November 12th, 2006: Today was pretty cool, about -11°, but not much wind and sunny for most of the day. It felt pretty nice!

We just got back from Kelvington, where we put on a slide show for residents of Kelvindell Lodge. Likely about fifteen people attended and we showed them a real mixture – elevators, crooked trees, wildflowers, Greenwater Park and a few others. Kept them amused for nearly an hour, and several said they would like us to come back. They even gave us some coffee and cake afterwards!

Then we looked up Jenny who was busy at her store. She is putting in a corner for Unique things and wanted it ready for Moonlight Madness. She was building a wall, so I gave her a hand to set it up and nail it down – she already had the wall built. That should be an interesting corner – a few antiques, some unique giftware, a social corner. Something a little different.

On Wednesday, we braved the snow and ice covered roads and went to Kelvington for our flu shots. Yes, we’re in the high risk group – actually by quite a few years. We had to sit down and rest with coffee and cake afterwards, and some very friendly folk sat with us, making the trip worthwhile. Mind you, we are strong advocates of the flu shots so the trip was worthwhile even without the visiting; the visiting was the icing on the cake.

Brian Chase had bought a lottery ticket somewhere in the States; the draw had already been made, but he said he hadn’t checked it out. He tried to sell shares in it to Maurice, Merv and myself; said if it was a winner, it was worth $94 million; then he revised that down to $47 million, but the US income tax would take half of it, leaving $23.5 million. By then we were wondering if it was worth bothering with, but finally agreed to take a 5% share each, so we each gave Brian a nickel. That should net us a little over a million dollars for a nickel investment – not a bad deal by any standard. Brian took the 15¢ but he was still shaking his head when he left. I think he was sorry he had invited us to take shares.

I think it’s winter. We had almost got rid of the last snow, but it started snowing every day last week; never very much, but it seldom quit. Now there is a good blanket on the ground. Walking is a bit dicey because you can’t see the patches of ice. I took a header yesterday walking to coffee, but luckily didn’t get hurt. Maurice says we have more snow than he has at Perigord, and Kelvington has quite a bit more.

I think our geese must finally have taken off for the sunny south. I haven’t heard or seen any for the past few days.

All year, there have been a lot of deer around but mostly does and fawns. Lately there has been a five-pointer, a good looking animal, hanging around the core area,likely trying to make the acquaintance of some of the does. Today, there was a young buck in the Cove parking lot, a big, beautiful animal with classic proportions but only a single spike on each side. The does and fawns are almost tame; in fact Mel Tkachuk showed us some photos of deer eating from a pail which he was holding. The bucks are a different matter. All I have to do is open a door to get a photo and they are gone like a shot.

The outfitters are having a busy time with hunters from the States. They take their hunters out in the morning and set them up in blinds. Then they go to the Cove and drink coffee until they figure the hunters are cold enough, and go and pick them up. One man from Arkansas got his animal the first morning, so had nothing to do but hang around with Gary and Dwight while his companions kept on trying.

From the conversations between outfitters and local farmers, I gather coyotes are plentiful this year. I’m not sure what harm they could be, except to household pets, but nobody seems to like them. There are always some wolves around the Park. I suppose their numbers would fluctuate a bit with the availability of food but there never seems to be a problem with them.