Winnipeg, which has had above-average temperatures for the past few weeks, has had the blanked yanked off Wednesday when I set out to walk the dog and donned two sweaters instead of sunscreen. Sitting at a desk in cool weather doesn't feel like a deprivation compared to those days when you could be comfortable reading outside in the shade.

1. Eating

We had visitors last Sunday and served BBQ pork tenderloin with potato salad. I was determined to try “Ottolenghi's Beyond Potato Salad” and our guest took one bite and said that it tasted like summer. It was delicious! I have just the tiniest quibble on the amount of tarragon recommended... The recipe asks for 30g, which, I feel might be fine if you have a tarragon bush or two in the backyard. But here, we find fresh herbs at the supermarket packaged neatly in rectangular plastic containers. At about 9g of tarragon I got impatient. The salad was still perfectly tasty.

2. Pa on Father’s Day

Warm weather brings with it surreptitiously placed painted rocks (#WinnipegRocks), in grass, on stumps, under benches... The kids collect them like art enthusiasts... but not this one. This one, titled Irish cottage, brought home by my husband, I kept for myself because it made me think of my dad.

College-aged, he took a trip to Europe with a friend, meeting up with acquaintances, hitting tourist spots, staying in hostels sometimes and keeping a tiny spiral-bound notebook with short sentences of the days' highlights and impressions. He spent a few weeks in Ireland and then went to France. He wrote "France is very flat – red soil and many trees." (It made me smile, reading A Writer's Diary, that Virginia Woolf too called it a "flat country" in 1928.) My dad took a few pictures on the trip, a pittance by today's standards, but three of them feature this cottage with its white exterior walls and flowering bushes...

3. The view this week was smoky

Just a bit, not too much...

Psst... There won't be any blog post next Friday... I'm away from my desk, but wishing you well! Back on top by the 30th. Cheers!