A Very Early Friday Morning

7:28

It's 6:30 and I have, unfortunately, been up for an hour.  Not sure why, but here I am, listening to NPR, staring at the darkness outside our front windows, no hint of dawn yet.  It's a chilly 23º out, with some snow flakes.  We got two of three inches overnight, another couple this morning, a wet snow, the branches of our pines hanging low, caked with snow or ice.  It's not supposed to get any warmer, in fact, we may have the high of the day at the moment.

Our Squirrel Proof Feeder

I started yesterday with breakfast in Bemus, only two of us, but it's always good to get out and be part of the mostly male breakfast crowd once a week.  I usually have either a waffle or breakfast sandwich, nothing too heavy as I know I have yoga at 10:00.  We are usually there for an hour, from 8:00 to 9:00, then go our ways.  It has become part of my routine over the past four years, something I look forward to and I seem to have lots of company.

How Do I Get Out?

I remembered that yoga was at 10:00, not 9:30, so I was on time.  Class was packed, a nice sign, so that we had to move our yoga mats closer together.  It's strange that despite the fact we have almost double the area of the previous studio, it still feels crowded yet we have the same amount of people. It was me, twelve ladies, and one new guy, my age or older, who seemed to know what he was doing. I have never seen him before, but it would be nice if he became a regular or not.  I like being the only male! Since I had my fill of coffee before class, a couple of cups at home, a couple of more at the Bemus Point Inn, I skipped Ryders Cup, did not have a car appointment, and just came straight home. O, yea, I forgot. I did stop at the post office, sending off a batch of chocolate chip cookies Evie made yesterday to our grandson, Tyler, in college.  Let's hope he remembers to check his mail.  Kids these days don't know what snail mail is, at least, with email and texting, they see little need for it, for checking it. So Evie texts him...check your mail, cookies are en route.

While I was gone, Evie made a huge pot of her vegetable soup, and a leftover special for lunch, noodles, mushrooms, and anything else she could find in the refrigerator.  We watched Jon Stewart and The Nightly Show, which we are beginning to enjoy.  It had a panel which discussed the controversy surrounding the movie American Sniper; funny as well as interesting points of view.

Our afternoons do not change much, so that we did little other than read, nap or watch some TV.  It started to snow hard around 3:00, almost blizzard like though it was a wet snow because the temperatures were in the 30's.  Around 4:30, I decided I could not stay inside and watch the blizzard; I wanted to be part of it, so I put on my skis and went out on the lake to ski for a half hour.  I love it when you can hardly see, when the snow hits your face, though I could do without the wind.  It was great for a while but because of the wet snow, my skis were starting to freeze up if I paused for a moment, making it difficult to slide.  In fact, when I got off the lake, started skiing through the yards, I could not slide and had to take off my skis, the bottoms caked with an inch of frozen snow.  Still, it was worth it to be out there.

Around 6:00, it was still snowing hard when we drove over to the McClures for dinner.  We took our time as the roads were definitely slippery but had no trouble.  As usual, we had a great dinner, compliments of Linda, Greek lemon and egg soup for an appetizer, Ina Garten's roast chicken with stuffing, and roasted cabbage as a side.  It was a perfect night to be cosy inside, to enjoy a great meal and wine, to be with our good friends, as it snowed outside.  For dessert, we had a pistachio cake with whipped cream and even though we were both full from dinner, we had to have the cake.  I could barely walk out of the house at 9:40 I was so full.  Fortunately, though it was still snowing, the roads were plowed and mostly empty, so we had an uneventful drive home to Woodlawn.  It was 10:00 when we got home and read some before going up to bed.

No yoga this morning.  Our only plans are to bake some bread, then make four pounds worth of cabbage rolls for the next couple of weeks.  And we hope to get outside and do some cross country skiing, either on the lake or the trail at Webb's.  As I finish this, it's 7:00 and still dark out though I can just make out the lake surface.

It's now 8:30 and Evie, the lucky girl, is still sleeping.  It's snowing hard outside, has for most of the morning, and I have finished reading a couple extended articles, one on Tom Brady from the NYTimes , the other on Marcin Gortat, a Polish basketball player who has made it big in the NBA,
and, of course, David Brooks and Paul Krugman and Cleveland's own Connie Schultz, who is often published in the Jamestown Post Journal. Now I am ready for a nap.