Snow Day!

Today was supposed to be the last day of school for the kids, when they could say thier goodbyes to teachers and classmates, but fate intervened and the schools were closed due to the weather. They were pretty sad early in the morning when they woke up to check if school was cancelled, but went back to sleep and were in better spirits upon the second waking. Maybe there is something nice about just saying, "see you tomorrow," instead of "goodbye"? Anyways, why do snow days always have to happen when they are least welcome? (Why not on exam day, for example? or a Monday-after-a-totally-crazy-weekend?). It snowed and blowed all day, and we ended up with 25 centimetres of snow! Mateo went to play at his friends Ben and Ollie's house up the street for a bit, and then was off to a sleepover birthday party at Matthew's, thanks to Matthew's mom, Diana, picking him up because, despite the fact that Gustavo and Ariel shoveled all day, we were unable to get our vehicle out of our alleyway (VW buses are not made for this weather -- I guess it's a good thing we are leaving soon!). But at least Ari was able to make some cash by shoveling out a neighbour's driveway!

We also managed to figure out how to fix our brand new camera (thank you Eva and Mary for this amazing gift!); apparently, there was a defect in the audio quality when filming. It is otherwise a perfect machine for us -- waterproof (up to 35 ft!) shockproof, crushproof, etc -- but there was some problem with the sound with the Olympus Stylus 1030SW in movie mode. The first couple of videos that we took had this "popping" sound every few seconds which was really distracting, and we thought we might have to return it; can you imagine trying to film the panorama from atop some Mayan pyramid, or a jungle tour down a Bolivian river, accompanied with a constant and irritating popping sound? Luckily we just updated the firmware of the camera, which specifically included an update to improve the audio, and that seems to have done the trick!