It is just gorgeous out there!

I took this picture while doing my rounds this morning. Rounds which finally included switching out the memory cards on the trail cam again! It was about -7C/19F at the time. As I write this, we’ve dropped to 0C/32F, from a high of 2C/36F. We’ll be even warmer over the next few days, with Wednesday – the last day of January – expected to be anywhere from 4C-6C/39F-43F, depending on which app I look at.

Checking the 30 year records for today, the record high was 3C/37F in 1989, and the record low was -37C/-35F, in 2019.

I well remember that year. Both our van and my mother’s car froze, and we were stuck here for weeks. 

And that, my friends, is why we try to have at least an extra month’s supplies stocked up for the winter! I am so enjoying this year’s El Niño temperatures. It’ll probably be another 30 or so years before we have one like this again!

I headed into town today, as three of our four 18.9L/5 gallon water jugs were in need of refills. I was just on the far side of our little hamlet when I saw a car in the ditch, with someone walking around on the road. 

The north side ditch, which is deep and steep!

I stopped to check on the driver, who had been taking photos of her vehicle from the road. I’m happy to say, she was unhurt. She’d had a deer run in front of her! She had a tow truck called in that she was waiting for, and thanks to our warm day, she was in no danger from the elements. She was pretty shaken – understandably! – but being able to talk to someone for a while seemed to help her relax a bit. Thankfully, it doesn’t look like her vehicle is damaged, so once it’s towed out, she expected to be able to keep driving. Someone else had stopped that was willing to pull her out, but her vehicle had nothing to attach to, so tow truck it is!

The car was gone when I was driving home. Hopefully, she was right, and was able to drive home without any issues.

Once in town I decided at the last minute to go to the dollar store, which is close to the beach. I was actually surprised to see the ice fishing village set up. I was sure this winter hadn’t been cold enough for the ice to freeze to a safe thickness. I guess this close to shore, it’s less of an issue than further out onto the lake. It makes me wonder about the ice roads up north, which is the only time some of the fly-in reserves can be accessed by road.

I found a few small things at the dollar store before heading to the grocery store. Of course, I picked up a few extra things besides the water refills. With three jugs to refill, there wasn’t much room in the cart, but that’s okay. I’ll be doing Costco in a few days. One thing I was excited to find were boxes of papadam! I haven’t seen these in years. When we were living in the city, we picked some up at a Wholesale Club and loved them, but then they stopped carrying them, and we never saw them again. For some reason, I suddenly started craving them, and have been trying to keep an eye out for them for at least the past year. I supposed I could have looked up a recipe and tried making them, but I know I wouldn’t be able to do as good a job. Especially with rolling them so thin. Even in the city, yesterday, I was keeping an eye out for them, yet here I find them at the local grocery store, as a new product! The boxes have 10 each, so I grabbed the two boxes I could reach. 😄

Must… resist… cooking them now! I want to save them for later today. 😊

I’m just itching to be outside and working on something right now, but there isn’t anything that needs to be done, that can be done before the snow clears. Ah, well. I’ll just enjoy the lovely day, instead!

In other things, I’m quite happy to have my computer up and running again! Yesterday, I was able to upload the files from the memory cards I’d switched out a few weeks ago, then go through them. Normally, I keep quite a lot of the stills, and a few of the videos as well, but not anymore. Unless our vandal is in the file, or there’s something specific I want to keep (I’m a suck for critter catches!), I’m going to be ruthless about the deleting. 

When I uploaded the other set of cards this morning, I was glad I didn’t have to hurry. The sign cam typically doesn’t have many files on it, but it still had almost 200. Stills are fast to go through, though.

The gate cam is another story. It’s set to take one still, then one 10 second video, every time the motion sensor is triggers. The gate sees a lot more activity, partly because the motion trigger can be triggered again after a shorty time, and partly because if we are doing things like unlocking the gate, driving through, then locking again, or meet the prescription delivery driver, each even ends up with as many as half a dozen pairs of files. This time, though, it included my daughter using little Spewie to clear the driveway, so there would easily be a couple dozen files of her going back and forth.

There was almost 500 stills, which meant almost a thousand files to go through.

Again, the stills were fast to go through. The videos took quite a bit longer! I could skip through a lot of them, like my daughter with the snow blower, or any time we were driving through, but others needed to be watched all the way through. 

And yes, there were some with our vandal in them that were kept, just in case. 

Then I made sure to empty the recycle bin on my computer!

Now that the machine is up and running, I need to continue getting rid of old files and clear more space. I should have regularly purged older files over time, but just didn’t realize how much space these trail came files were taking up! Especially since we got the newest camera. Having better quality images is a trade off, as the files are so much larger.

Meanwhile, my computer has an operating system update that needs to be downloaded and installed. I’ll to that at the end of the day.

Hang in there, little computer. You can do it!

The Re-Farmer