Hi Dad,

It’s been an eventful week for us at Hyde Creek.  It started snowing on October 7th and didn’t stop until it turned to rain last night.  The ground is not frozen yet so it was melting at a fairly good rate and we still ended up with about a foot on the ground by last night.  This is so early it caught us off guard!  We have our fire wood for the winter and that is the main thing but Barry was scrambling to get all the vehicles, tools … well everything under a shelter.  I’m sure when it melts we will find a lot of odds and ends that got buried.   It’s melting pretty good right now so we are hoping we get a second chance at fall.  It went from 20 degrees and sunny to winter overnight… no autumn in between!  The ski hill is happy!

The snow stayed up in the trees for the most part so it has very pretty with all the red yellow and green leaves still on the the trees. When the warm temperatures came in yesterday, it all got very heavy very fast and as a result, the power went out last night and is still out (its 9:30 Sunday morning as I am writing this).  We haven’t bothered to get the generator going yet but when we do we will go online to BC Hydro, they have a really good sight with updated information saying when they expect it to be back on, what the cause is etc.  We were just saying that last winter we didn’t have any power outages but the year before we went for week long stretches at a time with no power.   We are “off the grid” enough that it doesn’t bother us too much.

Mini is our little alarm system as you know.  The other day she was yapping at something for hours so we went for a walk to see what and found what we thought were coyote tracks.  It had been snacking on a bunny down by the shop (Mini brought home a rabbits foot). Later that day there was a fox behind my office, Barry spotted it.  Then yesterday morning we were awake but still in bed and Mini was on guard in the window and she started going crazy.  I jumped up and there was a tall red fox in front of my office.  We watched him frolic around and went up behind the new office and towards the well.  Everyone is on lock down until we are sure this guy has moved on.  One good thing about the snow, easy to spot predators.

We also had our cute little Martin scampering around the other day.  Nice to see he is still around, I thought with the cats, he might have moved.

We had to shift focus off my new office and onto winterizing things suddenly but yesterday we got back on track and insulated and put up vapour barrier on one half of the building.  Today we will do the other half.  Then we are on to drywall! I am back designing 5 days a week so I’m only a helper on weekends, Barry will make sure we have everything for the next step during the week.   We are very excited about this new space!

I better figure out some breakfast so we can get to work.  Luckily we are only using hand tools as the power is still off.

Have a great day… everyday!

Love you and miss you, give Mom a hug for me.

Paula