It’s The Saturday Morning After A Not-Quite-Killer-Storm — & We’re Still Alive –

Saturday, March 26th, 2016 — //  -2˚C / +27˚F with very bright sunlight reflecting on very white crust of ice & with very clear air in Atlantic Canada @ 9:14 am. — Had to restart my MacBook, it crashed and didn’t tell me why —

This is the kind of thick icy crust we loved as kids because we could walk on top of the snow. But this morning poor Jassper could barely walk around and keep his legs from flying out from under him.

The Morning After A Day In Which The World Did Not End?

— Yesterday, just minutes after I posted a photo and a short blurb about us expecting an all day freezing rain event, like the one that dumped 30 cm of ice on Fergus, Ontario – where my travel trailer lived for the first three years that I was in Canada – Um, Jassper went outside to pee and I started getting him and the orange cat’s breakfast ready – and heard what sounded like a summer downpour that you’d hear through open windows ( taking for granted you had screens in your windows to keep the bugs out and let the breezes in? ) And when I looked out through the porch door, we had a hell of an ice pellet event happening. I went to let Jassper back in, he was standing outside in his ‘dog run’ area, just standing there, looking stunned and perplexed about what was happening. After I clapped my hands and yelled something like, “Don’t you have enough sense to come in out of the sleet?” he turned to me, smiled, said, “Oh yeah, you southerners call this ice pellet stuff ‘sleet’ don’t ya?” – tried to gallop, didn’t quite fall with legs all flailing in different directions, did manage to get to the stairs, did manage to climb up and get back into the house, managed to get to the kitchen, began chomping on his morning ‘crunch crunch’ dry food and absolutely loved having me towel off all the little ice crystals he brought back in with him. The next time I looked the weather had almost become tame, and had become more like tiny ice crystals mixed with small droplets of ‘freeze on contact’ rain. — Not long after that, maybe after Cathi managed to claw one eye open and stumble around in her bathrobe – the weather network had revised its prediction from 20-30 cm of ice pellets and freezing rain down to less than 10 centimeters of mixed precipitation. More than a hundred thousand customers in Ontario lost electricity. Our lights never blinked here. And that’s amazing.

— But my laptop had an anxiety attack while I was busy with something else and right now it’s worrying about a hard drive it says I have to eject or initialize. I clicked, “ignore it you stupid computer routine!” and it said, “okay, we’ll just continue to try to open it for you…. backup usb hard drive? We were just testing you, Are you sure you don’t want us to erase everything you’re storing on that thing? I mean, if we can’t upload it to the NSA – you shouldn’t be able to hang on to it, should you-?” And I grumbled, “Oh Eff Off!” and it said, oops, sorry, wrong routine- we’ll work on this…”

Ice on the branches, Ice on the ground. Looking toward Canada Street at a little bit after 9 am this morning.

And, looking slightly down and to the right of the picture above this one. This is the ice-scape inside the ‘dog run’ where Jassper had to try to navigate around this morning. He kind of hugged the fence and leaned heavily on it as he stepped gingerly along, looking for a safe place to pee without falling and sliding indignantly around on his haunches or his side- He managed to remain upright, but was real happy to see the door open, and then climbed the stairs very carefully and happily came inside, ran to the fridge and wanted a treat. He wasn’t impressed with what I gave him, dropped it on the floor and sighed and stumbled back to lie on the floor in the bedroom. It might be a dog’s life, but that isn’t always the most exciting life in this world….  —jrw—

— Catch ya later? –,

~~~~~ Jim