Spring a leak..

Spring is slowly but surely upon us. The surest sign is the dri-drip-dripping of melting snow on the roof. Most is gone too except the patch on top of the flat section above the attic window - too bad this feeds a continual dripping onto the roof right next to our pillows!

We're definitely into 'brown spring' now though, and due to the low snow year we should be through that quickly. Turns out that March was the coldest since 1959 and within a whisker of edging that for the coldest on record - which the Februay-March combo was. 111 consecutive days with daily lows below 0 F (-18 C).

Easter stunk up on us and caught us by surprise, which was mostly, I think becuase there are no public holidays at Easter, so you don't have a 'what are you doing for Easter' vibe going on. It was nice today to visit friends and eat some homemade, and very tasty hot cross buns. You don't see them at all up here, which is odd given the American propensity to sell and eat as much food as possible associated with any and all holidays/ special occasions. Kay's homemade ones were really great though.

Yesterday I did my first ever triathlon. An odd one it was too: 9 km ski, 5 km run and 1 km pool swim. It was a low key event organised by the local masters swim group, which a friend tipped me off to. Too bad the skate skiing was closer to ice skating with the daytime melt and nighttime freeze, and I slipped over a couple of times trying to catch the guy in front of me. I was a little afraid of the swim though. Skate skiing is very tricep/back intensive, and how much so was immediately clear with my first swim stroke - ouff! Its kind of strange too - because you obviously don't know where others are up to in the 40-lap swim. It was nice to be in race mode for the first time in ages. With no competetive sport I miss that - the attention to managing your effort for best personal performance. In the end, I was second into the pool and finshed up third. Not quite up there with Lisa's 1st out of two in a ski event at last year's learn-to-ski day, but fun to open up the throttle for a bit anyway :-)

April holds a trip to Barrow for me (13th - 20th), and later, the start of Lisa's trip to the Pribilof Islands (29th - May 5) - and then May 13 is her big graduation date. As this is an American graduation, she'll be expecting appropriate gifts - gradiation ring, cars, holidays in Hawai'i, property. That kind of thing ;-)