Day 36: Snow wonder

Looking out at the garden this morning - the deep blanket of snow blown smooth by the wind, it looked like the tide had come in and quietly buried everything. The swing-bench won't be swinging for a while by the look of it. Both driveway and road had been ploughed (plowed) again this morning - unfortunately in that order - leaving me a pile between the two to clear with a heavy spade (no snow shovel). However, the journey to work was otherwise fairly straight-forward. There's little to fear in any case when the road is bounded by large piles of fairly soft snow except hitting another car that is. You can see some more pictures here.

Exile #3 had another day off school today - she is definitely leading the way as far as accent-development goes. We regularly get liddle examples of it. Today, looking at some photos from her school she was telling us the names of her classmates. Suddenly we stumbled over one: That's Carlen, "Sorry what was that?", Carlen - while we rack our brains to think of the names we have seen..."Colin?" No! Carlen. But yes indeed that is "Carlen" spelled C O L I N. At least it's not Coe-Lynne I suppose. I too have had to translate my name to have it understood. Until I do, the locals seem to think that I have some strange and exotic name and try to grasp at it phonetically (with limited success) - once they picture it correctly (as we did with Colin) suddenly it becomes straight forward. Exile #3, I suppose, is happy to take things at face-value and is not hung-up on connecting the sounds with their written forms - maybe another reason why the slower-start education system is better for her right now.