Wednesday - day before St. Paddy's!

Wednesday:  After feeding dogs last nite we walked up to the Sugar Shack; Claude had been there already for a couple of hours because he had so much sap (they call it water) in the holding tank that he needed it to get boiling so more could flow in!  The set up is lines of plastic (one of them had broken so he figures he lost about 100 gallons of sap before it was noticed and fixed) running from maple to maple on about 5 acres.  There is a compressor pump in a shed in back of the Sugar Shack and that pulles the sap into a holding tank inside the Shack – that holds 500 gallons – then from there it gets pumped inside the boiler area into a 50 gallon tank – then it drains into the stainless steel boiler set-up – that’s 3 different troughs at different grades so as it fill from the second holding tank it moves on to hotter and hotter areas – the final 2 troughs are right over the fire and when the sap reaches 219 F it is ready to become syrup.  Since this was the first day of the season, the sap never got up to temp cause it all came from outside; and that was even after Claude had burned 1 rick of wood in the stove under the boiler!!!  We only burn that much to heat our house a week!  About 6 it was time to go back down and let the dogs out- Claude insisted that we use one of their vehicles to drive down instead of walking……..sooooo….Randy drove the Mercedes SUV down…..you have to put your foot on the brake and then push the button!!!!  I was going to kid him and tell him while we were gone in ½ hour we had taken a trip into Montreal (an hour drive one way) just to see how fast it could go!!!

Melanie and Patrick and Renelle were all there and we ordered in from a local bar (an annual tradition for the first day of the season) and we had poutin (french fries with brown gravy and cheese curds on top) and hamburgs (with onion and relish – but the relish was more like cabbage..) and hot dogs!!  And of course a bottle of red and white and Coors for Randy.  And for dessert….what else…..Randy’s favorite, sugar pie!!!  We felt very special to be included in their family tradition!

Melanie gave us a report on her visit to the hospital yesterday (Monday) – they didn’t do any tests and gave her no meds – she has edema +2 from mid thigh to mid calf with lots of bruising – she may have medial collateral ligament damage, but they told her that if it doesn’t continue to decrease in pain, to come back in 2 weeks.  They just told her to elevate it and ice.  She has a lot of pain with any rotation or if her foot gets bumped!  She has crutches and we can only imagine how difficult it is for her to get upstairs (it’s like 2 flights long..) to her bedroom – there aren’t any bedrooms on the first floor.  She worked both Monday and Tues but she is not sleeping well because of positioning and pain so she was pretty tired when we shut down the boiler at 10p!  We spent all that time pretty much sitting in the boiler room with it so steamy that the droplets were falling from the ceiling on all of us – but what a sweet, wonderful smell when you walk in the room!!!!  Randy and I even had a cup the hot sap, about ½ to being syrup!  We also played around with Patrick’s Samsung telephone using a Google app for translation – you can hold the phone up to a sign or like a menu and it will translate it for you to English!!!

Today we have already unhooked the truck so we can drive up to their business, Cirtech, so that we can meet the gal that answers the phone when Randy calls – she tries very hard to speak English to him and to understand his messages!  Then to lunch at the Villagouis Restaurant – the only one in Charette!!

I guess we are not going to train at all this week – Hermel training some pups this morning and said parts of the trail were getting very soft – it was a beautiful morning – very warm and sunny – lots of snow melting away!

The 3 dogs that have been sick ate dry dog food overnite so that’s a good sign!

Things are going great!  After lunch with Melanie, off to Shawanigan for groceries and fuel for this weekend.