Blue Skies, Nothing But Blue Skies

6:37

7:08

708

7:22

I woke early, at 6:20, as our bedroom was beginning to fill with light.  The lake has been immaculate all morning, motionless, smooth, calm, with occasional scribbles from the buffleheads landing, diving and squabbling.  It's chilly, 32º, but will warm up later to 50º,  a good day ahead of us, perhaps a walk on Lake Erie's Barcelona beach and breakfast at Jack's Barcelona Drive Inn.

We had our usual Saturday morning of listening to NPR, then cleaning up the kitchen, emptying the refrigerator, so that I could take the trash to the Transfer Station which, as I think about it, is the only essential thing I have to do each week.  We then sat around trying to figure out what to do with the day and settled on driving into Jamestown to attend the Home and Garden Show in the Ice Arena.

Jamestown Home And Garden Show

We had gone a couple of years ago and it was pretty lame.  This year, however, it had expanded enormously so we were pleasantly surprised and enjoyed browsing and talking with all the vendors of everything having to do with gardening, as well as many other items for the home.  We stayed for an hour, eventually left and stopped at Wegman's on our way home to stock up on a few things for dinners this coming week.  It was Saturday so it was crowded with everyone like us, packing in the groceries.

Clearing Up

We had a late lunch, around 2:00, of soup and a leftover Cuban from Wednesday night, still tasty.  We then watched the taped end of the UConn women's loss to Mississippi State, a thriller.  The rest of the afternoon Evie spent either prepping our dinner of scallops with pasta or waited with me for the NCAA games to start at 6:10.

Buffleheads

We also took time out from prepping or watching TV to enjoy watching a raft of buffleheads play in front of our house for some reason.  They would dive, skitter along, and peck at each other for hours. We had a hard time figuring out with certainty whether they were buffleheads or hooded mergansers so we got out two bird books, consulted iBird Pro on Evie's iPad and decided they were buffleheads, as we thought.

Bufflehead

Of course, I was able to get in a good nap, some reading and we put off watching the first game until 7:00, so we could avoid the commercials.  Dinner was exceptional, asparagus, scallops, pasta, sour dough rolls and salad.  And we watched Real Time With Bill Maher between games so we could avoid the commercials in the second game.  We have it down pretty well.  Both games were exciting though neither of the four teams played particularly well and the best players for both South Carolina and Oregon had poor shooting games, scoring way below their average.   Clearly, teams that shoot well win these big games.  I stayed up till the very end but Evie packed it in early.  She had been a bit depressed because she was supposed to be in Phoenix with her sisters celebrating her sister Jean's 70th birthday but because of her TMJ, she was advised by the doctors to avoid flying.  So she had to spend the weekend with me, watching basketball, a bummer no doubt.