Cottage Opening - Summer's Here!

Here in the Colonies (the Loyal Colonies, that is!), we celebrated Queen Victoria's Birthday last weekend. This is the signal for all woodsmen to open up the cottage and see what the ravages of winter have wrought. In our case, the ice break-up on the lake has taken away our dock - no easy feat when the thing is 8 feet by 20 feet! No sign of it so far, despite scouring the lake by canoe and boat. Meantime, the woods are sprinkled with white trillium - not as colourful as the bluebell woods, but still very pretty. The weather is all over the place: zero on Sunday, 28C today. And the blackfly are carrying off anything smaller than a mastodon: Bev - you wouldn't last 5 seconds! Hope all are well. Now go raise glasses to Queen Vicky!

Love C, D, P & T

Bluebells

Bluebells in Badby woods last weekend, and building work at Foxgloves so far.

More Running Robinsons

It was the Yonge Street 10K race today. All three boys ran and turned in impressive times but honours go to Tim who came 5th in the official rankings for his age. Which means he gets an award of some kind and he was only 20 secs away from winning $100! Pop Jim would be smiling.

Chris is happy too because he beat Pip for the first time since 2006 (all that Marathon training!).

And Pip is happy because, after being out on the town last night and a surfit of chicken wings and beer, he managed to run at all!

Here are the official results:

Chris: 40mins 31 secs. Placed 323 out of 13,000 runners and 11th in his age category.

Pip: 42mins 23 secs. Placed 535 out of 13,000 runners and 32nd in his age category.

Tim: 43mins 43secs. Placed 751 out of 13,000 runners and 11th in his age category by "chip time" but 5th overall in the official race "gun time" and one of the 5 award winners.

So Pip has to look over his shoulder for Tim next year, by which time Tim will also be looking down on Chris judging by the height difference....

Love to all from Canada