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I’m very busy with work, last week I worked 120 hours. It’s on a game with a virtual pet, and it’s lots of fun, but a bit tight deadline. Not that we made the deadline, but whatever. Now the deadline got extended to next Wednesday, so still some more days of hard work and little sleep ahead. It’s fun and I get paid well, so I don’t complain. Alison complains a little and our real pets are also a bit cranky. I’ll make it up to them next week!

I’ll posted some pics from last week, but don’t have the time to comment. So you can do the captions yourself by commenting. How’s that?

Poupoune doesn’t like the metro very much. Too many people/smells. She;’s very timid. But the walk in the snow on Mont Royal was really appreciated. Well worth putting up with metro travelling. This was the first time we used her dog boots. Although they kept falling of her paws (she doesn’t have much of an ankle), it kept her paws snow and ice free and warm. She made it all the way to the top. This is on the way back home. I don’t like taking pictures of people, but I just pretended that I was a stranger blinded by the cuteness of Poupoune. Which I was.

A view over a snow covered Plateau, with in the distance vaguely our expensive Olympic stadium. I’m sure there are commenters that can tell why it was so expensive.

I’m not the only one who moved a lot of snow today. Apparently Montréal spends more money on snow removal than any other city in North America. Either because we’re bigger than other cities (Québec city, Winnipeg) or we get more snow (Toronto, Ottawa).

Lots of snow means lots of shovelling. I moved about three cubic metres…

Which is exceptional so early in the year. For sure we’ll have a white Christmas.

Pigeons on a wire in our neighbour’s yard.

When we came back to the service building after our hike there was a young fox on the parking lot. He was totally not afraid of people and came very close to me. Too close for comfort since foxes can carry rabies. It’s such a beautiful animal, I’m glad my last name is derived from the most famous, Reynaert the fox. Apparently this story was so popular in mediaeval France that they named the animal after the main character of this story, Renard.

I went with the McGill Outdoors Club for a hike in the national park (although it is of course just a provincial park) Mont Tremblant. We were very late because we had to wait for our trip leader. He never showed up (later we heard he had totally slept through his alarm clock and the doorbell when two of us went to his house) so we went, more than an hour late, by ourselves.

There was just enough snow to make it pretty, and fortunately not enough to make us sink deep into the snow.