Sledging

fun until your boots fill with snow
Crazy Carpets matting down the rough

When Rupert the Bear or Oor Wullie slid down hills in the hardcover cartoon annuals sent from Scotland when I was a kid it was “sledging” not “sledding”. Whatever it is called, for those of you worried that we sold the farm when we…sold the farm and moved to the city, this is the view from the from window of the family sleddging.

Earlier: I saw a Northern Harrier – a medium sized hawk identifiable by a white patch above its tail and its habit of flying slowly a few feet above the ground – tracking over ice next door at Elevator Bay this morning. I don’t know if this means the ice mice have moved south or if it had a hankering for fish.

Odd News

This is interesting news, coming from a formerly high-placed White House insider who would have to be an utter liar and nincompop if this is not true:

Jan. 10 — NEW YORK (Reuters) – Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill charges in a new book that President Bush entered office in January 2001 intent on invading Iraq and was in search of a way to go about it. O’Neill, fired in December 2002 as part of a shake-up of Bush’s economic team, has become the first major insider of the Bush administration to launch an attack on the president. He likened Bush at Cabinet meetings to “a blind man in a room full of deaf people,” according to excerpts from a CBS interview to promote a book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, “The Price of Loyalty.”

Odder still given the news about what the Danes found in Iraq.

Snow Sound

Winter Harbour

I snuck up to the top of the dome this morning and got this shot of the harbour. To the right is one of a set of Martello towers built to guard the opening of the Rideau Canal from the US navy. The headland across the water to the left is Royal Military College, a military university, with Fort Henry, our historic British army fort, on its own separate point of land behind. Wolfe Island is entirely hidden on the horizon by the lake effect clouds, no doubt getting a dump of snow. Lake effect snow is a conveyor belt picking up moisture out on Lake Ontario, dropping it downwind a few kilometres later at first landfall.