This was a rough week. Geiger has been sick. We took him to the vet and he’s getting better but he’s got a chronic viral infection and will need to be on Lycene from now on. It snowed last weekend. In particular it snowed all day Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. Nanaimo officially got 30 cm (about a foot and a half) with locally higher accumulations. For reference this would be like Minneapolis getting three to four feet in one storm. Travel was a huge mess on Monday. It improved as the week went on but we still have lots of snow around. Mostly it was cold (for us) and dry (for us). The beginning of March is supposed to be when buds start and it warms up, not when we get snow, dry and cold. Worse yet, the cold air is hitting my hands really hard. They’re so dry I’m having to lotion every couple of hours and wear knit gloves to protect the brittle skin. I picked a really bad winter to be sensitive to cold and dry. One other side effect of the storm was that I got a traffic ticket. No need to go into details but the snow was the ultimate cause so I’m contesting it. In national news the HMCS Protecteur is in the news again. You might remember this was the ship I talked about a couple of years ago. They were in a two ship convoy in the middle of the Pacific when they ran into the other ship. This time they had an engine room fire and lost power. They are being towed back to Pearl Harbor by the American cruiser the USS Chosin. Not a good week for the Royal Canadian Navy. Then on top of everything else I lost my pocket knife. This is the $50 Swiss Army knife with the magnifying glass, and scissors that Marsha got for me in Minnesota last summer. I use it all the time at home and work and I feel like I lost my right hand.

There was a bit of good news this week. First, Marsha is ‘glowing’. That’s the verdict of a friend of ours who saw her for the first time since her heart procedure. We’re not sure what it means but apparently it’s a good thing. I just told Marsha that it was because she’d been near me during the PET Scan but she said our friend meant it figuratively not literally. Then today I discovered that after a three year hiatus the Red Bull Air Race Series has started up again. I love this series, it’s really the only sport I make a point of following every chance I get. 

So overall a hectic and difficult week which is why this letter is so short.