big storm coming our way

This really sucks. We were looking forward to going to Regina on Sunday to celebrate Mom & Dad's 51st anniversary with them but now it looks like the weather is going to shut down that plan. They've been forecasting this storm for 3 days now - usually they can't tell what is going to happen this afternoon but it looks like they might have it right on this one. Tonight it sounded like it might swing more into the southwest part of the province so maybe we'll get lucky but we can't really afford to get stormed in down in Regina either so it will have to look good on Sunday.

This week I did something new. I went to the Hodgins auction on Thursday and I never left the comfort of my own living room. I was thinking about going to the sale because I'm looking pretty hard for a tractor to mow the yard with and I was looking for a generator too. Anyway, it seemed like a lot of driving to get to a sale that I probably wouldn't buy anything at anyway and then I remembered that Hodgins does a live webcast of their sales. It worked really well. I got a login ID for their sale - I couldn't make it work on Wednesday but by Thursday I had it figured out and I logged in to watch some items in the morning. They have it set up so you can set an alarm when an item you are interested in comes up so I did that. It goes off like a fire siren and then you can watch the item and hear the auctioneer. You can click on a "bid now" button or enter an amount to bid if you don't like the bid the auctioneer is looking for. It works pretty good. I ended up buying a generator. I phoned the office after my bid and she said she was going to send me an invoice but she hasn't done that yet. She also said it would be OK to pick it up on Monday so I will do that - assuming we aren't stuck in the snow here on Monday. I'm not sure how well it will work in the bus but I had to do something. The Kubota we have in here now is getting pretty tired. I may end up rebuilding it and selling the one I just bought or I may end up keeping the one I bought in the bus but either way at least we will have a working generator. Right now we really don't have one.

Marilyn spent the afternoon trying to buy a cell phone. Its more complicated than you would think. We are trying to lessen our ties to SaskTel so she had convinced herself that she would get a Telus phone. They sell them all over the place - apparently they work in Nipawin - unlike Fido or Rogers - most importantly Telus is NOT SaskTel - so it seemed like a plan. Then she discovered that Telus sells phones in Saskatchewan - with Alberta phone numbers. And the kid she was talking to couldn't tell her where the phone number would be from. So that meant that if she was in Nipawin and I phoned her from the farm we would both pay long distance charges. That was clearly a non-starter. This afternoon she went back to SaskTel but even that wasn't easy. They want to "give" you a phone in return for locking you into a contract of some description. She kept pushing them until she figured out what the absolute cheapest alternative was, and it certainly wasn't taking their so-called free phone.

Tonight the wind is howling around and there was a huge black cloud off to the west. George was a wild thing all day and my arthritis is acting up. Its hard not to think that the weather forecast was right.