Weekending

and then there were two..

It was a beautiful but chilly weekend with temps topping at 26F.  I spent most of it outdoors.  I took walks in the woods, stacked two weeks worth of firewood on the porch and scouted out the beaver ‘lodge’.  We made pizza on the grill. 

Friday we prepped the ice for a Saturday game with friends. Mother Nature had other plans. By the time Saturday afternoon rolled around, the ice had magically acquired a very slick new surface, making it impossible to stay upright. 

So, we shoveled another.  

If you haven’t watched Bridgerton, the costumes are amazing! 

Friday’s Photo

frozen and shoveled again..

we played until our fingers and toes were too cold to continue.

My Neck of the Woods

It’s not the end of the day, I fear what is still to come. It has already lead us to a place that I can only hope is the bottom from which we’ll begin to climb.  

But.. I’ve promised myself to focus only on what has been going on here, in my neck of the woods.

Last year, almost as a joke, we started shoveling an area of the pond to be our bocce court.  Bocce on ice has very few rules.  Stay on the ice, The closest balls of one color to the pig get points.  Play until you are tired of it. The court is as big as I can shovel, usually in the 20 x 60 ft range, but whatever.  It changes as we ‘clean up the edges’.

Sunday, because we had invited friends to come play, we decided to check the thickness of the ice. A four inch deep hole was drilled using a 1/2” bit.  All good.  Except.. water began to bubble up from the hole, faster and faster, until one end of the court was covered.  By the next morning (no, we didn’t play), the entire court was flooded from this tiny hole and it was breaching the snow pile sides.  

This morning I walked down, looks frozen to me.  I’m baffled as to why that happened.  I’ve always believed that there was an air layer under the ice.  This was  water under pressure.  So far friends have weighed in with, ‘the ice layer dropped’, ‘there was a gravitational shift’, ‘full moon tide’, there’s to much water in the pond’ and my own, the beaver did it.  Any ideas? 

Today is the day I begin to wonder if I should take down my little decorated tree. Once again, I’m thinking of leaving it up, with only birds and lights until we start forgetting it is there.  The days may be getting longer, but it is pretty hard to tell. Sparkling lights are pretty nice on a dark night. Knitting the little birds has been a lot of fun.  I’m not done with them yet. It surprised me that I didn’t have many little balls of leftover dk yarn and none in bright colors. How can it possibly be that I’m almost out of yarn. Me..?

So, be kind and remember that we are all in this together. Let’s hope we can hold ourselves together as a country, get everyone vaccinated and come to our senses. And, let’s not stop there.  I think a glass of wine is in order.  

 

Weekending.. the New Year

 

 

 

(The post I had written has automatically deleted itself twice.  I'm taking that as a sign.)

Walk With Me Wednesday

Umm.. Huh?  It’s morning, it’s winter.. there are all kinds of walks.

Today’s new word.. ‘nose gun’.

As in ‘I don’t know if I have a nose gun.  My last one came with one’.

This prompts me to look up.  ‘What the hell is a nose gun?’ I ask. He has come downstairs with the manual for his new chainsaw and now sits at the table with it open in front of him. I now know that it is part of whatever is needed to grease the nose. Why would he need another.. do nose guns come in different sizes? Do they need to be reloaded? If so, how do you do it? So many questions and I’m still drinking coffee.

Ten minutes before, he’d asked me, ‘Did you know that if you use the bidet before you pump the water in the morning, your asshole doesn’t slam shut’? (We pump our water from a very cold, very deep well to a cistern.)  Why yes, as a matter of fact, I did know that.

Willy knows when it is too cold to go out without me opening the door to illustrate.  HE JUST KNOWS.  Certainly, he is able to jump up onto the counter where the thermometer sits, but I have yet to teach him how to read it. I’ve decided I need to keep a record of his temperature choices. Apparently, yesterday’s 12 degrees was too cold, but today’s 18 (with feel like 12 degree) is borderline acceptable.  Umm.. Huh?

 

Weekending

 

I hope you’ve enjoyed your holidays in the best way possible.  If nothing else, I hope you spent a relaxed few days doing something you enjoyed.  It has been such an odd time. My sense of days has been all mixed up.  Friday felt like Saturday, Saturday like Sunday and Sunday morning was, I’m not sure.  I had Monday chores on my mind but I felt like I was beginning the weekend all over again.  Even the weather was confusing.  It snowed, I shoveled, then it rained for 24 hrs and absolutely everything melted. The frozen pond had icy waves blowing across it.  The temps dropped, it snowed again, and winter may have returned.  

Thursday evening I cast on stitches for a little knitted bird.  Friday, I did another.  Saturday, I knit a blue one. Sunday a pale turquoise bird began to take shape. They are great fun and very fast to knit.  I’ve gathered some small branches that blew down from my big old yellow birch for them to hang from when a Christmas tree won’t do any longer.  The pattern calls for dk or worsted weight yarn.  Just scraps.  Curiously, I don’t have much in that weight.  I may have to spin some up to feed my current obsession.  

This week will be full of end of year paperwork and finishing projects that I don’t want to carry into a new year. And, there will be more birds.

Walk With Me Wednesday

There are times when I need to intentionally help myself put my emotions into perspective.  Usually a good long walk helps. I can almost always find solace in the woods.  Acceptance and significance can require a bit more. I need big. The vastness of a dark starry sky, the mountains in the distance, the endless horizon of the desert, and especially for me, the ocean.  The only thing I can honestly say I crave when I am in the hills, is the sea.  

Last weekend we went for a good long walk along the shore. The air, the sound of the waves..

..what’s left behind.  I wonder where this log traveled from, what land did it shade?

We can guess what’s around the corner, but never be sure.  They say we’re in for a snow storm.  The first big one of the season.  High winds, blizzard conditions.  Beauty and a lot of clean up.  Don’t blow away.