Awesome new avatar Destor... and most fitting for Quinn. Whooooo!

Thankee Destor. Errrrr..... Ric. Love the new avatar, part preacher, part fund-raiser, part neck-throttler - the perfect blogger. And thanks all for the good thoughts. Will resume normal service, as soon as mind returns to full functioning order.

Right now, the big flood up here is consuming daily attention. It's pretty hard to describe what it's like, there's no real historic parallels. The Red & Assiniboine Rivers are at their 2nd highest levels in 100 years, except, it was such a long cold Winter that the ice floes crashing down them are the size and thickness of cars. They blast down trees, outbuildings, houses as they pour through. I can only put 2 links up, but this is what the river looks like - it's moving like white water, well over its banks, but full of ice like this.

But to really get a sense of how thick these ice chunks are, and what they do when they hit something, check out this house.

The 2nd river running through the city, the Assiniboine, is also at huge levels. My house and the adjacent park sit next to the river. So first the river rose up the 15 feet or so over the riverbanks... then another 4 feet or so to engulf the park, with the ice hammering and chewing at least 3 trees down under and into splinters so far... and now it's come under my fence and has begun rising up the bank, about 3 feet so far. No danger as the property here has a 20 foot bank, but utterly weird and otherworldly to hear the water pouring past your house in the night, then the sound of gunshots when the big ice hits the trees. Meanwhile, much of rural Manitoba is under water, with farms and villages dyked off, cut off from moving for days now, with the river's flood making lakes now 15 miles wide in places.

So all is well, but I tell you - this is one wild, and wildly-damaged ecosystem we're functioning in. The last decade here has seen 2 huge historic floods, 2 years of massive drought, a Category 5 tornado just outside town, wind chills of -71 Fahrenheit, humidex's of 115. Climate change? Naw. ;-)