Dec 25 - indoor and outdoor

I had more success outdoor than indoor today.

Outdoor, I shoveled the driveway, which had about 2 inches of snow. We have some more drifting down now, some sticky stuff, so perhaps I'll go out and make a snowman before it freezes hard.

I did give the snow blower some use on the wider parts mostly to move the piles of snow that I'd created with the snow shovel. Last year at this time I never even started the machine ! We do have a white Christmas at this point, very pretty.

After my shoveling exercise, I took out the 4-wheeler, following the trail from where it starts by Jason's driveway to where it comes back out to the road at Reddicks. It takes a while to follow that path so I was probably out there for an hour. Last year, if I remember correctly, there was already too much snow on the ground to take the machine into the bush. This year, so far, that's not a problem. In fact, since we've had cold weather to date, all the puddles are frozen over so it's easier going with the ATC.

Inside, before going outside, I was working at setting up a backup machine. I have an old machine here that has oodles of disk space and is "fast enough" for a backup. It has two small but fast SCSI disks as well as 600gb of space split among a 120, 200 and 300. I decided to install Linux on the 120, which went well as I had brought a 32bit install disk with me, and then expected to install VMware Player. That required a large download, so I had to wait until off-hours, did so this morning but found that it wouldn't install. Although it's the 32 bit version, it requires 64 bit architecture to support virtualization. Rats ! I don't think that VMware Server that dependent on the hardware, but then again it had a host of other problems.

So ... the machine works either as a native Windows XP machine or Linux but I cannot run Windows on VMware on Linux ... so there's no portability between the two machines. Oh well.

-------

Back outdoors, I decided to clear an area of ice with the snow blower so that I could flood it once the temperature drops again. That was a lot of work, because the snow was sticky and heavy and my little machine wasn't really up to the task. I was exhausted afterwards, not sure that I really accomplished anything.

The temperature stayed above freezing most of the day and down where there had been open water on the lake you could see the darker colour of the slush. It's below freezing again now, heading above later and then down again. It's hard to say what we'll have by the time everyone is here, but at the very least we'll have the area out front for play. Daytime temps are supposed to be above freezing today and tomorrow and then plunge, with -8 tomorrow night and -17 the night after.

I think that everyone's plans are set. Jeffrey travels to Oakville today and then to the cottage tomorrow morning (27th). David will come up the morning of the 29th, as will Stef. We're going to have Christmas turkey on the 29th and then Stef plans on leaving the 30th. David stays to the 1st; Jeffrey stays to the 4th; Megan stays after that, until we bring her back to Barrie, probably the 6th. We'll likely leave here on the 10th for hair appointment (Sandy) and dentist appointments (both of us) and then hit the road southwards. Some of this is pretty fluid ... but that's normal.

We'll probably open Christmas gifts on the 29th; I'm not sure when we'll do fireworks - the 31st ?

We had a wonderful dinner last night -- leftover lasagne. Don't get me wrong, I love leftover lasagne, in fact more than fresh ! Sandy's task today is to make more, as we'll have that for dinner tomorrow with Jeffrey, Sara and Emma.

and on ...

Oh yes, I did make a snowman, which lasted until it fell over. The ball underneath wasn't stable and the middle ball too heavy. He did last quite a while but was gradually falling over as I was clearing the ice. I tried to fix "him" but ended up making a mess. With warm temps again today, perhaps I'll make another !

Onward ...