Hello Orkney Affectionados, on this wonderful site: I took a few days in our near North, in fact on the world's largest freshwater island, to walk in the woods and hike along the winter shores. Migrating waterfowl were splendid; black ducks, buffleheads and others, and I saw at least a hundred deer, some of which involved very close encounters. I flushed a huge covey of sharptail grouse. My faithful, resting navy blue Volvo received a snow white arial bombardment from a huge bald eagle who perhaps didn't enjoy having his solitude shared with a featherless two-legged intruder, and wrote with unbridled enthusiasm his big note of protest in lumpy gooey quickly frozen circles on the car roof, perhaps to suggest I park in a less offensive location next time. We ate some some mouth-watering fresh whitefish and homemade blueberry pie at the rustic kitchen of Mme Benoit, who at just 70 years lives an hour from the closest village. Shuffling along the rocky shores, I thought of Orkney. Offshore from where I was treking, headlong into that raw north-west wind with no buildings visible anywhere along the distant North Shore, I was reminded that this rugged historic waterway looks today exactly as it did when our Orcadian relatives once paddled by that very place in their colourful birch bark Montreal canoes, daydreaming about their croft and loved ones. I was reminded of that rocky shore outside Finstown where my family lived, learned and loved for all those years. A local Orkney artist recently painted that place for us, and we just received her artpiece a few weeks back in the mail. In order to make a copy for a couple of people in Orkney, which we were thankfully permitted so to do, the work was scanned and compressed onto a transferrable cd format. After the flurry of recent weeks on this site, from lots of people who never volunteered a solitary peep in the last six months, we were all able to confirm that this site we cherish is alive and well, deep and widespread across our shrinking choking planet, and reactive as a horse's tail in fly season, in varying degrees of passion depending on the topic of the day. Criticisms of topics acknowledged and notwithstanding, I agreed with those who enjoyed the awakening. I feel the site that I have observed for quite some time, went through a confirmation and verification of who and what the subscribers are. Hats off to Sig. Thanks for your tolerance and the opportunity you have given to all of us. Therefore, to my point, should any one of you wish by chance to see-to in fact experience visibly- where the typical passion comes from that many of we distant offshore and long-ago-exited enthusiastic Orcadian families express on this site, I would be only too thrilled to share and to e-mail to any of you the new painting of our old stone croft, up off the rocky shoreline, on a awe-inspiring Orkney day. The Kirkwall native artist created a wonderful message and mood and statement that will endure. Hasta Luego Amigos: Stephen