Good Thing We Have A Hair Dryer

Today, the “pleasure” of winter took an unexpected turn. Well, maybe we should have been prepared for that, but this morning I could not get the trailer door open. The latch was frozen solid and there was no way I could move it. Bea had the idea of using her hair dryer to thaw out the lock mechanism from the inside. And sure enough, after a few seconds of giving full blast of heat to the lock-set the door opened up. The reason why this problem occurred was yesterday’s weather. It was sleeting and snowing and a lot of humidity came down, settling on everything exposed. Roads were slippery to the extend that most roads up north had been closed either because of road ice or accidents. Highway 881 leading up to Conklin was closed just south of town because of a major accident with a tanker on fire. Interestingly, I had just traveled that road the day before the freezing rain came down. In fact, the road closure came only a few hours after my arrival in Edmonton. The previous couple of days had brought much warmer temperatures. Snow had melted and water was dripping everywhere. But all that came to a sudden halt yesterday. Gas prices have now been on a steady decline and people in Alberta are getting worried about how long this hot economy will last. As a matter of fact no economic boom will go on for ever and history shows that clearly. The last oil bust was in the eighties and it can happen again. A moderate softening of the Alberta economy can be a healthy thing as there are a lot of people struggling to get ends to meet. Have you seen the yellow line over top of my postings? The reason why it is there is that I have been “graced” with lots of unwanted “comments”. Today 2 of those “comments” arrived again. Probably the sender could not read English, as his postings were in Spanish. They got deleted anyway. I am still hesitant to install an approval process, as that could prevent legitimate commenters from sending their comments. I will monitor the situation and as long as there is only a couple of soliciting comments I choose to hit the Delete-Button.