A Tuesday Afternoon In Buffalo

7:35

I prefer winter and fall, when you can feel the bone structure in the landscape - the loneliness of it - the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show. ― Andrew Wyeth



It's 7:00 and I have been up for a half an hour; the darkness is beginning to recede so I can make out the lake surface, the flag moving, though it's mostly gray out at the moment.  It's 22º, a few flurries forecast, a few tents already out on the ice.

Long Point, A Fixture From Our Porch

Yesterday was in the 20's most of the day.  I went to yoga at 9:30, as usual, had a coffee, stopped at the bank, then hit TJ's to see if I could find a deal.  I did, a pair of running pants for twenty bucks.  While I was at yoga, Evie went shopping at both Sam's and Wegman's, a big shopping day because our twenty-one year old niece, Leah, who lives in Reno, Nevada, will be coming to stay with us till Sunday.  She just graduated from college in December and is taking a couple of months off to enjoy herself.  She spent the past five days in Chicago with Evie's sister, Elaine, now five more with us before flying back to Nevada.  

While Evie shopped, I had lunch, pizza and cauliflower soup and indulged my guilty pleasure, watching Banshee for an hour.  Great show, lots of violence and sex, geared, obviously, for real men not Snags, like me.  Evie returned around 2:00, weighed down with bags of groceries.  I helped carry them in, then went back to the last few minutes of Banshee...don't want to miss a minute of violence, for sure.  

Cross Country Skiing With The Fishing Guys

I then read some, made a cup of 'good coffee,' with Peats coffee, from San Francisco; it definitely has a distinct aroma, different from our usual Folgers. Around 4:30, I went out and cross country skied in the woods and on the lake for an hour.  I fell a couple of times for some reason, perhaps because I was bush whacking in the woods, making trails and realized how easy it is to fall, how difficult to get up with skis on .  The lake, despite the thaw the past couple of days, was good for skiing so I look forward to be out there with my niece when she arrives later today.

We had a dinner of leftovers, schnitzel, potatoes, cauliflower and salad and discovered that since we were members of Amazon Prime, we could watch the last two episodes of Season 1 of the Americans free.  We opened Apple TV, then Evie switched on her Ipad, opened the Amazon app, and we were able to watch The Americans on our TV.  Ain't technology amazing.  It was a tension filled ending, as we both were on the edge of our seats, wondering if the Russian plants were finally going to be caught...of course not, Season 3 starts in a week!

Yoga this morning, then a drive to Buffalo, with a stop at the Apple Store at the Galleria Mall before picking our niece up at the airport at 4:15.  We should be home just as it gets dark, around 6:00 we hope and it looks like decent weather both going and coming.  

Tonight we will listen to the State of The Union Speech, usually a bore.  The Writer's Almanac had an excerpt from FDR's State of the Union in 1937 and I thought it was interesting and worth quoting as little seems to change:

FDR's second inaugural, and in his address he examined the progress the nation had made in the intervening four years. He said: "Have we reached the goal of our vision of that fourth day of March 1933? Have we found our happy valley? I see a great nation, upon a great continent, blessed with a great wealth of natural resources [...] I see a United States which can demonstrate that, under democratic methods of government, national wealth can be translated into a spreading volume of human comforts hitherto unknown [...] But here is the challenge to our democracy: In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens [...] who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life [...] The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."