another weekend in old Glengarry Another long weekend Kate & I on the homestead, Thursday until last night, for our usual twice-a-year jaunt, but this year, foregoing the Glengarry Highland Games; too much to do! My sister got married on Sunday (even though she & Corey have been together ten years, own a house & have two little kids), so Kate & I spent much of our first two days there hanging out with their older girl, Emma (3 1/2; see a whole slew of photos I posted from same on facebook). My mother apparently spent most of the last two months adding to my sister's stress (more stressed about my sister's wedding than she even was about her own).

Piles of family that we never get to see, family that Kate barely knows but I know too well (from when I was very young; a slew of cousins & others that used to visit all the time, until my mother got too sick in the late 1970s). Why is it only weddings & funerals?

Kate & I even spent part of Friday erranding with Emma (before we went to the park, of course), picking up a gift for their Hawaiian-themed wedding, a garden gnome that looked like a holiday Santa, complete with Hawaiian shirt (Emma didn’t like it; thought we should have purchased the pink birdhouse instead). At least her mother liked it.

Throughout the weekend, we kept seeing deer slip quietly through the bushes; where have all these deer come from lately? Wild animals are few & far between out there (at least the larger ones being seen), but I can recall growing up with sightings of deer, fox, wolves and even a bull moose at one point. There was even the year Dad lost a cow & there were sightings of her on the next road for over a year before she simply disappeared (she survived the whole winter in the bush by herself).

It's probably the longest we've stayed on the farm without really doing too much of anything; despite all my plans & my work, I didn’t crack a single book, do any work on the computer at all (his monstrously slow dial-up had much to do with that).

Kate goes off to PEI for two weeks with her mother on Wednesday; strange to think that I might only see her once or twice more before I head west; strange to think of me west at all. I don’t completely believe it, it still seems so abstract (partly because I'm still overloaded with deadlines, editing, introductions to write, final edits to go through, proofing of books, etcetera). Will I only start believing it the night before I fly out?

Wanted to get a blog entry written on Caledonia Springs (like this one I did last year), a little bit of research, some photos during a day trip, but simply couldn't find any information ,which is too bad (I haven't given up; the only book on such was written in French, so I can't even read it). Where the hell are the ruins? I wrote the guy who wrote the book, but he hasn't answered yet...