May 11, 2008:

Happy Mothers’ Day, all you mothers out there! Hope your day was as good as ours. Doreen heard from all the kids by phone, then we went to Lloyd’s and Louise’s for lunch, which turned out to be a steak dinner. All their kids were home so we had a great visit.

It’s not quite summer weather this weekend, but pretty nice anyway. Bright and sunny, and the temperature has been in the plus teens. Quite a wind came up this afternoon and there is a possibility of rain, but nothing so far.

We left Sandy ’s place west of Didsbury on Friday morning. It snowed there all day Thursday, and I had to shovel about six inches of snow off the car. By the time we got to Didsbury there was no snow in sight, and the roads were dry. The brunt of the storm seems to have hit south and west of there; one place apparently got about 50 centimeters of the white stuff. Good for stretching out the ski season.

At Kindersley, I grabbed a cup of coffee and sat down with some old men in the mall. They tell me seeding is well along; they expect to wind up with a couple more weeks of decent weather. Then they would like lots of rain.

I talked to both Shirley Miller and Alex Dunlop on the phone Friday. The ice is off the lake as of Thursday, May 8, which is later than normal. I kept track for the past seventeen years and in that time there were two May 8, a May 10, May 15, and May 24 (believe it!). The rest of the years it was off earlier, once as early as April 20.

Alex tells me Connie and Gary Schmidt opened the Beach Café last week. I thought they were going to open for Mothers’ Day but I guess Connie got restless after the long, idle winter. Sounds as if coffee row has moved to the Beach Café.

The lynx that was a regular at the Millers’, Dunlop’s and Renneberg’s seems to have lost interest in civilization and headed back into the bush. Maybe food is easier to find now that the snow is gone.

We joined the Good Sams Club. It is an international association of RV owners with benefits like discounts on sundry items including camping fees, roadside service, route planning and the like. There are four chapters in Saskatoon and we applied to get allied with a chapter, but all were full. They have a maximum of twenty five couples, understandable when it comes to booking campground spaces. I have a coffee row friend who is a member of one of the chapters, and he invited us to a breakfast meeting yesterday morning. They meet every Saturday morning all through the off-season. Then we were invited to participate in an outing next weekend at Craik Regional Park . I think they want a chance to size us up; if an opening comes up we may be invited to join.