For the last couple weeks I’ve been thinking about doing a picture a day as the snow melts. This weekend the snow did start shrinking back (some). By the look of the weather forecast, I’m expecting a good amount of snow will disappear this week. Unfortunately, my schedule this week is such that I’m not going to be able to follow through on my idea which was to take a picture from the same spot every day for a week and post them. Likely, the next day that I’ll be able to take a picture is Thursday after work. Here is the picture I took yesterday afternoon:

The blue at the bottom of the picture is the top of the compost barrel. The snowbank in the upper centre of the picture is about 10 feet deep. I’m interested in seeing what it looks like in 2 or 3 days.

Comments are still not working. We have made progress with it, just not all the way there yet. In the interim, you can send me a note here.

I took this from across the road:

Spring weather will get here eventually

Today, the folks at the post office told Andrea that spring arrived at 1:30 this morning. I awoke to the sound of ice pellets hitting the window. When I stepped out of the carport this morning, I saw the groundhog that has taken up residence near our house. We had several hours of freezing rain through the day which turned to snow about the time I was shutting my cubicle down for the weekend. The accumulation in the driveway looks to be about 8 inches.

Tonight, my brother called. He lives in our first house which is about 3 hours’ drive south of here. He has no snow. He had rain and freezing rain today. We have an 8 foot bank in front of our house. It is officially spring, none the less.

My mother’s mother died in childbirth when my mother was 4. Her father remarried and my mother has 7 half brothers and sisters. About 5 1/2 years before I was born, my mother’s father died of cancer. In her early 40′s with 6 children still at home, Grammy married again. Her second husband died in the ’80s. At the time, they were parenting 3 of his grandchildren (the youngest was my age).

This morning, my Grammy and only grandparent for the last 14 years passed away a few hours into spring.

While I was growing up I did not have alot of contact with any of my grandparents. Our next door neighbour was 80 years older than me and had been a widower since the 40′s. Even though I called him Mr. So-and-so, he was the closest thing I had to a grandparent type relationship. He passed away at 88. I was grieved to the point that I wanted to cry but simply could not collect myself enough to do it. I said virtually nothing and avoided any contact I could for days.

My second grandfather died less than a week after my 12th birthday. I liked Grampie every bit as much as Mr. So-and-so, but I had only seen him over a handful of visits. I spent Valentine’s week in 1994 on a return trip to Ontario for my other Grammy’s funeral. Our anniversary is in 3 days. There is never a convenient time to lose someone dear.

In preparing to write this post, I did not want to say how grieved I am or how much I will miss her. But that, on it’s own would, either seem a bit callous or that it was due to her character. And, I didn’t want that.

What I did want to say is that I liked her. And I expect that there are very few who survived her and knew her who feel other wise.

Farewell, Grammy. You made it to spring.

Hiya!

Boy I bet you’re as surprised as I am to see the wrong blog here. We are at the end of moving homeschooljournal.net and all member blogs to a new server, and this is one of the glitches. Support is working on it as we speak and I hope to see member blogs back up shortly.

And of course this happens when the comments on *this* blog are inoperable. *sighs* you can contact us at sillyandrea @ gmail . com if you really need anything.

All email is currently down as well.

Thank you so much for your continued patience.

Opportunities for fun like this don’t happen that often. You have to grab them while you can

You can click through for more pics.

After supper, I walked down to the lake to get a few pictures of the sunset. I stopped a few steps short of the lake shore and looked back. I couldn’t resist. Even to the naked eye, my tracks disappeared in the distance. I would guess that I was standing on between 3 & 4 feet of snow. There were many spots on the way down that I left no tracks at all. Over night Saturday night, we had a mixture of freezing rain and ice pellets. The few places I’ve punched a hole through the crust it has been about 3 inches thick. The last time I remember having a crust that solid was 30 years ago (also on March break). For 2 days, we spent 8-10 hours on our bikes going places we had never been able to take our bikes before or since.

Yesterday, Andrea posted this picture and wrote about my trip to Toronto:

Now, when I first heard about this jet a couple years ago I initially thought it was a bit excessive. But, after my trip to Toronto in 2006 on commercial flights, I recognized the value of a private jet to a company that has staff flying on an ongoing basis. On my 2006 return flight, I had to be at Pearson International more than 9 hours before I finally arrived home. The actual flight time was less than 2 hours of that.

Except that we made a detour to the drive thru at a Tim Horton’s for coffee and a muffin, we could have been in the office in Toronto at 8AM. Andrea and I left here at 6:30 (there’s a 1 hour time zone change). To do the same via commercial flight, I would have needed to have a flight that landed at 7AM to allow for walking time, waiting in line time, car rental time, etc. The departure time for said flight would be about 6AM in Fredericton. We are required to be at the airport an hour in advance of the flight. So, I’d have to be there at 5. Realistically, I’d have to leave here around 3AM.

It’s a big difference. And the thing is that people who fly frequently aren’t going to run that type of schedule all the time. Instead, they use a working day to travel. Then if you add the mileage for the return trip to the airport, the parking & other airport fees. It all adds up to be quite expensive. Nor have I found commercial air travel all that enjoyable.

Unschooling Voices #13 is up.

Andrea sent me a link to some maze design research at the University of Waterloo, one of Canada’s prominent universities. I’ve always enjoyed mazes. What I find a bit amusing about the article is that in one of the programming courses I used to teach, I gave the students an assignment where they wrote a maze solving program.

Currently, comments on my blog are not working unless you are signed in. I haven’t had a chance to figure out why. In the mean time, if you want to leave me a comment, you can do it here.