Woodsman no.2 arrived yesterday punctual to the minute. This is the cheerful guy from the excellent but pricey company I've used before. He opines that my cherry is quite healthy, a relief, because I keep expecting they who know to say, 'That tree is about to collapse any minute, cut it down at once!' Nor did he mention the moss on the thing and I didn't ask, but noticed Prof Islamic Studies' magnolia is equally green about the gills. Ran into Prof himself yesterday when returning, wet, from the super where I'd foolishly gone in just a fleece jacket without my rain cape. Prof was being miserably cold in the springlike 12C of y'day: twenty plus years here have not yet acclimatised him to TO anythings but the most unbearable depths of summer. But he is quite willing to assemble my branch trimmer for me.

We're having a by-election mid-April and I have heard diddly about it bar one or two election signs on the street. The Liberals contacted me about putting up a sign on my property back when the snow was piled a metre high there. They contacted me again when it melted and I said, yeah sure put it up, but since then it's been crickets. Rather like the tree companies, in fact. Today finally I get my notice of where to vote delivered in the mail,  barely two weeks before the advanced polls. I assume this low-key approach has something to do with an expectation that we'll remain firmly Liberal: the Cons aren't even running a candidate. The threat from the south being exactly as it was a year ago, people will go for the competent devil we know over any alternative. It still amuses me when bots and trolls on FB insist that Carney is the face of a communist conspiracy intent on ruining Canada but there are educational failures here as well as in the US.

Stayed up late reading Poirot fanfic, The Monogram Murders, which, well. Poirot wants to find a girl he believes is in danger. How does he do this? He gets on a bus, of course! and looks out the windows hoping to catch a glimpse of her on the streets of London. Does he have any reason to think she's even in the neighbourhood? No, but he still gets on the bus. To put it no stronger, this is not the Poirot I know. And if it's just the narrator who thinks that the reason he's looking out the window is to find the girl, and not merely to look at the scenery, then the narrator needs to resign his position at Scotland Yard, because that's a ridiculous way for an inspector to think.