A Few Shades Of Gray

7:55

I have been up since 6:30, sitting in the darkness of our living room.  At the moment, it's 7:10 and I can just make out the shape of our trees, all else is a blanket of fog, no lake or Long Point visible.  It's 34º, may get up to the 40º and I wonder if it will be warm enough to melt the snow.  Probably not.

Yesterday was much like Saturday though for Evie, it was a busy day.  Neither one of us thought it would be a good idea to walk the Chautauqua Institution because the roads would be icy.  So we had a leisurely morning, drinking coffee, listening to NPR, no hurrying off to yoga for me.  We were, however, having neighbors over for dinner and we needed a few things from Wegman's so I drove their late morning, stopped at Ryders for a coffee, then did some quick shopping, packing up a couple of bags of food.  The store was surprisingly crowded, perhaps the church crowd after a service.

When I got home, Evie has already made a couple of batches of gingerbread cookies, and the kitchen smelled like Christmas. Once they were all out of the oven and cooling, she made our breakfast, the Sunday special, eggs, bagels and three pieces of bacon, no more.  We finished just in time  for NFL football but to my dismay, the Browns game, the debut of Johnny touchdown, was not on TV, a good thing because the Browns lost 30-0 and Johnny had a miserable day.  Go Browns.  So while I watched some of the Bills/Packers game, Evie worked in the kitchen, putting together of our dinner, listening to Jimmy Donovan narrate the Browns dismal loss.  I also was finally able to clear our stoop and walk way of ice, after five days.

Dinner With Maryanne and John Johnston

At 5:30, after showers, setting the table,  getting appetizers and drinks ready, our neighbors, John and Maryanne Johnston came over for a Sunday dinner.  They are acquaintances, neighbors we have known and seen off and on for thirty years but have never gotten together.  Their sons, when they were in high school and college, put in and took out our docks, helped with yard work, things like that and were great kids.  So we have known them and their family and decided, after years of saying we ought to have them over for dinner some time, we did it.  Both, like us, are now retired, Maryanne just four months ago.  We had a really nice evening with them, as we regaled them with our exotic life in Hawaii, then Turkey---just kidding.  They were both originally from Erie, moved to their home on the lake about the same time we bought our home in 1981.  Back in 1978, they had backpacked through Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy, and Austria, so we had fun talking about places we both had visited. And their daughter Julia had just returned from a trip to Istanbul as well as other European countries, so they enjoyed learning about our lives in Istanbul.  Dinner was one of our favorites and they seemed to really like it as well, Greek lemon chicken, brown rice, garlic spinach, pumpkin roles and a great salad with a new dressing, one we all liked so much that they reminded us when they left to send them the the recipe.  It has tahini, apple cider vinegar, siracha, oil, ginger, garlic to name a few of the ingredients and was really different but good.  The salad also had thinly sliced fennel and asian pear.

After dinner, we sat in front of the fire,  Maryanne had made an apple pie, so we had it with a dollop of ice cream.  I also made some Turkish tea which John really liked and I showed him how Turks make their tea in a samovar.  It was a fun evening and we really enjoyed getting to know them better. We then took about twenty minutes to do up the dishes and clean the kitchen so we did not have much of a mess to wake up to this morning.

Its now 7:30, the sun supposedly has risen though I still can only see our trees, the lake hidden by fog, the flag flaccid, not a whiff of wind.