category: gabriola

19

November
2009

6:23 PM

of mice and rain

Skooks' mouse wasn't the only one, not by half. I started seeing the little beggars poking their wee heads up through the burners on the stove, and got on the phone to the nice Pestilential Doom people in Nanaimo, who sent a young woman right out Monday fore last and snooped around. She left me a few traps and showed me how and where to set them, and said we didn't need their full nine yards, as we didn't have a confabulation of mice, just the odd one coming in from the cold and getting snuggly with our cooking gear.

She left, I set the traps and then (it being lunch time) did up a bit a lunch and sat down at table with it and a good book. I don't remember which book, but I do remember the sound of a mousetrap ripping the life from another of God's creatures as I chewed. I'd always wondered what it meant when food turned to ashes in one's mouth. 'S what I get for wondering.

The next one snuffed it later that afternoon, while I was on the phone to Nola. It went out screaming.

The third went to its maker that night, thankfully silently, and after that I was pretty much hardened. To date the total stands at Skookum: 2, Me: 4. But Skooks still gets the edge, as she dealt with hers using only her own cunning.

And the rain falls and falls and falls. All the rain I could have wished for, and did wish for, this summer. The pond is overflowing and I've had to rake leaves and other carry from the creek to keep it from backing up at the bends and overreaching its bounds. ScottyThePlumber kindly came out this morning to verify that the pressure tank in our basement is not actually leaking; there was a trickle coming from under it last night that worried me desperately. Goodness knows what is going on exactly down there, but for sure groundwater is welling up. It's the very definition of too much of a good thing.

Today saw only sprinkles, and tomorrow is supposed to be similar. After that we're back to solid rain, and the really worrying part is that, as soon as this South Pacific Event moves on, temps will crash. Environment Canada keeps showing flurry icons at the far end of their five-day forecast, have done for a couple weeks. It keeps raining instead, but there it is. When the rain is done, all this water's gonna freeze.

pondering sudden death while swaying to the dulcet tones of A Million Miles Away from the album "Free" by Jann Arden

2

November
2009

8:02 PM

an excellent day, including bread

Two things happened today: the first being that early this morning, following an evening of quiet encouragement, Skookum caught the mouse that's been plaguing us for the last few days. (I say "the" mouse, though there may well be more than one.) I'd spent much of last evening and night poking quietly into closets and under appliances with a flashlight, and chirruping at Skooks, who got the idea right quick. Sure enough, she homed in on the little bugger just as soon as I'd got to bed, and that was that. I found the corpse on the rug in the bedroom where she left it, and immediately promoted her to Best Pet.

The other thing is that I pulled out the bread flour and yeast I'd gotten last week, and Julia Child's french bread recipe from The Way To Cook, and made the best loaf of bread I've ever done in my life. Store-bought bread is so lifeless, and even the local artisan bakers have their faults; I forget what causes air pockets, I think overmixing, but on top of that all their breads seem to have a sourdough base. Which is fine if you want sourdough, but I don't, much.

This one came out with an even, light, slightly chewy texture, and a just-right crust. I am setting down what I did, since I'm going to want to do it again:

(There are pictures in the book, which is nice but not essential. You don't want to look at pictures, you want to look at what you're doing, and think about what you want it to become.)

This is a base recipe; you can make baquettes, round loaves, pan loaves and rolls from this. I made a single oval loaf, as being the simplest and involving the least handling of dough after it has risen.

• 1 package dry active yeast
• 1/3 cup tepid water in a 2-cup measure
• ¼ teaspoon sugar
• 3½ cups bread flour (aka, 1 pound)
• 1 tablespoon rye or whole wheat flour
• 2¼ teaspoons salt
• 1 cup cold water

The tepid water is for the yeast; it should feel warm to your hand, or arm if your hands are normally cool. If you need to watch the salt in your diet, you can probably cut that to 1¼ teaspoons. As this was a first try for me in some years, I stuck to the list as given.

You'll need two bowls: one for mixing and one for rising. For the latter, I used a clay salad/serving bowl. You'll also need a pastry knife. Julia uses a food processor for mixing, if you want to go that route, be my guest. However, I think Julia had people to clean up after her, for one, and for another that hand-mixing works better. I am much less likely to screw up working with my hands, and honestly, there's not a lot to the mixing. It just isn't worth hauling out the food processor and messing about with pulsing or whatever for so many minutes and so on.

In the oven, you'll want to have a pizza (baking) stone and, if you have a gas oven, an iron skillet for doing the steam. This is not a job for your best skillet. If you don't have an iron skillet available, use something that will hold heat and won't crack when water's poured into it, and won't get in the way of the bread. If you have an electric oven, apparently you just toss the water onto the floor of the oven.

If you don't have a stone, you can get by with a baking pan. A stone is tons better, though. With a baking pan you'll really want to watch your bottom crust to see it doesn't cook way faster than the rest of the loaf. And it may be more liable to sticking. I dunno; I have a stone.

You'll also want a couple of pastry cloths and some clingfilm. I don't have pastry cloths; I have several tea towels, though. They're just thin cotton, about a couple feet to a side, and totally ace for all kinds of kitchen tasks.

Because this is rad and edgy baking we're doing, you will need a razor blade. Or a really, really sharp knife. If you use an exacto blade, remember they are packed in oil and must be cleaned thoroughly.

Last, you'll want an oven thermometer, for testing the inside temp of the loaf. It needs to get to 200°F (93°C). At that point, for good or ill it is done.

First Things First

Find your towels, stone and skillet, and leave them where they are. Heat oven to lowest setting. Set rising bowl in oven to warm. You will be setting the dough in the warm oven to rise, so you don't want it to actually get hot, just welcoming.

Set by a small amount of spare flour, as well as a spare shot of water. Get out a kneading board. It will look just like a cutting board. Sprinkle a bit of the spare flour over it; that's what makes a cutting board transform into a kneading board.

Proof the yeast: mix the sugar into the tepid water. Add yeast, stir a bit. Set it on the stove; the stove is warmer than your counter. Measure out flour & salt into mixing bowl.

Turn off the oven. Compose soul in patience for about three more minutes.

The yeast mix should produce a nice head of foam. If it does not, either the water was outside the temperature range or the yeast is dead. Toss that mix, wash the cup, and try again with a new packet of yeast. There is no point in mixing dead yeast into your dough; that's the reason you proof it.

Okay, so you have a good batch now. Add the cup of cold water to the yeast mix and give it another stir. Pour slowly and steadily into the mixing bowl, while mixing as best you can with the pastry knife. You'll need to clear the knife several times; don't get anxious, just keep at it.

About the time you've poured in all the yeast water you'll find that the pastry knife is no longer up to the challenge. Clear it a last time and then finish mixing by hand. If you think you need a touch more water or flour, add from your spares. Sparingly.

You're done with this part when you don't have measurable amounts of flour still dry at the bottom of the bowl and the dough is holding together pretty well. Let it sit a few minutes. This is a good time to clean dough from your hands. Pro tip: rub off as much as you can before you go for soap and water.

You want to let the dough rest a bit here so that the flour and water particles continue to mix on their own terms.

First Kneading

Turn dough out onto kneading board. Knead it. If you've never done this before, allow me to congratulate you on your audacity for even trying this recipe with so little baking experience. No, I'm serious. You rock.

Kneading is just another way of mixing things. With dough, it has the added effect of waking up the yeast and helping the gluten in the flour to form. And it is deeply satisfying emotionally. Think about giving someone a massage. Okay, not so much with the dough, but that's the general idea. You push down with the heel of one hand, and at the same time fold the pushed-down part of the dough back into the centre. Then flip it over and do it again. Do this for a minute or so; Julia says 30 times. What you want to end up with is a ball of dough that doesn't stick to your hands, and which is "smooth and elastic". You'll know it when you feel it.

First Rise

Pull your rising bowl out of the oven, and set the ball of dough in it. Julia says you do not need to slick it up with oil or butter, something about making a proper seat from which the dough should rise. Whatever. I had trouble with the dough sticking to the bowl on first rise, but not subsequently. Cover the bowl with clingfilm and set it back in the oven. Turn the light on, to help it stay warm.

The dough needs to increase by 1½ times its original size. About an hour or so for first rise.

At this point you can clean up your mixing bowl, measuring cups, pastry knife. Leave out the kneading board and the spare flour. Wash your hands, set the timer and go do something else.

Deflating And Second Rise

First rise is a tenuous and sensitive thing, and deflates easily. Blowing past all the tacky jokes and metaphors, scatter a bit of flour onto the kneading board and turn the dough back out on it.

Form the dough into a rectangular shape, then fold the ends into the centre and push down a bit. It's sort of like kneading, except you don't want to get into it at this stage. Do that again. You're done doing that now.

Return the dough to the rising bowl, smooth side up, and replace the clingfilm. Put the bowl back in the oven. What you want it to do now is nearly triple in size, and the point of punching it down and working it a bit is to wake the yeast up again, give it something new to play with.

Set the timer for 80 minutes, and go do something else. You might want to check the dough in an hour, because the important part is that it triples, not that you've left it sit for the right number of minutes.

Get out a clean tea towel, and scatter a bit of flour on it.

Final Rise

Take out the bowl. Make sure your working oven rack is at mid-level, and that your skillet rack (if needed) is at lowest level. Put the stone into the oven on the working rack, and skillet on lowest rack. Turn oven on to lowest setting to kick up the welcoming warmth again.

If you are jonesing to make baquettes or rolls or anything other than a single country loaf, you are on your own. The rest of this assumes you want a single large loaf.

Turn dough out onto kneading board. I'm not sure how to describe what you do next, except to say that you want to handle it. Gently. Pick it up and work it ever so lightly so that you form the loaf shape with the motion of your hands, rotating it and stroking always down and to the centre. Do this about a dozen times round.

Turn the oven off.

Flip the dough over on the board, and where you see seams, pinch them together. Lay it (pinched side up) inside the floured tea towel, then slide it (towel and all) onto the stone in the oven. Set the timer for another 60 to 80 minutes. Check in an hour; again it should triple.

Baking

Home stretch! Ooch the towelled dough off the stone and onto your kneading board. Preheat the oven to 450°F. While it's heating, gently unwrap the dough and flip it so the smooth side is up. You'll notice, if all has gone well, that the surface is just a bit dry; this is good. Get out your razorblade and hold it so that it is nearly parallel to the surface, and score the surface of your loaf in whatever pattern pleases you so long as it is not too elaborate. What you're doing here is making openings in the surface gluten so that the inner part can expand out as the loaf bakes. So you don't want to cut into the loaf straight down, just cut so as to lift the surface away from the body.

Make sure you have about half a cup of water ready. Get a grip and wait for your oven to heat. It will take however long it takes, possibly 7 to 10 minutes, it's your oven, not mine. When it's hot, slide the loaf from the kneading board onto the stone. Pull out the rack with the skillet, and pour the water into it. Push the rack back in place, close the oven, and set the timer for 20 minutes.

In about 15 minutes, you'll want to do a quick check to be sure the bottom of the loaf isn't cooking too quickly. With the skillet in there, it shouldn't, but if you've an electric oven and so aren't using a skillet, and your bottom crust is darkening too quickly, you can shove in an oven pan on that lower rack.

When the timer goes, take the skillet out and reset for another 10 to 15 minutes. At this point you're just watching to be sure the crust doesn't burn. If it seems to be cooking too quickly, drop the oven temp to 400°F.

The loaf is done when its internal temperature is 200°F, and it feels 'light' when you move it around. If you don't have a thermometer for directly checking the temperature, you will have to go by feel. It's harder, but you know what? You've been handling bread all your life. You can do this.

If you think it needs more time still, drop the oven temp to 375°F and keep a steady watch on it.

It Is Done!

Your kneading board is now a cutting board again. Let the bread loaf rest on it for another 10 to 15 minutes. You can tuck a towel around it if you want. When you can't wait any longer, cut a slice out of it and enjoy! Butter optional. No, I'm serious - butter totally optional. This is a damned nice loaf of bread.

rehashing my day and tapping my heels to Charlie from the album "The Boy Bands Have Won" by Chumbawamba

15

October
2009

6:17 PM

one whole handful

Today is our fifth wedding anniversary. Go, us. We actually went out last week, cos Nola's in Vancouver till tomorrow, to the local posh eatery and had a lovely evening. Got all dressed up and everything, in clean clothes with real pockets rather than patch. I know, we should be careful about inflicting such splendours on an unsuspecting public, but we thought it worth the gamble.

So to celebrate today, I paid bills, balanced the chequebook, did laundry and changed the bedclothes. I am the original party animal, it's true.

28

June
2009

12:05 PM

Okay, I won't harvest this lettuce today.

I estimate its body was half an inch long.

20

June
2009

6:57 AM

The World's Tiniest Onion

Yesterday while we were giving the doglet his chase-the-ball-obsessively-at-the-beach time I noticed a tiny shell at my feet, and picked it up. I thought it was just a small bivalve, but it turned out to be a snail shell, miniscule and paper-thin. I've looked it up since then, and it's some kind of bubble shell. I'm not sure what kind specifically, but something called Haminoea virescens seems to be common in these waters, so likely that's what it is.

At any rate, since I'd spotted one, I started looking for more. They're tiny, transluscent, and extremely fragile; I broke several just trying to pick them up. I've never noticed them before. Likely that's partly because they're so small, and partly because their fragility reduces their survival rate as shells on a beach. But I also can't help wondering if it's something to do with the seasons and what happens with seaslugs, so that they only appear at certain times of year. Maybe I'll contact an expert I've done some work for and ask him.

But here's the interesting part. While looking for these tiny shells, I found Something Else. For scale, you can also see it in the background of the bubble shell picture.

Looks like a pearl to me.

Half of one, anyway; a blob grown around an irritation on some shell. You can see the growth rings on the back. Amazing what you can find on a beach.

Somehow I don't think this particular pearl is going to make my fortune, though.

5

June
2009

5:23 PM

hummmmmmmmmm

My new ride.

So I hand over my credit card, get my receipts, strap on my helmet, find the keys, and Nola's saying, "Okay, I'll meet you back in the ferry line-up."

"Um, Nola? Which way is the dock from here?"

I read about electric scooters on the ætherwebs until my eyes bled. I searched for what's good, what's not actually horrid, and what's available right here in River City. You know, there's a whole lotta stuff available in Ontario. 'Struth. I never woulda thunk it, Ontario being so far away and chock-full (so I hear) of Easterners, but they actually appear to have a system of trade.

I read bike forums, too. Boy, did that ever take me back to the days of Usenet and rec.moto, aka 'reeky', flamewars lasting for months, endless debates on the validity of helmets; earplugs: spawn of satan or just another bit of gear, on and on. As far as I can tell, bicycle forums think electric scoot riders are total wusses. So, amusingly enough, do gas scooter forums. Yet another way to tell when one is on the right track: online forums think you suck.

So off we went today, across the water to the bustling metropolis of Nanaimo, to Cyber City, the local Motorino dealer, did some test rides, some quiet conferring, and after careful consideration wherein I was just as calm as could be, no one will believe that I know, but I was, I settled on the XPh. It has a lower centre of gravity than the XPr, and I can flatfoot it, first time I've ever been able to do that on a bike. (The motors are all the same, it's just the frame and doodads that differ between models.) So despite the other being noticably better-looking, I think I made the right choice.

First days' ride: from 1815 Bowen Ave to the ferry dock, then from the dock up That Hill and then home, then out to Twin Beaches where Nola got to test ride it and went heaven knows where while I threw the ball for the dog* Then back home, again including That Hill. Battery seemed to hold up just fine, so there's one worry abated.

So why did I go with electric? Gas scooters are nearly as economical to operate and are by many measures more reliable. Well, for one thing, I truly believe in the need to change my ways to reduce my fossil fuel use.** I thought about getting another motorcycle, or even a gas scoot, and I just... couldn't. I couldn't get excited about it. It's been a long time since I got a thrill out of speed for speed's sake, for whipping round the twisties at max throttle, for having the coolest ride thrumming between my thighs... I swear, it all just gives me giggle fits now, anyway, that last does. But seriously, when it comes to stunts and motorbikes, I've already done all I cared about. I've taken long trips across North America and England. I've been to Tennessee and ridden the Dragon's Tail at Deal's Gap. I've nipped around and through the Hill Country in Texas till my chain stretched and durn near slapped the tarmac. And the most fun in all of those excursions was the time in the middle of nowhere, slowing down to see everything around me. Taking the turn onto the lumpy road. Tall trees and a whole lot of nothing much else on the Naches Trace. Flowers in the desert. Cows lining a fence, lipping tall grass through the barbed wire and ignoring the tall grass right at their big feet. Signposts showing the way to Sheepy Parva and Sheepy Magna, take your pick, no wrong answers here.

So, y'know? I'm not in a hurry, and there's not just a whole lot to this island. Fourteen kilometers from here to the farthest shore. I'd just as soon hum along, and enjoy the scenery.

* Nola and Cardhu went to the beach in the car, thankyouverymuch.

** I could say 'our ways', but I don't feel qualified to talk about how you do things, whoever you are.

humming along with The Bike Song from the album "Matapedia" by Kate & Anna McGarrigle

22

May
2009

6:34 AM

Frog Patrol

As previously mentioned, we have a pond. The pond has frogs. Every day I do frog patrol once or twice—walking around doing a count. My record so far is 12 red-legged frogs. I'm sure there were more—these are brown frogs sitting on mud, after all. There have been fewer of them recently, probably partly because it's been sunnier and partly because of the garter snakes.

I've never lived anywhere that had frogs, so this is all somewhat new. I'm learning a lot, and when I'm totally mystified I email my herpetologist friend and say, "Harry? What does this mean?" He's very obliging.

It became clear when the Pacific treefrogs started their spring nighttime chorus that there are A Lot of Them. The chorus was so loud that it was almost painful. Treefrogs also tended to pop up in unexpected places, hopping out of a clump of weed when I put a spade into it, for example. They don't limit themselves to the pond, so they're actually relatively easy to catch as they struggle frantically through the grass, especially the little ones. The one disturbed by my spade was admired and then carefully replaced a little ways away, where she sat quietly. (We think it was a female because it was extraordinarily fat, which may also explain the lack of movement when we put her down.) There was the one that appeared on the glass of the door one night, its throat pulsing gently. (It dropped off onto the ground when the cat noticed it and started poking at the door.) I caught one with a body only 5/8 of an inch long, narrow-waisted like a dancer—that one was more agile but didn't have a lot of range with its jumps.

The red-legged frogs in the pond don't generally venture too far from it. They often perch in grass facing the water and ready to leap if things look dicey. Many of them seem to return to specific perches. One in particular has his own tuft of grass just at the pond's edge—he nestles down into the centre and surveys his domain. Others lurk near the bulrushes. I finally managed to catch one to look at closely—they're fast and slippery. As Pericat said at the time, they're retained energy just waiting to be released. We've also seen them floating at the surface of the water, drifting with the breeze. I wonder what they were up to?

Although they're hard to catch, the larger red-legged frogs are remarkably tolerant of being photographed, as long as the camera doesn't approach from the top or front, so I've gotten some great closeups. (The smaller frogs are much more skittish, which makes sense when you think about it.)

One of the frogs was bulgy—it looked like someone had blown it up like a balloon. I haven't seen that one for a while, so we're not sure if it has survived, but then the frogs have generally been more in the pond than out as the weather has gotten hotter and dryer, so it's hard to tell if it's actually missing. Harry tells me that swollen frogs are sometimes seen, but the reasons for their state are unknown, with the best guess being something to do with their ability to control their water balance. Apparently they often recover from this condition, so we'll hope that happened in this case.

The local wildlife organization asked if we'd like to join their frog monitoring program, so we're waiting to hear more about it. We're enthusiastic—to our mind anything that encourages frogs is a Good Thing!

16

May
2009

6:38 PM

Stalking Prey

Now that we have a house with a pond and a fair bit of "wild" land attached to it, not to mention an undeveloped empty lot to one side (i.e. forest) we see more variety in our wildlife. We have a pond full of frogs, and consequently we have a number of garter snakes hunting them. This week we had one large snake sunning itself, with a large bulge that it was presumably digesting. But more svelte and active snakes were still to be found in and near the pond. Who knew gartersnakes swam so much? Not me.

I've been having fun stalking wildlife with the little digital camera. It has a wee telephoto that more or less replicates what you see in real life from the equivalent distance. So my challenge has been in stalking my prey—getting close enough to get closeups. It takes a fair bit of patience. I've got some great pictures of frogs, and yesterday I had a go at getting closeups of a garter snake.

This one had taken fright when I walked by and dove into the pond, but then returned to the edge; I went and got my camera. It took fright again and dived in, but I was moving very slowly, and it doubled back and actually came up through the grass a little toward where I was; it was clearly watching me.

I managed to very slowly get down on my knees and extend the camera toward it, bit by bit. (The camera has a foldout monitor showing what the lens sees, so you don't have to keep your eye to it, which means I do much less grovelling in the dirt than I used to with my old SLR.) The snake craned its neck to see what I was doing.

I advanced the camera slightly. The snake advanced through the grass, very cautiously.

This is the last picture I took—camera and snake were probably about 4 inches apart.

And moments after I took this picture, it lunged and bit my finger.

Didn't hurt, didn't do any harm, didn't break the skin—it just felt like being tapped hard. I yelled, the snake flung itself into the pond, and I fell over laughing.

Now it's possible that it resented not having me get a release before taking its picture. But my herpetologist friend said it may have thought my finger was food, as snakes generally decide that things that don't move aren't alive, and most of me hadn't moved significantly in quite some time. And I guess a finger does look kind of pink and worm-like—at any rate, I fooled a turtle with it on one occasion (a turtle in hunting mode is something to see), and perhaps turtle and snake brains aren't so far different.

So now the question is... who was stalking whom?

1

May
2009

6:35 AM

Little Mysteries

My parents always had a vegetable garden and bit of a flower garden, so I do recognize some common domesticated plants. I also have an interest in wildflowers, so I recognize some of those. But when you're not a gardener, and the garden you're acquired has kinda run wild, it's like a treasure chest, and a slightly mysterious one. What's this? Is it a weed or something planted with intention? (It can be hard to tell the difference sometimes.) I don't want to accidently yank out a hosta or something, but I also don't want to let the weeds take over. We've got shasta daisies everywhere, and those suckers are hard to uproot.

So beyond the obvious (daffodills, primulas, hyacinths) I've been doing a lot of peering at plants and trying to figure out what they are. In the "intentional" category, I have been clearing a little rock garden area and found a type of jade plant that I used to have in a pot, and some sedums and creeping jenny. There's quite a lot of columbine and some bleeding hearts as well.

Over on the weedy side, some mysterious plants popped up--yesterday I finally identified them as purple deadnettle. We've also got blue-eyed mary.

No sooner had I got the deadnettle identified than I found another mystery, over on the other side of the pond where the gardener had reclaimed some territory last fall. I've no idea if it's weed or intentional. What the heck is this? Whatever it is, it's growing out of a big lumpy root thingie that's obviously been there for a long time.

First spring in a new house is so interesting.

Followup: it appears to be bergenia cilata. Who knew?

17

December
2008

9:39 PM

yikes!

I am overcome by the amount of snow that is blanketing my near vicinity. Seriously, outside of ski resorts I've not seen this sort of thing since I was a kid in Germany. I'm beginning to feel a bit oppressed, you know, these four, um, five, uh, okay six - possibly twelve walls depending on which room I'm in... Whoever built this house apparently declared war on the right angle. I strongly suspect some of the interior to have been lined out by eye. Darn good eye, though, it all fits together really quite well, but just this simple upstairs bedroom sports nine walls. Or sixteen, depends on how you count. However many there are, they all keep the snow out quite handily.

Current temp is reputed to be -5°C, which translates to bitingly cold, at the least. Somewhere around 20°F is my guess, and lo! my guess is not bad, the weather report thingie I wrote translates the Fahrenheit as 23. They have it a lot worse in the Antarctic, or so I hear.

Still, I am right this very moment, on the second floor of this house, about one and a half football fields above sea level. There's a skookum landmass just to the west, and a sodding continent just to the east. There should not be anything like this mass of snow all over the place.

On the plus side, Cardhu is thrilled.

In other happy news, my mom's plane did finally land in Vancouver this evening. Early last summer, she'd scheduled connections that had her picking up a prop plane from Vancouver to Nanaimo, pretty much as soon as her plane from Dallas grounded in Vancouver, with plenty of time to clear C&I. Word last week came to the effect that the Vanc->Nanaimo flight she booked was cancelled and so she was shunted off to a later one. Well, what with one thing and another we all decided she should punt that leg of the journey entirely, and they could either not charge her or charge her for the ticket price, however their arcane regs demanded. She wanted a shopping spree on Granville Island, as opposed to wandering the corridors of YVR for five hours, so we made reservations at a hotel on that side and planned to ferry her over next day.

At pig's hours this morning, their regs demanded that she not only pay for a plane ride from Vancouver to Nanaimo, whenever it should please their nibs to present her with a plane on a runway, but also that she must physically sit her bum down on a seat on that hypothetical plane. They wouldn't take the experience as read; unless she was visibly right there, irritation and considerable luggage in tow, they'd take it upon themselves to cancel her return reservations.

All of which she was put to communicating to Nola (currently in Burnaby with the car) and me (currently snowbound here on Gabriola without so much as a golf cart to my transportation credit) at around 5:30 this morning.

It's just another example of security theatre; she couldn't even pay for a seat on a plane no longer needed, she actually had to present her person ready to board, and this despite the airline's cancelling the flight she'd contracted for.

In some strange fashion, this all makes us joy in the instance of fog in Dallas. Fog delayed the take-off of that plane from Dallas to Vancouver to the point where any connections to Nanaimo were indeed moot. So she's had a simply horrid day of travel that started at least sixteen hours ago, but she's now settled in a nice hotel room on Granville as planned and doesn't have to try for any leftover commutes to Nanaimo in the dark of the evening.

There's still loads to do before she gets here, much of which would be so much easier if there weren't so much snow on the ground and chill in the air, but, well, hell. It'll get done, or we'll manage. What really matters is that we're all safe and sound, and it's a bonus that we have all this snow to play with.