10:04 a.m.

When the road looks like this, it means spring is here. The snow is melting like crazy, and the road is soft and soupy; one has to slow down or end up in the ditch.

I plan to go from this chair to the bathtub and then to town to pick Emil up from school at noon. We are heading for Kelvington, where we will both indulge in therapeutic massage. I'll pick up a gallon of creamed honey, so I can once again mix up a huge batch of granola, which is a staple of our household.

We were then to go to Kate A's for a little visit and to pick up some groceries she's brought from the city. But her yard is muddy-scary and she's fighting a cold. We'll have to visit another day.

Water is dripdripdripping all day. On the weekend, Scott asked Everett to dig out our bikes, which had been left leaning against the barbecue in the fall. Tsk, shame on me. "You should put the bikes in the barn before winter!" Scott tells me. I am terrible for getting around to fall preparations for winter. Once it gets cold out, I'm done, and that's what happened last fall. As Scott says, winter came in September.

Anyway, Scott's nephew Alexander came over to keep Everett company and they posed for this photo, which is meant to suggest, they tell me, that Everett is an archeologist who just discovered a frozen man on a bicycle.

Later in the day Alexander was up on the roof of the house next door, which I call South Forks, with his dad and his little sister. They were shovelling snow off the roof before the weight of it could cause trouble.

I couldn't resist taking this photo of the cow because it shows how much snow (among other things) has built up in the corrals. The cow can damn near step over the fence! They've already had to deal with some flooding inside the barn, where at night they keep the cows with newborn calves.

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My wakeup call this morning was a call from Norway. I spoke for the first time with Pat, who is a longtime member of my favourite discussion list. We had a lovely chat; Pat is cheerful— I could sense her smiling right through the phone line when we laughed as we talked. What a great way to greet the day.

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Now playing: Sounds Like Canada on CBC Radio

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