Camping

We bit the bullet and took them camping this weekend - in a tent. All in all it went pretty well.
We stayed in Pictou on the Sunrise trail, a nice camp site. Plenty of swimming in the sea - "warmest waters north of the Carolinas" it said in the pamphlet and I guess they were right, but it was still nothing to write home about.
The wind got up during the second night so we decided the visit New Glasgow, now there's a saying that goes "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything..." so... We visited New Glasgow and that's it really! Then it was off to the NS musuem of industry, a great place with lots of buttons to press and levers to pull, what made it extra great was that there were more staff than visitors so you could play with all the exhibits without queuing. A great exhibit about coal mining in NS, unfortunately it seems that all the mines here blew up - several times each.
So then back to Pictou which, unlike New Glasgow (oops), is absolutely great. We visited the Hector, the rebuild of the ship which brought the some of the first Scottish settlers to to "New Scotland", an excellent exposition on the journey and the harsh realities of living in NS in the 18th centuries with no money, home or food... Similarly more staff than visitors again.
The only downer of the trip was Thomas' walking on a ember and burning the sole of his foot. Hasn't slowed him down any...

Canadian fun...

I'm quite pleased with myself this evening - I have chopped down a tree with an axe (albeit a small one) and then, the icing on the cake, I tied a rope to the stump and pulled the root out with my jeep. YYYEEEEESSSSSSSSSSS!!!

Anyone seen...

"a five year old girl wearing a blue dress with flowers, 43" tall, dark pink framed glasses, blonde hair". (me)
"Eyes?" (policeman)
"Yes, two." (joke, easy now)
"Same as mine really" (me, taking off my glasses)
"Oh, well, blue... err.. hazel... err... I'll put blue" (policeman)
I think I even forgot to tell my parents about this episode...
She wandered off with her little cousin who was being a little difficult and his dad at the mall, then decided she'd come back to MC and I, unfortunately for Ellie we'd moved on... Then ensued ten minutes of absolute fear when MC and I ran like mad around the Halifax mall. I made it to all car parks and round both levels before realising that more or less everyone in the place was looking for her. By the time I started the police description, I'm sure the lovely lady at Centry 21 real estate had already escorted her to the security office. Anyway we got paged quick enough and what seemed like about 10 hours was surely only 10 minutes and everything turned out okay but my heart did beat a bit quicker than I would have liked...

The perfect afternoon for us men...

Well, Saturday takes some beating for us men. Housewarming at friend's Penny and Steve's house. A few beers, followed by some good food, then "us men" left to play frisbee with varying degrees of success. When tired we returned to the house to fire guns at a line of bottles from a variety of positions - free standing (which yielded very poor results - apart from our gun toting host), leaning on a car bonnet (I managed to KILL two bottle from this position and hence felt very manly for the remainder of the day) and leaning on a wall (see free standing for the results). Then more frisbee made more entertaining by using Thomas as a sort of "irate piggy in the middle". Then a little cake and home for a snooze... Perfect day... for us men.

Another piece of the Canadian dream in the garage!

Crikey... Two weeks since my last wittering about the doomed Lobsters... In my defence it has been a very frantic time with MC's sister and offspring (3 of them under the age of 2) visiting! So what's been going on over here?
Firstly I have wasted an in ordinate amount of time on Google News with the following search terms: "ASTON VILLA RANDY LERNER", "ASTON VILLA TAKEOVER", "ASTON VILLA MARTIN O'NEILL", closely followed by repeatedly hitting F5 to refresh my searches... Anyway they've disappointed me so many times who knows if we'll ever get our multi-millionaire (or preferably billionaire) owner ready to squander obscene (preferably profanely obscene) quantities of money on a squad of international superstars. Only one man stands in the way - our octogenarian (mad) chairman, Herbert Douglas Ellis...
After this pastime became boring, I turned my attention to the other thing which had been bothering me for a while, I still didn't own a 4x4, anyway in 6 mad hours I resolve this issue in a positive manner.
I must take some pictures of it in the day light - I've now removed the roof completely and it's rather good fun. For anyone who is interested here's a brief review.
It's a Jeep TJ Unlimited, 4 litre V6. Selective 4-wheel drive. We test drove a regular TJ a while back, I think there was a picture of an orange one on the blog a few months ago... Problem with that was it had approximately 2 cubic feet of luggage space and certainly not enough room for a stroller (pram). So, outside it's big and bulky, as aerodynamic as a house brick with an x-rated mpg to go with it, cerainly nowhere near the current U.S. industry target of 20mpg! Inside it's surprising small (!) it's has four seat belts for a reason, no way to fit in a fifth person... The ride is rough and possibly even amplifies imperfections in the road surface, and there are plenty of those in Nova Scotia! So those are the things I turned a blind eye to, on the other hand, it looks brilliant, will drive through anything the weather will throw at us in the winter and is convertible which is sooo cool for jeep! We take it to the beach a lot where it looks so much better than the caravan!