puppies do. They look innocent

but then they fetch and eat your shoes.



If you want to be at peace to enjoy a snack


you need to be on the other side of a door

Brigid should sleep well today. We've a motion detector light outside the bedroom window, sometimes when there's a power failure at night it gets confused and stays on until darkness next falls. It did that last night, keeping Brigid and, in turn, the rest of us, awake most of the night. She can doze all day while we're at work which raises the alarming possibility of a pattern emerging, a pattern in reverse of us. Eeek!

The unreliability of the power supply in rural Ontario is a huge bother, the case for going off grid here isn't predicated so much on green concerns as the fact that the supply is expensive and conks out whenever there's wind, or snow, or rain. It's about as good as the mobile phone service.

Anyway, Dana, this is a bit of a better picture of Monique.

She was trying on a stack of old style dresses. That was something to do with the sugar bush, perhaps we should have set her to work there.

Dog picture,

this one's mostly dog.

There's something of a Charles the First look about these dogs, an air of aristocracy that in another country would demand the guillotine.

So far so good with Charlie and with the cats, we'll see about the chickens tomorrow.

Brigid.

That's the name of the new dog and these are the first pictures.

Very many more to come, no doubt.

On the way to pick her up we passed a Mennonite church. Not just a few horses and buggies parked outside and there was more parking at the back.

Odd that they don't seem to water their horses.

They've made it.

It's been a long time coming but now we have chickens visiting the house.

We need another dog, one to see them off.

Car and deer season.

A common sight at the side of the road lately.

This week Anna and I have both seen recently dead deer, cars with steaming radiators still on the scene, and this morning I narrowly missed a beast that decided to play chicken with my car.
The trouble is that it's always in the morning and you can't really stop and scoop a deer on the way to work. If we saw a recently hit animal on the way home then it'd be a venison night, but guts all over the whistle?(1) I think not.

Here are some cheerier shots from this morning's drive, inspired by Mr. Inukshuk.

Pretty but still too bloody wintery.

1. "Whistle" is the London expression for suit, a matching combination of jacket (coat if you will) and trousers (pants if you must).

Not much of a long weekend.

It was Canadian Easter, a long weekend here. Anna worked all three days (and Monday which is a holiday for banks and liquor stores). I worked Sunday.

Inbetween, I expanded the chicken coop and put a fence to limit the pending puppy's roaming. The coop's not quite finished but the chicks aren't here yet, nevermind wanting adult accomodation. My efforts were impeded by this hen who became possessive of the screws and pecked at me each time I reached for one.

Savage!

Charlie and I went for a walk at the Mono Cliffs. It's pleasant but all a bit regulated, trails with signage, a leash requirement, that sort of thing. Still, it did have dead animal traces to roll in.

Mono is near to here but it's another world, endless little parcels of land with good fences and recreational horses. People in Mono blanket their horses in April, with lightweight blankets no less. Very home counties. They even have garbage pick up and this on a Saturday:

Charlie and I also went for a walk around the old gravel pit, that's not at all regulated. I suppose there's some contradiction in seeing a disused gravel pit as an amenity and a used one as a blight but then consistency, hobgobblin, and all that.

In the gravel pit we came across this.

It looks to be a harrow. Abandoned junk ? Valuable tool parked pending future use? It's hard to tell with farm equipment.

We went deep into the woods behind the pit, just to see what was there. What was there was a mechanical dragon:

There was a label attached, "New Holland Forage Harrow" it said. It didn't seem to be foraging.

Nearby there was something terribly complicated which must once have dealt with seeds:

Better than a museum, the gravel pit, and you can have a beer on your quad over there.

Politics and decline.

Local politics are getting interesting. A flyer recently arrived from the "North Dufferin Agricultural and Community Taskforce"

http://www.ndact.com/NDACT/North_Dufferin_Agricultural_%26_Community_Taskforce.html

pointing out that a group called The Highland Companies has accumulated over 6,000 acres of local land and suggesting that this was not likely to be good news. Today a DVD arrived from the company in question with a covering letter confirming that they intend to use the land for gravel pits and windfarms and to reopen a disused railroad; at first glance this letter seems a spectacular public relations own goal but perhaps the video somehow makes the idea of industrialisation other than ghastly. I fear that we're going to have to become radical environentalists and go Monkey Wrenching the windmills.

Meanwhile, developments on the poultry front offer a horrific vision of the future. The old cock has been usurped and banished. He's been driven out of the coop by the younger ones and now lives in the tack room.


Only the oldest and slowest hens now fall prey to him. He's lost some feathers, his comb never recovered from the frostbite, he's generally past his best. He's only alive because we throw grain to him after the others have gone to roost.


Who will throw grains to me, I wonder.

So here you are Renee

the newly mininalist Beetle in a car park in Guelph,

in a shopping plaza,

and in High Street, Grand Valley

I suppose I'll either have to fix it or install a giant fake blower intake.

Maybe it was that elusive idea of Spring

that made me so stupid. Anyway, I didn't clear the driveway last night. This morning I jumped in the car and drove off, not allowing for the road having been ploughed and there being thick wet snow piled in the driveway. I didn't get near the street before I was stuck and had to climb out of the window. No one is in the car in this picture, it's running in reverse but going nowhere.

Oh well, I thought, not so bad to have to pull just once this winter. I fetched the tractor and hooked it up. Alas, I'd removed the chains from the tractor. The wheels just spun.

Since the driveway slopes down to the road and the Beetle was stuck close to it I then had the idea of pulling it out forwards. I couldn't get the tractor out through the deep snow so I decided to use the Land Cruiser. I didn't clear the windows so steering that out through the trees involved pointing and hoping.

The VW doesn't have a hook on the front and it doesn't have a frame. I looked for somewhere to chain on to, mindful of that video where kids hook a truck to the bumper of a car and pull the car apart. The only point of any strength seemed to be the bonnet/hood latch so I fastened to that. I had the deranged idea that, if it didn't hold, it would break off with relatively little damage.

Ha! The Toyota wheels spun, the VW deformed. No progress was made.

Eventually I cleared the snow in front of the car by hand and the snow behind by tractor. A combination of wheel spin, tractor tugs and much kneeling and scraping under the car got it out to the road.

Two hours of hard work resulting in being cold and wet, a fine start to the day.

April, not in Paris.

Yesterday I got a slight sunburn while brushing the moulting horses. I considered putting out some patio chairs. This morning the car looked like this:

The snow was very wet and the roads slippery, this car had spun out and was stuck over a ditch.

Later in the day conditions were no better, this is a highway (all that junk at the side of the road is the gubbins required to work windmills), the car is a way off the road.

The occupant was surprisingly jolly, she'd called for help so I left her there.

Our cabin in the woods looked rather nice, in a Decemberish kind of way.

Inshallah, it'll be warm later in the week. Then there'll be floods.