What, more snow?

Not much to report here this week.  We had to scrap our plans of walking in the Peak District due to weather.  Despite the calendar saying it's officially Spring, we got a nice dump of snow on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  My patience is wearing thin.  As a colleague (co-worker) says "I am starting to have a sense of humor failure" about this.


I don't have official statistics to back me up, but I believe it has been colder in March on average than December or January this year.  Enough already.  I'm guessing we had 5-6" all together.  Fortunately, they did a decent job with the roads since it was only a few degrees below zero.  I'll give them that.  However, I don't think we would have been able to drive to the Peak District, much less walk in it this time.  Oh well.

Here's one of the front, albeit with the auto-focus set too close.  You get the picture.

I used the down time to put the final touches on our upcoming Easter trip as well as book accommodation for our October trip to Spain (!).  I've got one 3-day weekend left to plan then I'll be pretty well done except for the details.  What am I going to do?

We did manage to get out with friends this weekend.  On Saturday, the Seppanens were gracious enough to host us (thanks guys).  Today we had our semi-regular ex-pat gathering at the Bull's Head in Repton.  Fun as usual.

Quick digression since Easter is coming soon.  We are pretty much past the egg dying stage but Alex has a project due tomorrow that involves eggs (Eggstraterrestrial Egg Competition) so I had to go out an buy some dye.

Then I thought, all the eggs are brown here, what do the kids do?  Why are there brown eggs and white eggs?  I'm not exactly a farm boy so I had to do some research to find out.

Back in the good ole USA, most eggs are white.  In fact, you get the privilege of paying extra for brown eggs (some think they are better).  Turns out, white chickens lay white eggs and brown (red) chickens lay brown eggs.  Huh, who knew.

And the reason the brown eggs cost more?  They are bigger chickens!  (that eat more).  That and the fact that suckers will pay more for them.

Back in the day, the only brown eggs (in the US) would have been organic and fed a special feed so they could very well have tasted different (and been "better").  But big business has caught on and they are mass produced (and fed the same), so don't pay more for brown eggs today!

But here?  No choice -- pretty much nothing but brown.  I happened to be at Costco today and noticed that they sold (white) duck eggs.  Who knows what they taste like, but we'll try it (and dye a few).  The photo above shows the color and size difference as well as my long term dying experiment (3+ hrs while we were at dinner).  Not sure about the results--perhaps a little too long in the solution.  Hopefully it fits the bill for his project.

Okay, I've either provided you with an interesting nugget or bored you to death.  No blog next week as we are traveling.  Have a good one everybody.