WORK! and crime in the country

ARRRRGH! Work is silly busy. We've got all these short term, emergency projects, plus we are hiring students, plus the normal madness that is our everyday jobs... I'm feeling a little stressed today. I had a little over a hundred messages in my email today. CRAZY.

On my way home a couple of days ago, I passed a police cruiser and the two (!) officers looked me over pretty completely. When they passed, I noticed that they were putting on the brakes every 100 feet or so. I didn't think much of it until I crested the next hill and got on the brakes to avoid two police cruisers. There was a van off the road that looked like it had 'mis-negotiated' a T-junction (i.e. didn't see the stop sign while going extremely fast). It was up to the axles in mud. The two police cruisers near it didn't look too impressed with the situation.

Then, when I get home, H tells me that she saw another officer standing at a corner of two roads looking up and down them with binoculars. Not a good sign.

So, after dinner, H went to work and I took the kids with me in the car to see if we could talk to some police. Of course, you can't get a number to call a REAL person. So, I ended up finding an officer. He was quite nice and gave me a full run down of the situation.

So, the provincial police chased him up one of the major highways, he escaped onto the road where he crashed and the airbag nailed him in the face. So, he has a cut below one of his eyes. He gets out and runs about 2 kms through a muddy field and tries to steal a truck. It stalls and the woman that lives there runs out and asks what the crap he's doing. Well, he offers her a hundred bucks to drive him across the city and she, of course, declines. She calls the city police and they are STILL looking for him.

The good (?) news is that the police did not have any reason to think he was dangerous. Anyhow, I told a bunch of neighbours and then paced around nervously all night long and didn't sleep that well either.

H said there is a message from the police on our voicemail. I hope they know some good news...

Woodstoves are the best, well the most fun anyway

So we have been using our woodstove a lot recently...the nights are getting quite a bit cooler. They have been hovering around 2-3 degrees at night time, so the house goes down to about 18 degrees by morning.

Just stick a few logs in the woodstove and let the place warm up!!! One evening last week, the family room was a sweltering 26.5 degrees...you should have seen how warm the basement family room was... yeek. It was hot.

Brian and I calculated that we likely have just less than two whole cords of firewood. A whole cord is defined as 8 feet x 4 feet x 4 feet = 128 cubic feet. We have a stack of about 15 feet long, 3 feet wide and 4.5 feet high...

Luckily oil has not been too expensive, although, fuel oil costs significantly less than gasoline. It was about 69.9 cents/L.




It's been gorgeous here lately... notice the maple is turning colours now. Most of the oak leaves have fallen from the fencerow at the back.