Spring is here-ish

It is meant to be spring time, usually by the beginning of April the snow is gone and the weather warming up with the trees and flowers beginning to bud and the grass getting greener. Well it is the middle of April we still have some snow laying around the temperture is not all that warm, we still have nights where it goes below 0c.

As spring was approching we decided this year to try and have a little indoors garden. This is the humble beginning, some herbs, cherry & regluar tomato, hot and sweet peppers. Not sure how we are going to manage them all on our balcony. We will keep you up to date on how the gardning is going.
With the so called return of spring we are also see the return of some of the wiser creatures who flow to warmer parts for winter. We were amused to see these ducks swimming in a poddle left by the melting snow on the grass verge in the middle of the road. All the bigger pond and lakes are still frozen so I guess that they had to settle for whatever they could find.

The day after taking the photo of the ducks, it again snowed, in fact it snowed real heavy, overnight we had 15cm/6inchs of snow.

The day after it snowed, I was driving by the ducks again and this time saw them swimming around in snowy sluchy water. Poor guys were probably thinking we should have stayed where it was warm. We also planted some sunflowers, not sure what we will do with them if they reach their protential hight of 1.5 metres.

Doing our bit for Paddy's Day

Today is St. Patrick's Day. So the kids wanted to do something a little "Irish"

So we sent them off to school like this.

Karina and her friend Ye Jin

Daniel at Basketball

The Kids

Timothy, doing his homework
Sonja ?

Daniel. He has had a lot of basketball games and practice the past few weeks so it was not unusually to find him asleep.

Sonja Basketball.

Both Sonja and Daniel have been playing basketball this winter. Here are a few pictures of Sonja playing and her team. I don't have any photos of Daniel playing yet, but I will put some on as soon as I have them.

Sonja on the right
Number 40

Sonja, second from right.

Snowed In

Over the last six weeks we have got a lot of snow, I am not sure if it is more than other years, but it does seem like it. With all this snow, if you leave you car sit too long they tend to get snowed in. Here are a few cars by our building that have not moved for a while! The photos below these are of the play ground outside our windows, below the round red roof is a sand box, the snow is almost up to the swing seats and the end of the slides disappear into the snow. Hopefully only another 4 - 6 weeks and this will all be gone.