Snow Bound Days

8:30

I was not up till 6:30, sleeping in for me lately.  The house seemed chilly when I got up so I turned on our gas fireplace (a great invention), got my coffee, turned on MSNBC and got my computer to catch up on the latest repetitive news.  I expected more guys to be out fishing but at the moment, 8:00, a solitary figure sits out mid-lake.  It's still dangerously cold, 11º and may not get much warmer for the rest of the week.

Group Huddle

We had a quiet, unexciting New Year's Day, just the two of us, a good time to ponder the past year, the solitude of being snow bound.  I am already tired of being housebound, like some Arctic scientist, at the North Pole, chained inside by the cold weather.  The cold weather is not all to blame as neither Evie nor I have felt like snowshoeing or cross-country skiing.  In fact, we have yet to get the shoes or skis out of the attic.  Perhaps today's the day.  So we hung out yesterday, thinking about doing something, like walking the Chautauqua Institution but by the time we got around to doing it, we decided to pass as the wind had picked up and neither of us really wanting to get out in the cold.

Around noon, after a leisurely morning, I went out and cleaned off the car, again, and shoveled around five inches of snow off our parking area.  I have to admit it felt good to be outside and it was not that cold because the wind had abated for a bit.  When I got in, I warmed up the baked potato soup for lunch, added some ham and cheese and had a tasty lunch. Just as I finished, our neighbor, Nancy, stopped by with a gift, a calendar they made of monthly sunrises photographs taken from their cottage.  How cool, how nice. 

Early afternoon, Evie got busy in the kitchen and put together our dinner, one we both looked forward to, not the usual New Year's Day dinner of pork and sauerkraut, but a pot roast, with lots of vegetables.  The beauty of a pot roast on a day where we stayed in was that the house was filled with the aroma of the cooking pot roast.  I managed to get a nap in mid afternoon and both Evie and I watched some TV and did some reading, waiting for dinner time.

Around 5:00, Evie decided some buttermilk biscuits would be good with our pot roast, so she quickly put flour, butter, and buttermilk together, cut out the biscuits and baked them.  It was a good choice as I could have just had them with just the pot roast gravy and been happy.  We were not sure what to watch on TV after the first quarter of the Rose Bowl game, so we decided on BROADCHURCH, a series we were midway through.  Well, we really got into it, watched the final four episodes and finished bereft, empty emotionally.  The series, each of the characters, really pulled us in, more than most.  By the end, we empathized with four or five characters and the acting was so real we felt we were actually participants in the drama.  This was the third season, equal if not better than the first two.