A Slow Melt Sunday

7:25

Long Point, 7:45

Frozen Pines

More Pines

It's 8:15, and I have been up for almost an hour.  Nothing but gray outside, lake and sky, with a patch of white snow where a couple of farms sit above Bemus. The lake is wrinkled, the ice on the trees has melted, our white, snow covered lawn is covered with branches and twigs.  It's a balmy 36º out,  a light wind, with perhaps some drizzle and fog during the day.

Yesterday, we had a weather alert for the morning and part of the afternoon because of freezing rain and icy roads.  When I headed to yoga at 8:45, it was foggy, with some drizzle but fortunately it did not seem to be freezing.  A good class, with three or four new students which makes me wonder where they come from? Perhaps students on winter break or just home for the holidays.  When I got home, I was anxious to take the trash to the Transfer Station before the roads got worse.  So I was ensconced on the couch by 12:30, ready for an another afternoon in our cozy home.  I had a lunch of soup and a burrito, Mexican/Indian fusion, and I watched a few minutes of the Kentucky/North Carolina basketball game.  It's hard to get interested in college basketball anymore because the teams change so much from year to year, as the good players leave after a year, and the viewer ends up having little interest in the games.

Evie and I then spent the rest of the afternoon listening to music, as Evie searched Pandora, making up music lists so that we could play a nice mix of various genres when we wanted.  Evie loves her Sonos which allows us to play almost anything through the system, from Pandora to Sirius, to almost any radio station in the world, to my music library.  And speaking of my music library,  where all my CD's have been downloaded to iTunes, my iPod and Sonos over the years, I have been unable to access the library on Sonos since I downloaded the new Maverick update from Apple.  So I called my son in law, Ramiro, who is pretty good at trouble shooting things like this.  He helped me reset some of the preferences and within five minutes, I was able to access the library.

Late afternoon, I was tempted to go out for a walk but it was still too icy on the roads, crunchy on the snow, so I stayed in and read my book, An Amateur Spy, decent not great. And, like Evie, I worked up a list of interesting radio shows that have podcasts which allow us to listen to them anytime we want.  This morning, I listened to the Wall Street Journal's film critic review the new Chris Rock movie, five minutes long, then I listened to a half hour discussion of the New York Times Top Ten Books of The Year by their book critics, quite interesting and fun to listen to others talk about books I have read, books I want to read.

We sat down and relaxed around 5:30 for an hour, listening to Garrison Keeler, having a couple of glasses of wine and Evie's favorite, Utz potato chips.  Dinner was already made, my sister Linda's sloppy joes,  so all Evie had to do was heat the buns and we had a tasty, easy dinner, Sloppy Joes with pickles to set off the Joes. Yum. We watched some cooking shows, what else is there on TV on a Saturday night and another episode of Last Tango in Halifax, a British series.  We miss much of the dialogue because of the accent but understand enough to enjoy it.

We went to bed around 11:00, to sounds of ice cracking, falling on to the ground in crystals, like large, icy snow flakes, something neither one of us have seen before the past couple of days living in this kingdom of ice.  Much of it should melt in the next couple of days as the temperatures get into the forties by Wednesday and I will be out raking twigs.