Wow, two handsome beasts! :) I think it was great that Niels was able to meet up with you FH. Super picture of both of you. Wow, I must say that was a nice bright sunny day. We do not see too many of them here this time of the year - yup, a lot of rain, but mild temps. What a really nice place you have their Doug. Niels, though it was so nice to hear from you, I was really saddened by your story. That must be pretty hard. One good thing is you are in the right kind of job for you and I am sure you are very happy doing that. I hope the green card business for you may be resolved some day, maybe it will not be as difficult as you think to obtain one. If not, would there be any point trying to emigrate to Canada, then crossing the border frequently could be managed to see each other more often?? Any how you seem a happy guy and I am sure you are managing the best way you can. Good Luck. I think it is a great thing what you suggest about forum members getting together and I look forward to meeting up with some one of these days. Any regular poster here is more than welcome to visit us when coming to the island. I have heard of some meetins on the east coast between members, but love to get something happening over on the west one of these "summers" rose time! :) Veilchen, nice picture of your hubby with his catch. Something my husband did for years, but gave up his boat and fishing a few years' ago. I sure miss the fish though and canning and smoking the salmon. We still smoke it now and then, but now we buy it! Pauline - Vancouver Island

Unheated tank; but may we presume that in winter, your home is heated and that like most fully clothed humans, you are most comfortable in a range of 68 - 72, with 70 being optimum? If so, then you could keep most livebearers and common danios or barbs in unheated tanks. Just a suggestion, but one of the finest aquarium fish publications in the world; Practical Fishkeeping, is published in the UK and the vast majority of people who contribute articles to it are also there. If you subscribe online, you can communicate with experienced aquarists from every corner of your Blessed Isle and may even connect with one who lives near you and can relate to your climate. But if you want to give a "tropical" tank a try, I'd say start with a small school of a single species of danio and see how well they do. If they sell them there, look for some of the gold phase, long finned zebra danios; very pretty fish that are also innexpensive and- particularly hardy.

Sounds a bit like a major project. Setting the cooling section to blow air into the grill and also maintain the smoke, will be difficult. I think that this technique needs the nitrates for proper safety. These are used for air curing meats, and I would suspect fish too. The smoking might take a few days or more to finish, and the cost (electricty) of running an AC outside in the hot summer with its heat side blowing out more heat, and the cooing side just barely keeping things cool inside a small grill, and competing with the temps that the grill can get inside even if its not running... A 12,000 BTU is huge for this. Maybe a 500o or 6000 would be better, smaller, and less expensive to run. Your not really storing the foods in a cool environment to smoke them, but smoke itself must also be cooled, without its particulate condensing too fast, so your almost aught between a rock and a hard place.

Alberta and Saskatchewan had Family Day, I think that both of them call it, before. Manitoba has named their day after Louis Riel, a French-Metis guy in the West who wanted some regional autonomy and the gov't. fixed him and his few guys in a small battle in N. Sask. in '85. No idea how many killed, but it wasn't very many. They hung Louis Riel. We'd had another tiny revolution in Ontario and Quebec in 1837. I'd said a while ago that we hadn't had international military battles in N. America N. of the Alamo for 190 years, or within one country for 140, referring to that as the most recent. But our battle was really the last, 120 years ago in 1885 ... and it was so small that I forgot about it. The Ontario government declared a new holiday in February, Family Day (to promote "Family Values", I guess, including family-like assemblies based on same-sex couples), after they'd won an election last year. So now there's a holiday in the four contiguous provinces from Ontario to Alberta on that day. The Alberta holiday, governed by a more Conservative group, with an election in the offing, has defined "family" a bit more narrowly, I think. About 40% of the people in those areas, for various reasons, had to be at work today/yesterday ... but many of the workers had trouble, for their day care providers were on holiday. At least some Toronto civic workers were on duty - they had a lot of snow to move. Just a regular old holiday, same as every other day, for us retirees. Well, not exactly - quite a few stores closed, and provincial govt. offices (but Fed. workers, as (Susan?) reported, were on duty). One Federal political leader said that they should make it a Canada-wide holiday. Some said that such an eventuality is a bit remote, for Canada's productivity is much lower than in the U.S., that the rise in value of our dollar has hurt our manufacturing industries, and though we've had 8 statutory holidays and U.S. workers 13 ... they think that there's little chance of expanding our numbers for a while. Hope you all find some interesting and memorable things in the rest of this week. ole joyful