The Ovens Are Fixed and Fabulous Once Again

Just a quick note here - for those of you who have been following the Dacor Preference Oven saga - it has come to a splendid conclusion. Dacor in California read my blog, sent parts to George in Ontario Canada, who then brought boxes and boxes of new parts to my house and presto/chango after 2.5 hours of rebuilding and installing - I have an oven that is once again turning out wonderful meals. So to counteract all that baking I've been doing, Kevin & I went on an adventure. We didn't end up where we thought we would on that Sunday afternoon, but had a great time anyway. There's a small town/village that you can see going eastbound on the QEW/403 before you get to the Royal Botanical Garden. As you zip by at 100K, it looks like Whoville & Kevin decided he was going to see if he could figure out how to get there using the force, the pull of the tide and keen intuition. It seems we'll have to try another day - but what we did find was the Smokey Hollow trail which is part of the Bruce Trail - Canada's longest and oldest footpath (800+ kilometers).

Never mind the StairMaster - lots of ups and downs - and great views of the creek below. You can really see how little snow we've had this year. I bet normally this pathway would be impossible to use.
Bits of outcrop rock here and there.

If you want to know a little more, here's the handy information sign.

Here's another snow bereft photo - the white on the other side of the valley are icicles.

Very cool to see the water rushing along and over the ice - hard to see where it becomes ice and where it is water in this photo.

Now normally, most folks would be happy to just stay up on the trail and observation deck. That is unless you belong to a photography club, in which case, there isn't a photo that isn't worth risking life or limb. How deep could the water be anyway?

And just one more for good measure before we left for home. Sometimes it's more fun getting lost and finding something new.

This is my Brain on Numbers

So, the sun came out. I took a few shots. Dumped them on the computer and decided that I had one or two subjects that deserved a bit more work. Rather than do it right there and then - I started to work on the hideous pile of receipts in advance of handing everything off to our sainted accountant for our Income Tax. As I've mentioned before, my personal idea of hell would be me in a room with an adding machine and an endless stack of receipts that needed totalling.

So, long and short of it - didn't get back outside to do a couple of do-overs - but I found the perfect representation of what happens when I spend too much time on my computer doing numbers.....look how the brain cells are falling away from the central core. The two hemispheres are virtually indistinguishable.

I remember this moment well. The adding machine total and the Excel spreadsheet totals didn't agree - no matter how hard I smacked them.

And then I realized that all my brains had fallen out my ears and that the sun had gone down and it was time to open that bottle of wine that I was saving for Friday.....

Much better now.

And so, here are a few more bits from the garden - the Limelight hydrangea - notice how thin the flowers are compared with PeeGee below. Still very pretty.

This is the most determined Gaillardia I've ever grown - can you believe it's still holding its colour considering all the cold and snow?

Wonder if I could train it to do the books?

Looking for little bits of Colour....

There's been nothing really wrong with this winter. We had snow for Christmas, but not too much. We had a January thaw. We had some weather cold enough to haul out the dreaded snow-pants. So nothing terrible, no exciting storms, not much of anything. But somehow, it feels as if it might just go on forever.

This weekend, rather than enjoy the lovely beigeness from our warm sofa, Kevin insisted we go over the the Royal Botanical Garden for a walk. We lasted about 20 minutes - it was bitterly cold. But, as you can imagine we felt so much better for having been out and about. Here are some of the tiny little glimpses of colour we saw:

Next camera - longer lens!

Just to show you how cold it was, the Cornus sericea - (that swath of sticks above and between the sea of beige) was positively purple rather than its normal red.

Bart trying to escape from the people who put him in his embarrassing Doris Day outfit.

The water moves just fast enough so that this patch rarely freezes.

I think these are the beigest photos I've ever displayed.

Had tried to take a photo when they were nice and green - much easier without the distraction of any other plants around.

And should I ever feel too cheerful, I'm going to come back to this photo.

p.s. Sunshine is out, and just as soon as I stop squinting - I'm going to get out there to see what I can find.