Sep 20 - not too many more of these !

What a beautiful day. 20C and sunny, light winds (unless you are kayaking like Sandy), stop-at-the-side-of-the-road wonderful, drinking it in. No bugs, no traffic, a few leaves changing to brilliant red ... why does the day have to end ?

I went into town for two things -- mail and cement. Using a bag of portland cement with a mix of 4 parts gravel to 1 part cement, I've got my work cut out for me. The darn bags are heavy ! At 40kg (88 lbs)I'm not slinging these around w/o some effort ! I bought three, which hopefully will be enough. I've got lots of gravel.

Mail ... none. We're still waiting for the mail coming this way from NSB.

Once home I had lunch, using the bread that I'd made the night before. I couldn't tell that there were olives (green) in the bread. Perhaps bread by itself would be different, but with salami, dijon mustard etc. any olive flavour was overpowered.

For the first time in a long time the wind had a southerly component, so that's where I went.

While I was gone, Sandy was busy out on the kayak as well as making ratatouille. Now that we're back from France and Italy our menu has changed. Sandy's having salads for lunch with those small mozzarella balls (forget the name), olive oil and balsamic. The ratatouille will be for dinner tonight, apparently the recipe calls for it to be cooked one day and eaten the next when the flavours have fully permeated the mixture. For dinner we had pike and perch, the pike a lot stronger than the perch, rice, balsamic red peppers and broiled broccoli. As usual we ate well.

I heard from Jason late in the day -- they will be up here this evening. It sounds like the operation went well on his shoulder but I guess time will tell for something like that. I exchanged emails with Philip, nothing much new in Thunder Bay.

... and, I have a lot of new friends who send me emails. Now that I'm the VP-Simcoe for the Ontario Randonneurs with a link on their website, I'm getting bombarded with emails from Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Hong Kong and a variety of other countries. The RO site doesn't force you to decipher a pattern to allow you to send an email so the web crawlers have picked me up. Some of these phishing emails are so amusing, most of them promise money, today there was one from the FBI. I can't believe that some people actually fall for these things. I'm always tempted to reply with fake info, but that's a waste of my time and no-one at the other end will actually read my reply anyway.

Today ... it's time to rock. I'll be mixing and shoveling concrete.

Onward !