family tree

Are you wondering why you haven't heard from me lately? I'm sorry that I've been neglecting you, my faithful readers, but I am fully immersed in the research of my family tree. I believe I have a tendancy to be obsessive....maybe just a little. I got bit by this bug and now it's all I can think about. I love, love, LOVE all the data. And I'm finding that my new-found relatives are very willing to share their info with me.So far I'm concentrating on my grandmother's line, on my father's side. I chose to start there because that family name is not very common. All the people in Scotland with that name come from this one family. And they've expanded to places like England, Finland, Spain, Australia, the USA and Canada. At times it's been a little overwhelming, but for the most part I'm just eating it up. It's like one giant Logic puzzle ..... and if you know me you know how I love those.

Art was away for a few days and while he was gone I was literally glued to my computer. I could barely wait to get up in the morning to see if someone from the other side of the globe had written to me during the night. While Art was in Vancouver, he had access to Chapters bookstore and brought me home some treasures.Thank you, Art. Woo-Hoo!!!

Oh, and he also brought me this. Where can I stash this for emergency purposes? Hmmmmm.....

spring forward

Geez....don't forget....daylight savings time begins tomorrow night (Saturday). Set those clocks ahead 1 hour. Stupidest thing I ever heard of, but that's just my opinion.

lamb? ... what the ???

It was snowing pretty good this morning, so we figured we'd better get to town while we still could. I took this as we were driving along ... well, Art stopped the car for me. All I had on me was the Canon Powershot, but it is a pretty darned good little camera.

are you smarter than a Golden Retriever?

Had to take Xena to the vet the other day. She'd been having the "trots" for awhile. Her presciption is a bland diet of rice, cottage cheeze and yogurt for about 5 days and some anti-biotics. I have to give her a honkin' pill 3 times a day and you dog owners out there know how much fun that can be. A favoured way is to hide it in a bit of weiner, which works great until the first time she chews instead of gulps. Now she's on to me and spits the pill out onto the floor. I know about peanut butter or cream cheeze, but I believe I have a less messy solution. So far, it's working like a charm.....brilliant, if I do say so myself.I break off 2 pieces of weiner (not very big ... just large enough to hide a pill). Stick the pill into one of them (I don't let her see me do this ... just in case she's really, really smart). Make her sit, hold a weiner piece in each hand right in front of her face, so she knows there's 2. Pop the one with the pill as far to the back of her mouth as possible and immediately show her that she's getting the next one. She's so focused on the next one that she gulps down the one in her mouth. Then she gets the second. Voila .... Robert is almost certainly your mother's brother (as my wacky cousin in Finland says).

lion or lamb

What's that they say about March? In like a lion .... .... out like a lamb.Or vice-versa. We had a little snow overnight but today is glorious. Sunny blue skies, no wind. Just lovely.

the moon and Venus

Did you have clear skies on Friday night? Did you get a glimpse of the moon and Venus almost kissing? It was a pretty sight. I took this picture just around sunset (bigger view here). It looks brighter because I had a longish shutter speed. I wanted to show the horizon, too, so was going to wait until later, but that cloud bank looked like it might be trouble. I had to go for it now. I used my wide angle lens in portrait orientation for this shot, but it wasn't zoomie enough.I switched to my long lens and took a bunch of pictures, changing shutter speeds. I wish now that I'd used RAW format. I suppose I didn't expect to get anything very good, but am pleased with the outcome.

I like that this one shows the shadowed part of the moon (much more apparant in fullsize) .... .... but this is my favourite. You can't see it because the picture is compressed for posting on this blog (go here for fullsize. You can actually see the craters on the moon (that's why I wish I'd taken it in RAW ... it would have been awesome blown up).This one was taken with the shutter open for something like a full minute. Not a good picture, but it shows how much things move in a short amount of time.