Free at last!

I've been out and about at meetings in various places over the last week, but the thing that made travel difficult - the snow - was also the thing that brought a great deal of pleasure last weekend. My wife, daughter, her school friend and I went sledging on the grounds of a nearby school. We joined about a hundred or so parents and kids in the sheer pleasure of sliding down a hill and climbing back to do it again. The winters have been so mild in recent years that my daughter outgrew her sledge without ever having a decent opportunity to use it and we gave it to a charity shop last year - bad decision, and we were reduced to using plastic kitchen trays for our descent. Mind you, some people were using heavy duty plastic fertiliser bags. Great fun! The ice is slowly melting and I can get the rear-wheel drive car safely around again, but the forecast is for more rain/snow/fog until the weekend. Much more important today is the unfolding story of the earthquake in Haiti. Some reports say 500,000 may have died and that is the population of the city I live in. Difficult to comprehend and puts our pathetic woes about some snow and ice into perspective.