A Plethora of Wildlife

When I woke this morning, Huffle was still in bed. I woke him to check if he should have gone to work but he was feeling ill and decided to work from home today.

The boys went off to school. Today's temperature was -9* with sunshine.

Huffle found Mouse poo in one of the drawers so another huge washing marathon was done on all the cutlery and the graters and choppers. Vaccuuming and disinfecting was done and lots of things moved to other more enclosed spaces. What a nightmare! Huffle later filled in more holes and set a couple of traps, before sitting up in bed with his fleece and blanket wrapped around him and making some business calls.

Moo too, still felt ill but I decided to give her a 'Grandad Ic' walk (not up the top of Big John like we did back in the UK, but our new equivalent, along the Conservation Walk and on to the beach. We packed a lunch and a flask of hot chocolate, put on our thermals and drove to the walk.

The temperature had gone down to -5 and the sun was beautifully warming (whilst we were in the car). As we got closer, the clouds were getting darker and darker. The walk was lovely and snowy.

The dog wood was very very red and the chickadees came and perched on our hand again. We didn't have anything for them so they didn't stay. It was a hardish walk because of the snow and we soon got warm. There were many Canadian Geese, flying and calling to each other.

Once we got to the beach we were amazed. The whole beach had been swallowed up by ice which was about a metre high. There was ice in the water. It looked like waves but they were frozen ones. Very stange.

It was very hard walking on the ice beach as it was slippery but managed to get as close to the edge as possible. There were a lot of geese, ducks and swans in the water and we were worried that they would want to come and eat our lunch so we sat ourselves on the bench to eat.

The clouds were still very black but there was a lovely sun on the horizon that was creating orangey stripes on the lake. We sat on our picnic rug to keep our bums warm and drank our hot choclate from our mugs. We must have looked very strange sitting there. We did meet a couple of 'intrepid explorers' while we were there but they didn't hang around (unlike us!).

When we got cold we turned around and walked part of the way back and then went on a different route we hadn't been on before. We were followed by a group of four chickadees who flew around us. We had saved a few of the sesame seeds from our bagel so we put them on our hands. They were lovely little things, so sweet.

We wandered through with the chickadees following after us when we spotted something in the woods. Moo thought it was a dog but we crept quietly towards it. It was a beautiful deer. A really big one. It obviously didn't want to be near us but stood very still watching us and then crossed our path, really close to us.

My foot was hurting and we decided to turn back. We had walked quite a way and didn't realise how far we had come. The chickadees still followed and we went back to the route we started on. As we were nearing the end and were warm again we stopped for the rest of our Hot Choclate and a muffin but we got too cold so the muffin had to go back in the bag and we carried on to the car.

All in all we had been out for two hours. Moo didn't cough much outside but once back in home it started again. Huffle was still feeling ill and sat and watched a documentary on skiing while Moo and I jigsawed.

The boys came home and had their showers and tidied their rooms while Moo and I made Beef Burgers for the Carnivore boys and Carrot and Bean Burgers for the Veggie Girls. Yum yum.

The cooker is performing very well and is coping with many pans and different temperatures. However, I did drop the beef burgers off the tray and onto the bottom of the oven, luckily it missed the inside and just dropped mainly into the warming drawer. What a mess though - I wanted to keep it all shiny and new looking! We did have an email from Samsung this morning asking us to return the damaged item as it had been seven days since they requested it. DID THEY? SEVEN DAYS AGO? WHAT A BUNCH OF MUPPETS. They have our credit card details in case we didn't return it. Best check we haven't been charged for it again!

Small and I played Mastermind and then he watched Wrestling with Huffle and Moo and Smallest played table tennis.

MICE, CHICKADEES, CANADA GEESE, we might have seen a falcon, and we saw two female Cardinals, SWANS, DUCKS, DEER and a small brown lump of snow we nearly ran over but avoided because we thought it was a small animal. That's definitely a plethora!

The other day Moo and I saw a strange sight in the sky. It was like a rainbow but was inverted and straight up. One side of it was sunshine and the other side was dark cloud. We think it was a Snowbow - being part of the 'geoffrey' family, I obviously looked this up and found there is no such thing but it could have been a snow halo. I wish I had taken a photo but I was driving at the time.

 

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