birthday parties and football

We just got back from a brief roadtrip. The Miners kids were throwing a 75th birthday party for their father today and RJ had his end-of-camp intersquad scrimmage so we combined a trip to Shellbrook and a trip to Saskatoon.

We left here at noon on Saturday and went over to Shellbrook. We had a good visit with Reg, Ken & Mer at the farm. Just as we were getting ready to go into town Arlene and Cam showed up (with multiple coolers of food) so we had a brief visit with them too. We visited some more with Ken, Mer and Kyle in town and then left early this morning for Saskatoon.

We had a bit of a false start on the trip to the city. The sign was up for Wingard ferry so we went down to the ferry and it was in the water and working alright but the ferry operator didn't think we could get off the ramp on the south side so we had to backtrack to Marcelin. That put us a little late arriving for RJ's scrimmage but we still got to see most of it. Marilyn had made some of her stuffed pasta shells so we heated them up and had lunch with RJ. That was a chance to test out the new generator too - it performed just fine and I don't think it is any noisier than the old one. Mind you, the old one was pretty damn noisy so it isn't all that hard a hurdle to get over to be no worse than it was.

I took the old generator out last week and hauled it up to the Super Uke. He will get around to looking at it when he gets around to looking at it. In the meantime we have the new noisy generator to replace the old noisy generator. At some point I am going to build a hushbox for one or the other of the generators but my preference is to use the old (diesel) one so I am holding off on starting that project until we determine whether the old one is worth fixing.

It still isn't very warm but I think the leaves are going to come out on the willows around the yard either tomorrow or the next day. The bark on them has really changed colour the last two days. We didn't see any seeding going on the whole way to Saskatoon but there are a few ammonia trucks running around this end of the world so somebody must be in the field.