Jan 5 - ready to roll

Well, we're all packed and ready ... but of course I don't know about our car. 

I went to Britt for Mass yesterday; a very quiet day.  The fishing rigs were out all day; no minnows left at the end of the day so likely some pickerel (walleye for the Americans) scored.  I kept my minnow bucket running in the basement in case we ended up staying on Monday, and it looks like that will be the case.

At this moment it's still snowing heavily and it looks like we got a real dump overnight.  It would take a huge dump to stop the X5 but of course that car is in Barrie, not here.  I'll have to check with Susan but expect that the plow will come through some time today, likely already triggered by MTO, since it's obvious that we'll need plowing.

I did bring a couple of hand-truck-loads of wood down from the wood shed, expecting that we might be staying today.  To do that, I had to run the snow blower to the wood shed, since that hadn't been done before and while it was ok to tromp through the snow, I needed a path for the two-wheeled hand truck.

I also started up the generator, which proved to be difficult.  I had to run the heat gun (like a hair dryer) on it for quite some time before it would start.  That obviously would be a problem if there was no power !  I put some gas line antifreeze in the tank, which might have been the problem.  I really need to think about / do something about, that standby generator before we find that we need it !  

I took all the obligatory backups yesterday, just in case we were leaving this morning.  Just in the last half-hour I installed a new backup tool -- Cobian Backup -- which looks like it could nicely take care of nightly incremental backups within Windows.  Up to this point I've been doing weekly full backups within the Linux environment, with Windows shutting itself down prior to that.  During the week backups of prone-to-change files (My Documents) were manually handled. 

We had stir-fried fondue marinaded steak for dinner, leftover from New Years.  As Sandy commented at dinner, we've got food here for several days.  We'll see what happens with the car and the plow.

What else ?  Nothing really.  Oh yes, Jim and Bonnie got back later than planned from North Bay yesterday, so we didn't see them.  When I talked to them on the phone yesterday, we pretty much figured that we'd see them today, unless the snow didn't materialize or didn't accumulate to the extent expected. When you get right down to it, the weather services are pretty good these days.

Onward ?