Spring Is Here
The snow is nearly all gone, and the snow flurries that were forecast never reached our area, so maybe the driveway will dry up!

Our well water is too high in minerals for white laundry. Yesterday I took the white laundry to the laundromat in Alberta Beach. The wife of the owner of the laundromat was showing another customer her wedding photos from five years ago, so I joined them. I never knew much of Colombia, and found the photos very interesting. They showed a land of mountains and sea coasts. I never knew that Bogota had a population of 10 million people! That is a huge city!

At home I raked the branches etc. from the near garden, to prepare it for tilling in a few days.

I hauled the trailer load of garbage to the dump. This trailer used to be a tent trailer before the mice ate holes all through the canvas, but it has been re-purposed as a dumpster on wheels. The plywood flaps that were once beds, provide a perfect covering, keeping the animals out of the garbage, and keeping the garbage from blowing out in transit. When I brought the trailer back, I was having problems backing it into the right spot, so I uncoupled it from the car and Judy and I pushed it back into place. The undercarriage of a defunct lawnmower had been converted to a trailer-hitch caddy for that purpose a few years ago. Living in the country, you learn to improvise.

Totem Lumber was advertising a concrete-block barbeque pit for $100. We burn our waste paper to reduce the amount we have to store. Our burning barrel, the latest in a long series going back over 30 years, was completely burned out and no longer safe. So we decided that the concrete-block barbeque pit might be a good long-term solution. I drove into Edmonton, bought the curved blocks and fire screen, and brought it home in the trunk of our Corolla. (Yes, the front wheels still touched the ground!) Then I discovered that the tire of the big wheelbarrow was flat. We used two older, smaller wheelbarrows to move the blocks from the car to the area by the far garden. ... 17, 18, 19, ...!!! Where were blocks 20 and 21? The receipt said 20 blocks, so I called Totem. Apparently there are supposed to be 20 blocks in the kit, leaving an opening at the bottom to light the fire. They will provide the missing 20th block and we can buy block 21, which will help us to guarantee that the fire will not escape.

So yesterday was a productive day, even if it was not quite perfect. Spring is here!