Ann’s Weblog

We bought a TRACTOR yesterday! It’s a bit on the elderly side, but I don’t know what year. It has recently had a 5 gallon overhaul: bright blue, which might be the signature colour of Ford tractor, which it is. Gary will be very happy going around our little fields with his little tractor. Someone in my Yahoo Garden Chat room said that a 40 HP tractor wouldn’t turn over a good-sized rock, but we really don’t need it to do the heavy lifting! It is more for ploughing, disking and harrowing, and perhaps, because winter WILL come again, some snow clearing.

We’ve been having trouble with our Internet signal being WEAK. It’s very frustrating to either surf or chat or even send email. Sometimes it takes several minutes for a page to load, so my level of frustration is high. Our local server is working to fix this problem, but as you might imagine, some “fixes” require getting up a MOUNTAIN to install better equipment on a tower! Everything is so different out here, even backward sometimes, but I often think of how far this valley has come in the 28 years since I moved here.

Part of my frustration these days is that Myrtle’s surgery for the hernia in her diaphragm is scheduled for the middle of our area’s Spring school break, and I’ll have MANY dogs and cats for boarding. I have promised to go to Calgary, and Gary assures me that he can take care of things. Shelly (my eldest daughter, who lives in Calgary) suggested I come down just for the day before and the day OF the surgery, then go home for Easter weekend, and come back after Myrtle is discharged from hospital. That seemed like a good plan.

That’s probably enough rambling for one post. I’m going to see if THIS time my paragraph breaks show up. I hate to think that people will believe I write this way… without the paragraph breaks that I make in the draft forms of my “postings”.

Take care, all. Back later. ~ Ann

Today I woke up and couldn’t remember WHO I was or WHERE I was, let alone what day it was. Nope, I hadn’t been drinking. I stayed up until 2 AM last night, AGAIN, so that might explain my feeling of disorientation at 7 AM..

Sometimes I don’t know what happens sometimes on the pages in my website, which is what I was working on until so late. They’ll seem fine when I build them off-line, and then develop a gremlin or something after being uploaded. Sometimes it’s gratifying to FIND the snippet of code that has “fouled up” the whole page, but the project is tedious at times, too.

Our Internet connection is from a “wireless” signal from a tower several km. away, and my understanding is that we are the “fringe” customer. That is, we pay the “going rate” for Internet service, but sometimes the connection is fleeting or it fails altogether. That is very frustrating; I think we were the guinea pigs for the local server, though as I said, we’ve paid what everyone pays.

I have a very old Shiba Inu dog boarding. She looks like a little fox. The breed is high strung and suspicious of strangers, but we’ve “won her over” over the course of a few visits, thank goodness. Only RARELY have I had any trouble getting a guest to EAT, and Sheba is being fussy, so now she is getting very “spoiled”. I’ve plied her with meatloaf, sausage, bologna, canned dog food and bits of real chicken breast: well AT LEAST she’s EATING! I’m being careful that these goodies don’t upset her system, and offering lean chicken broth so that she drinks enough.

Last night I FORGOT to bake cheesecake for the local Bistro! Therefore, cheesecake baking is on the agenda for today, and it will be “Vanilla Bean”. That flavour was wildly popular a few weeks ago, certainly more than regular Vanilla, which also seems to be a favourite.

I don’t know whether this will show up as a live link, but I’m inviting you to visit my website http://www.annschwartz.com if you haven’t already; I love it when people sign the guestbook! Talk to you later, Ann