Sleeping In

7:20

7:20

Both Evie and I slept in, till 7:15, and it felt good to get an extra hour of sleep.  It's cold out, 14º and we had three or four inches of  snow overnight so that everything is white once again, even the grass in our front yard.  Not much action on the lake the last day or two.  I wonder if it's still wet and slush beneath the snow, which would not be good for cross country skiing.  By the way, our boiler/furnace is working once again.  Our plumber spent a couple of hours here, yesterday, changing the Taco pump and Aquastat, which controls the water temperature. We worry what would have happened if we had not been at home.

So yesterday morning was spent with our plumber, watching him fuss with the boiler, talking with him about the problems many residents have had this winter because of the polar temperatures.  Lots of busted pipes, destroyed walls, things like that which keep the plumbers in the area busy.  I guess we have been lucky, to have been here when the problem started, to have gotten someone over immediately.

The rest of the day was lost for some reason; neither one of us felt energetic, just happy to be in a warm house once again, boiler functioning, and it was lovely out, large snow flakes falling on and off most of the afternoon.  It was so lovely that I walked up to the main road, via Kinney's trail but of course, it stopped snowing until I started back.  Both Evie and I have this thing about skiing or hiking when its snowing out.  It's our favorite weather for a walk, as long as the temperatures are not in single digits. Yesterday was perfect out.

We had a leisurely pre dinner glass of wine, munching on one of our favorite snacks from Turkey, hazelnuts with raisins. It was snowing so hard at this hour that we couldn't see Long Point, though we were able to make out a single guy fishing at that late hour, For dinner, we had pork schnitzel, with baked sweet potatoes and asparagus.  Just put a dab of butter on the schnitzel, squeeze some lemon and you have something just as good as you  could find in Vienna, the first place we had schnitzel, probably in the summer of 1971.

A Smudge of Gray

We watched a couple of more episodes of House of Cards, then some of American Idol from last week, catching up the episodes.  I am reading a new book, Quiet Dell, by Jayne Anne Phillips, who wrote Lark and Termite, which I read three years ago but do not remember much about it.  Fortunately, I reviewed it so I was able to go on my blog and read my review.  This novel recreates a true crime story, the murders of a family of four, by a serial killer in West Virginia.  Phillips combines the facts, articles from the papers of 1931, the journals and diaries, with fiction, to make a compelling read.