A Thick Blanket of Fog and a Frosty Morning (Millers)

Sun Rising Over Fog at 7:00

An Elderly Couples Cute Cottage

A Happy Girl

Rhubarb and Raspberry Pies

Busy Ovens

The Bakers Putting Together Their Pies

Evie and our Neighbor, Mary Ann Miller

Up a bit late, 6:30 to frosty morning, lots of fog, car windows with a layer of ice.  As I write this, the sun has just broke over the top of the fog, blinding me, making me move my seat.  I have already been up twice to chase the squirrel away from our bird feeder.  He gets to it by climbing up the gutter, then dropping down to the feeder.  Problems.

Yesterday, I went to yoga at 9:30, quite crowded and much more difficult than usual, as many of the group complained, good naturedly, about the rigorous positions.  I did not smell of garlic and onions.  When I returned home, Evie was ready for our walk, so we took off on a partly cloudy morning to enjoy Westfield, about 15 miles away.  I wanted to go to the library to get a book of James Dickey poems, recommended by Pat Conroy in his book My Reading Life.  He felt he was the great American poet; I doubt it having read some of them.  We also had heard about a new pie shop in Westfield, a mom and pop hole in the wall, just beyond the shoe repair store. Well, we found it, a small run down house, went in and found the bakers, a husband and wife, busy cutting up peaches and layering pie crusts over the filling.  There kitchen, as you can see, was tiny, with three used ovens, and between the two of them, they bake pies on Thursday through Saturday, from 9:00 to 2:00 we think.  We talked to them briefly, friendly but busy, took some pictures and bought one of the only pies left, a raspberry pie for 15 bucks, no cheap pies there. They also make sticky buns, a favorite it sounds like. When possible, they use fresh fruit but the raspberries were, of course, frozen.  The rhubarb, however, was from their garden. The baker asked me to go to their Facebook page and 'like' them, which I did.  A type of hype for their business.

When we got home, Evie asked our neighbors, Mary Anne Miller and her son Tom over for dinner.  So she spent a good part of the afternoon getting our dinner ready, chicken picata, salad, rice, and broccoli.  We had dessert of course.  They came over about 6:00, had kashar peynir, a Turkish cheese, for an appetizer, then a great dinner.  All was eaten, no left overs for my lunch, alas.  We enjoyed them, lots of stories about Penn State where they live and Mary Ann's brother is the AD just for football, so they have been very close to the scandal.  Tom, the son, is a real sports aficionado, knows lots of football, loves the game, the players and coaches.  He always seems to be working, a day job, then either teaching snow skiing in the evening, or golf in the spring.  They left about 9:00 as they had been up since 6:00, spending much of the morning working on clearing the downed trees branch in their yard.

After they left, we watched the Press Correspondents dinner on C-Span.  Obama was very funny, as usual, Jimmy Kimmel less so though we did enjoy the fact that he made fun of everyone, from Obama, to Clinton, to Newt, to Romney, even the press.  It's fun to see people laugh at themselves, or at least look 'like' they are laughing at themselves.  With Newt, it was hard to tell.

Since it's a lovely morning, we are breaking our Sunday routine of a walk at CI, then my favorite breakfast of bacon, eggs, and toast and are heading off to the Allegheny State Forest, about 30 miles away, for a nice three or four mile hike, depending on which trail we decide to take.