April 20, 2008:

We got a real blizzard late Friday night; an awful north wind blew snow pellets against the house and they drummed on the front windows. It only lasted a couple of hours but left quite a bit of snow behind. We hardly heard a vehicle all night on Attridge. We were lucky – the wind blew the approach to our garage completely clear. The sun came out Saturday afternoon for awhile, and the temperature came up to about +2° so most of the snow disappeared. The forecast blizzard never did materialize, unless that was it Friday night, a day early. We did get a hard wind and freezing rain Saturday night but it didn’t affect the roads. Today it started raining in the early afternoon and last time I checked (9 PM) it was still raining, and freezing on cars. The temperature was down to -1° so roads could be pretty bad tomorrow.

Every time we look out our front windows that new World Gym building is a different color. It has been white, blue, yellow, white and red, black and red and likely even green in there somewhere. They seem to put on a coat of something; then they paint it; then they put on another layer of cladding. Now it looks as if they are putting stucco on the east wall and some of the south wall, and it is brown. There is some metal cladding on the south side, and it looks gun-metal gray. I didn’t know it took so many layers to make a building. Next, they will likely paint the stucco, so it will be another color.

We made a circle on Friday, visiting Tisdale, Greenwater, Kelvington and Mozart. Six hundred clicks and we were home for supper. I slept most of Saturday. We had planned to go on Monday since the Perigord Rummage Sale is on that day, but the horrendous weather forecasts decided us to make the trip earlier.

The only snow we saw was on tree lines and the odd spot in the ditches. Many sloughs are clear of ice, others just starting to break up. The Red Deer River was running fast, but not very high; the same with Greenwater Creek where it flows into the Marina . The Marina was still full of ice, but there were lots of open areas. The floating docks at the boat house seemed to be free of the ice, and were floating level with the fixed dock, which would put the lake at just about an ideal level. The lake ice looked pretty wet. We didn’t see any indication of flooding conditions anywhere that we travelled.

We had coffee at the Cove, the men in the store part and the women in the dining room. It’s more peaceful that way. Helen Renneberg told me the women’s exercise group has pretty much broken up for the spring; the Cove had put a bunch of exercise equipment in the new dining room and there were a fair number of locals using it all winter.

What with fishing season being closed and farming not yet started, the people at coffee row didn’t have a whole lot to talk about. I did manage to compare notes with Mel Tkachuk on our GPS navigators and talk to Ty Andreychuk about our winter holidays.

A lynx has been a regular visitor on Helen’s deck. It has been socializing with her cat, but Helen keeps a baseball bat handy just in case, while she takes pictures. Shirley Miller says it has been visiting their deck too, in fact she sent me a picture Merv took of it and it only looks about three feet away. I think it is very unusual to have a lynx hanging around habitations, and presumed it would enjoy a house cat for lunch. Do you suppose the Greenwater lynx could be one that someone had found as a kitten and kept as a pet? Likely let it go around there when they found it to be an impractical pet. Helen thinks it is pretty young.

We carried on to Kelvington where we had lunch and a visit with Jenny. We were in the house but didn’t see a single cat. Unusual, since old Frankie is usually loafing around in the living room, enjoying her second childhood.

From Jenny’s place I could see four little kids playing on the road, a half block away. They had some kind of design chalked right across the road and were playing a game that looked like hopscotch. That’s something I haven’t seen in the city.

Doreen drove to Grimson’s while I had a nap. We wanted to check out our motor home as we thought we might have put some garage sale junk in it when we were packing up to leave the Park. Bryan had started it up and drove it around to a drier location. Good to know the battery was still up as it had been parked too far from power to be able to put a charger on it. Once we find a place nearby to store it, we will bring it to Saskatoon and get it ready for the touring season. Laurie was at work, but we had coffee and a visit with Joyce, Dan and Bryan. The air seeder was parked in front of the big shed; they’ll be going over it inch by inch to make sure it is ready to go once the ground dries up.