Here Comes The Sun

6:57

7:37

7:51

7:51

7:52

7:59

It's a spectacular morning here at the lake, as I have been sitting here with my coffee, waiting for the sun to rise on a brilliant blue sky.  It's exceptionally cold, below zero in fact, but it did not deter the fishermen who are out in full force (at least 24 huts at 8:00.  They, too, must have been thrilled by the morning sunshine, the spectacular sky.

Fishing Huts Abound

Yesterday was not the usual Saturday, as Evie, not me, gathered the trash and made the run to the Transfer Station with temperatures in single digits as I sat home reading, occasionally coughing, wishing I could be outside and do something rather than sit around.  I am still fast into my Jack Reacher novel and we both took time out in the morning and watched a movie, feeling guilty about it of course.  Lunch was more chicken, lemon and rice soup, the third day in a row but it tastes so healthy and good that I don't mind.

A Nasty Afternoon On Long Point

While I took another nap around 2:00, Evie began prepping our dinner, pork tenderloin medallions in a tasty sauce.  She likes to have everything ready to go by the time she is ready to start cooking. It was a nasty afternoon, of heavy winds, snow flurries, and gray skies.  Around 5:00, we saw our first snowmobiles on the lake in a couple of years, brave souls racing from Bemus north on the lake.

Snowmobiles

Lights On

We both were looking forward to the Kansas City Chiefs game at 4:30 and by halftime, the Chiefs were comfortably ahead, so we decided to have dinner and watch the first few episodes of Season Four of A PLACE TO CALL HOME our soap opera obsession.  Our dinner was great, the pork tenderloin, with brown rice and my favorite, roasted Brussel sprouts. We planned on watching only three but the third episode left us hanging so we had to watch the fourth.  We did not finish with the four episodes until just before 10:00 when I checked in on the current NFL game and found out to my dismay, the Chiefs lost to the Titans.  Unbelieveabe...no doubt my son, Tom, and son in law, Drew, both avid Chiefs fans are in mourning.  I then watched a few minutes of the NFL game, the end of the first half of the Kansas/TCU game before leaving the remote in Evie's hands and went up to bed, to get back to Jack Reacher and bed.

Surprise...Snowy, Windy And Cold

8:03

Snow From Our Bedroom Window

Well, it's the weekend, colder than heck, as the temperature has hovered around 4º for the past 24 hours.  I was surprised to see two fishermen out on the lake because the lake was empty yesterday.  I guess it's the weekend.  It's 8:30 as I finish writing this blog and as I looked on the lake, at least 12 fishing huts have appeared off of Long Point, near the Pavilion.  Hardy souls.

A Warming, Morning Fire

Yesterday I was not feeling as terrible as the day before, sort of a good thing.  I tried to get back in a routine without much luck,  just no energy.  Evie, however, took good care of me, making it a lot easier to get through the boring day.  The only solace to staying inside and being ill is that even if I felt well, it was too cold to do much outside other than shovel the driveway, which Evie did, again mid-morning.  I watched a John Grisham novel turned into a movie in the morning called RUNAWAY JURY, with Dustin Hoffman and John Cusack, a good cast, mediocre movie but it passed the time.  Evie made more chicken and rice soup for my lunch since I like it so much on Thursday. And she spent a good 20 minutes trying to save a finch caught in our bird feeder to no avail.  He had hunkered down in it and could not get out and ultimately froze.  

A Big Boy

After lunch, Evie wanted to bake me a treat so we decided on something we could freeze and was easy.  We decided on lemons squares, so when I took my nap, she put together all the ingredients and made them.  Although I am reading A MAN CALLED OVE, the lure of the new Jack Reacher novel sitting on our coffee table was too much so now I am reading two books at once.  Late afternoon, Evie and I both had a treat, the lemons squares which, we both agreed, seemed more cookie like but delicious.  

View From A Living Room Window

For dinner, Evie had found a recipe, vegetarian, using rigatoni and caramelized cauliflower as the two main ingredients in a casserole, which included cheese, lemon zest, mushrooms, and capers.  Along with a salad, we had a tasty and healthy dinner.  We finished the last three episodes of Season 4 of A Place To Call Home.  We will finish the series but it's getting sillier and sillier, as one terrible thing after another seems to haunt this family, to the extent that you can only end up laughing because it's so ridiculous.  O, well, it gives us some respite from the real world.  

Nothing But White

7:49

Breakfast and Trying to Keep Warm

It's 8:30 and I have been up for an hour, having actually slept in some.  I still feel lousy but as Gloria Gaynor sings, "I Will Survive."  It's 4º, may get colder and tomorrow the high may 1º.  Because of the cold weather, schools have been called off in the area, to the delight of kids and teachers.

Auguring In Cold Weather

Yesterday was basically a sick day for me, for Evie, it was taking care of me.  She made me oatmeal for breakfast, camomile tea during the morning, and a delicious and healthy chicken, rice and lemon soup for lunch.  It tasted so good that she is going to make more today.  I obviously slept a lot, but watched most of one of my favorite movies from 1963, CHARADE, with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, music by Henry Mancini.  I must have seen it four or five times.

Late morning, Evie went out and shoveled our parking area, moved the car, made sure it started in this frigid weather.  I took a good nap in between reading my book, A MAN CALLED OVE, who has many qualities that remind me of myself, though exaggerated.  He's a real curmudgeon.  We just hung out in the afternoon, drinking lots of liquids, using up a couple of boxes of Kleenex.

A Turkish omelet, a menemen, sounded good to me for dinner, so Evie put the eggs, tomatoes and feta cheese together and made a salad.  We then binged watched more of A PLACE TO CALL HOME, interspersing it with the breaking news on CNN, FIRE AND FURY, the book about Trump's dysfunctional Whtie House, and for humor, we turned to Hannity as he talked about Hilary's emails.  Cable channels are nothing if not predictable.

For those who know Chautauqua, I am including a photograph I took on Wednesday of the hotel going up in Celeron.

Celoron Hotel

Snowing...Again

7:58

Well, I didn't get up till 7:40 because I am feeling miserable, suffering from all the symptoms that go along with a cold.  It's' been awhile since I have felt this bad. 

Yesterday I felt decent enough to get out of the house a couple of times.  I was smart enough not to go to yoga but I wanted to get our cross country skis hot waxed so I drove to Holly Loft, in Celeron and dropped off my skis, then shopped at Wegmans, picking up a few things.  I was tired when I got back but not really sick.  Evie got out some frozen sloppy joes for lunch, with a pickle of course and I watched another episode of BERLIN DIARIES.  I was smart enough to take a nap and woke up feeling decent enough to drive off to the Smith Library to pick up a couple of DVDs.

Dinner was citrus salmon, cooked a different way from the usual, and both of us thought it was really good though it's always difficult to figure out when salmon is done.  We had it with garlic spinach, a glass of white wine and we were ready for Season Three of A PLACE CALLED HOME.  We put the series we started yesterday, BLOODLINE, on hold because we will have to send the DVD's back in a week.  We are not as enamored with the third year.  It's clear that the series was supposed to end after Season two but because it was so popular, they reconfigured the end of Season Two and have made three more years of the series.  It's good but we both think it's become too much like a noontime soap opera, alas.  We watched three episodes before I started feeling bad and went up to bed. 

A Cloudless, Blue Sky Morning And 2º

7:53

8:04

Another frigid morning on the lake and it looks like we may have another week of this weather.  I didn't get up till 6:30 and looked out to a star-filled sky, a moon hiding behind a few clouds. I waited until 7:53 when the sun began to peak over Wells Bay, on its path back towards Long Point and beyond.  It's the first time we have seen a sunrise like this since December 6th and it seems strange to be invaded by sunlight and blue skies after weeks of gray, snow, and clouds.

Well, I have been fighting a cold, stuffiness and an occasional cough and I am not sure how to deal with it.  Just carry on, ignoring the symptoms, or stay home and take it easy.  Yesterday I said the heck with it and drove to a yoga class.  I sound like a brown bear when I talk, a sure give away that I have a cold.  I don't think I put anyone in my class in danger of catching my cold, however, no coughs and a small class.  It was good to go to class and I felt much better after it.  I came home, cleaned the parking area of snow again and then came in for lunch.  Evie heated up some of the vegetable soup and made me tuna sandwiches on toast, with a dill pickle on top for crunch.  I started a new series on EPIX called BERLIN STATION.  It's a spy series, with the CIA seeking to find a mole, someone like Edward Snowden who is passing CIA documents to the newspapers.  The show is different in that it's set in Berlin.

After lunch, neither of us did much, read, napped and watched some TV.  Evie was at a loss for things to do but finally settled on cleaning out the kitchen drawers, washing the insides and throwing away or putting away utensils we don't ever use, a form of downsizing or Kondoizing.  We both wanted to get outside, so we bundled up around 4:00 and decided to walk through the campground.  We hardly made it a couple of hundred yards when the wind picked up and we decided it was just too cold to enjoy a walk. Instead, we fired up the Outback and drove to Mayville, the village which got close to 70 inches of snow last week, to see the eight to ten feet of snow, piled up on the sides of the road. Amazing even a few days after the last snow.

Blue Snow at 4:30 PM

We were home by 5:00, in time for a glass of red wine and we enjoyed the end of the day, not worrying much about dinner because it was leftover pot roast and a salad.  And for those who don't like leftovers, stews like this are even better the second day.  We started a new to us but old and highly recommended series on Netflix called BLOODLINE.  We had watched it a year or two ago but never got beyond the first couple episodes.  My sister and her husband, however, highly recommended it so we are giving it another try.  So far, so good.  We stopped watching just as CNN and MSNBC picked up on Trump's latest Tweet, suggesting that his nuclear button was bigger than Kim Jong Un's.  What idiots, playing with nuclear war as if they are kids on a playground.

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.

Happy New Year

 Tufted Titmouse in Lilac Tree

7:42

It's 7:10 and the outdoors, the trees, the lake, the shorelines, are just beginning to become visible.  I am listening to CNN talk about what to expect in 2018 as the furnace turns on and off, measuring my morning.  It's warmed up some, no longer a 12 below like yesterday morning.  It's a toasty, double-digit 10º. Unfortunately, the wind is picking up, perhaps the reason I have yet to see any ice fishermen on the lake.  Perhaps they had a hard night. And today marks the beginning of the New Year. To the natural world, it's just another day, one that's moving inexorably toward spring.  Mankind is the only part of the natural world that celebrates the new year.

Trudging Out To Ice Fish With Sleds

Yesterday was a long day as we spent most of it inside, waiting to go out to dinner at 6:00 with our friends, Linda and Ron.  Evie, the lucky gal, slept in some but I was up at my usual 6:00 or earlier.  We had gotten four or five inches of snow overnight, so after a leisurely morning of doing little, I went outside around noon and cleaned off the car, moved it, then shoveled our parking area, lately an everyday occasion.

Scrappy the Squirrel Enjoying Berries

When I came in from the single digit weather, Evie had a big breakfast ready, our typical Sunday repast of home fries, fried eggs, bacon and toast or a bagel.  We watched CBS Sunday morning, which talked mostly about this past year, somewhat of a bore I thought.  I lived it and did not want to relive it (Trump) again.

Ready To Head Home

The rest of the afternoon we did little, watched some TV, a couple of football games, read, napped, cleaned up the kitchen, things like that to keep busy.  I also made some Turkish tea which went nicely with the yogurt cake.  I also watched the surprising Buffalo Bills play pretty well and eventually beat the Miami Dolphins, clinching a playoff spot for the first time since 1999.  Late afternoon, we both showered and got gussied up for our night out.  Linda and Ron picked us up at 6:00, just as it started to snow again.  We were eating at the Landmark, in downtown Jamestown.  The roads were slippery enough that we almost turned around and had hot dogs at our house.  But it seemed to clear up around Lakewood, so we marshaled on to Jamestown.  We had drinks in the bar while we waited for our table and I ended up talking with Tabby, our local Ashville librarian.

Night Out With A Couple Of Cuties

We were seated around 7:15 and the dining room was packed with locals of all ages, from golden agers like us to teenagers.  We ordered a bottle of Apothic red wine and some calamari for an appetizer.  Linda and Ron were in good spirits because one of their feral cats, Claymore, who had gone missing for a week, suddenly returned yesterday in good shape.  How he survived in the subzero weather remains a mystery.   Everyone ordered fish, two salmons, one sea bass but not me.  I felt like Italian,  veal parm with spaghetti.  We enjoyed our dinners, the festive atmosphere of the restaurant and as usual, our checks were screwed up, Ron paying for three dinners, me for only one. Unfortunately, he caught it so I had to fork over a twenty to make up for the screwup.  This seems to happen to us quite often and usually, I am the benefactor.  We took our time driving home as the roads were still slippery, arriving at our house around 10:00.  Neither of us were excited about staying up till midnight, so we said our goodbyes and went our separate ways.   Evie and I stayed up watching some TV until 11:00, then went up to read and sleep, too tired to welcome in the New Year, a couple of wimps.

Evie and I both liked this poem enough to end 2018's first blog with it. One of my former Robert College students put it on Facebook. Enjoy.

An Easy Prayer For Pagans

Philip Appleman, 1926

O Karma, Dharma, pudding and pie,

gimme a break before I die: 

grant me wisdom, will, and wit, 

purity, probity, pluck, and grit. 
Trustworthy, helpful, friendly, kind, 
gimme great abs and a steel-trap mind. 
And forgive, Ye Gods, some humble advice - 
these little blessings would suffice 
to beget an earthly paradise: 
make the bad people good 
and the good people nice, 
and before our world goes over the brink, 
teach the believers how to think.