Another Lovely Winter Morning On Chautauqua Lake

7:32

Well, it's 7:45 and the fishermen have been out for at least an hour, like ants crawling on a white table cloth.  Off to the Southeast, the sky is streaked with pink and gray and it's warming up, a toasty 23º.  Not a good sign as we don't want it to warm up until April!

Skiing Chautauqua Country Club

Yesterday for us and most of America was football Sunday, two big games filled the screen from 3:00 to 9:30.  But the morning and early afternoon was ours to do as we liked, so we started with a rousing cross country skiing morning on the Chautauqua Golf Club's course.  We had never skied the course before and were not sure we would like it because it's so open, few wooded areas, just vast fairways of white.  But it ended up being fun and Evie especially enjoyed it because it was mostly flat with gentle slopes, no big hills to speak of.  We skied from the clubhouse to the southerly end of the course and back, following the tracks of other skiers at times.  We were the only ones on the course until we were skiing back to the clubhouse when we saw another couple snow shoeing up one of the fairways.  We loved the view, skiing with the lake off in the distance, beyond the fairways, streets, and houses of the Chautauqua Institution.  We will be back.

 Sunny At 4:00

Still There At 5:00

We skied for an hour and were home by 12:30, after stopping to talk with our neighbors, the Fox's, who were heading home, alas.  They mentioned our friend, Jerry, who dropped off a couple of bags of frozen perch for us on Friday.  We wanted to make sure the fish was not sitting out for a week.  He left a note with his phone number, so Evie texted him later in the day with a thank you.  We cannot wait to fry them up this week.

Breakfast was our typical Sunday breakfast, eggs, bacon and sesame seed bagels and we watched, what else, CBS Sunday morning, always interesting.  We then spent the rest of the day inside watching football though we regretted it as the lake was extraordinary and the fishing guys were out in full force.  Late afternoon, neighbors were out on the lake walking their dog, others were on the lake cross country skiing.  We should have been out there. We even saw what we think was either a lost dog or a coyote or fox trotting in the middle of the lake late morning.

Dog, Coyote, Or Fox

Long Point Late Afternoon

During the commercials, Evie put together our dinner, a classic go to dish which she first started making when we lived in Hawaii in 1967, chicken with artichokes and mushrooms.  The only difference between then and now: we used canned mushrooms and artichoke hearts then, fresh mushrooms and frozen artichoke hearts now.  We wanted to enjoy a glass of wine and some cheese before the sun set but the Patriots comeback and almost victory kept us in the TV room till 6:30.  We had the chicken with rice and watched some of the Panther/Cardinals game until we just got sick of watching football.  So, we watched some junk TV because not much is on Sunday night before 10:00, when I went upstairs to read.  Evie followed around 10:30.

Moonlight at 6:45 pm