Canadian Spring

People keep telling me that Spring is here, and that you can tell because the weather looks like this:

Rain, rain, rain, and some more rain to top it off.  I think I preferred the snow personally.

The temperatures are starting to go up at least, which is good - before, it would rain during the day which melted all of the snow, and then the temperature would drop below zero overnight and all of the rain and melted snow would freeze into huge ice sheets over everything.

A bit like this.  Yes, that's the path.

That was a couple of weeks ago... this week, it's looking more like this:

Most of the snow and ice is gone, only little bits left.  The grass somewhat amazingly hasn't died over winter, although it's looking fairly yellow in places.  We can actually utilise the full width of the path again, which is a nice change - in winter they only clear about 3/4 of a standard footpath width, so it gets a bit squashy when you're passing people and most of the time we end up walking in the calf-deep snow while some annoying women push a giant offroad baby stroller that's six times as big as it needs to be and say "like" a lot.  Hooray for spring!

The other night we invited some people over for a pie night.  It seemed like a fantastic idea at the time - everyone bring a pie to share, and we cook up and eat tasty pies and drink a few beers and chat.  After about the 4th pie, the issue became apparent - too many pies, too much sugar!  We managed to taste 6 pies, and the 7th is still sitting on my bench.  I can't look at another pie at the moment though :(

 The first two casualties - vegan apple pie and raspberry pie (which was my personal favourite of the evening).

An array of appropriate pie toppings - there's the standard vanilla ice cream, and then there's sorbet and soy ice cream for our vegan and lactose-intolerant friends, and then there's this weird thing called Cool Hwhi... I mean Cool Whip, which is apparently imitation cream - bizarre.

Finally, I had to include this picture.  I found this in the store the other day when I was looking for pinto beans, and I thought it had to be tried.  I told you Canadians put Maple Syrup on everything!

I can report that it is pretty gross - beans are not meant to be sugary sweet.

In other news, I start my new job tomorrow.  Apparently Toronto is having a bit of a shortage of UX professionals, so there was a lot out there.  I'm not sure how well I'll manage at getting up before 9am, but I guess I will have to relearn.