Every Day Is Exactly the Same

Up at 5:30 to a pitch black house, just like yesterday, and it was 18 degrees outside, about two inches of snow fell overnight, I lit the fireplace to warm the house up, made the coffee, took my sour dough starter out of the fridge, to ready it for bread, turned on the radio to NPR, sat down on the couch, got out my computer, and my day begins.  It's now 7:00, the sky is beginning to lighten over Bemus, with a long thin  but thick bank of clouds over Bemus, above it a slight rose tint moving up towards a clear, blue sky. I do love the lake at this time of year, covered with snow, always an interesting hue in at dawn or dusk, today a gray tinged with a white paste.  It looks like a good day.

We went over to Stan and Anne Marshaus's home last night for a Miami University gathering as they were playing in the GODADDY Bowl.  We spent most of the evening talking with Stan's high school neighbors, Tom and Lola, he's a retired post man from Perry, Ohio, and quite a talker.  I asked him about the post office and got quite an insight into how inefficient and screwed up it was, a typical analysis of any retiree about the job they have just left.  All of us look back at our work and see mostly the bad rather the good of the job, how things are not like they used to be, how people have changed, how inefficient things have become.  I remember hearing it from the older faculty from Reserve when they retired, and now I hear myself saying the same things, though I try to avoid it.  I not sure what this says about us, the retirees, jobs in general, or it's just the arc of life and work, from innocence and excitement, to experience and disgust or apathy at change, the inevitable part of any experience.

It's now 8:40, the bread is rising in the hot room, I have taken a couple of pictures as the sun was rising, those above, and the temperature has dropped from 19 when we got up to about 8 degrees right now.  We are hoping to snow shoe at Long Point this morning but we are going to wait for it to warm up a bit or, if it doesn't, Evie will go work out at the Turner Center.

It's almost 11:00 and we are going off to Long Point to snow shoe.  I have downloaded all the past month's pictures to Picasa and saved the albums on my external hard drive, just to be safe.  Lots of little things fill one's day, as I have been busy since 8:00 and, by the way, the bread is shaped, sitting in the hot room till after our walk.

We had an amazing walk through Long Point Park, with a few cross country skiers.  There was little wind, the sun was out, the trees were decorated with drifts of snow, especially the evergreens, and it was just good to be outside, enjoying the natural world, the crisp air, the blue sky through the barren tree branches, the groomed trails, the feeling of doing something physical that's also good for you.  I want to go back tomorrow and cross country ski.

While Evie  got things ready for our dinner with the Cassells, I got the Apple TV set up after a few wrong turns.  Inevitably, it worked out so I can now spend even more time in front of our LED TV.  Finally, the birds have returned to the feeder.  Because we were gone for a couple of weeks, they ate till it was empty, then moved on to other sites.  When we returned, I filled it and it has taken two days before they have rediscovered the filled feeder, and now they broadcasting it, so more and more are returning, mostly chickadees so far.