Sunshine

Yesterday the sun came out for a while, and we all rejoiced. Shortly afterward, the clouds rolled in, but surprise ~ they dissipated by mid-afternoon. Beautiful!

I sat outside in the sun for a bit, which felt really good. I cannot walk on the property right now – too treacherous. The snow is frozen and is about 12 inches height in most spots. You can walk along the top of it but you never know when a leg will go through to the bottom. Not a good feeling ~

So I sit inside by the kitchen window and wait for a bit, or sit outside if it’s bearable enough. The driveway is still tough to navigate, so I am still limiting my excursions out into the world. Tomorrow, however, it’s back to work and back to business as usual. I am really looking forward to it after five days off.

Here a few photos taken yesterday.

 

Female red-winged blackbird.

Really.

Thanks, [Kerri], for confirming my hunch.

 

 

Dark-eyed junco.

 

 

I am not even going to tell you this one.

I have said it enough.

 

 

I went to the movies today to see  The Monuments Men. I cried, I laughed a little, and I left the theater feeling good. Highly recommend.

I saw a lot of previews that left me wanting to put my hands over my ears and close my eyes tight. I can’t stand loud, bomb-blasting trailers. Am I showing my age? I mean, it was just SO LOUD.

 

This is a panorama shot. I created it in Photoshop using two photos I took with the camera turned sideways (lengthwise).

 

And then I took a couple of portraits of my buddy.

 

Looking regal.

 

And being really careful where he walked on the snow. At any given second, one paw through the snow would go up almost to his shoulder. It’s only about 12 inches or so, but it feels like so much more when you’re walking on it.

 

Here’s hoping for a good week to come. For all of us ~

Thanks for coming by.

Blow, blow, thou Winter Wind

So sorry for the lengthy absence. I opened the laptop to write several times since last Tuesday but just didn’t feel like it. This is the first time as far back as I can remember that I have actually felt that I have had enough of the winter. Those of you who know me will be surprised by this statement. I don’t know . . . maybe I’ll change my mind, and maybe it’s because my husband isn’t here to enjoy it, and maybe I will stop being angry at what has become my nemesis of late: The Damn Driveway.

Our driveway is horrible. Even after having it plowed. However, I am thankful to be able to live here. It’s a double-edged sword, I tellya.

It snowed some more on Wednesday night into Thursday – a big, wet, heavy snow that left our area blanketed with about 14 inches. The next day it snowed another 3 inches. George was actually finding it difficult to maneuver in and I gave up trying to walk around the property after several tries. Just too deep for comfort and I was afraid I’d twist one of my knees. Some of the drifts were to my hips.

 

It sure was pretty for awhile, though ~

 

 

These were taken from the windows as the sun was rising on Friday morning.

 

 

The glow is from the sun on the trees at the edge of the property.

 

 

I’ve filled the feeders several times in the past couple of days for my bird friends.

 

 

When I ventured out to take some photos I thought it was interesting how the snow had formed all these little bumps.

 

I sat outside for a bit yesterday. The sun was shining and it felt good.

 

 

Took this one Thursday. My son was scheduled to go to work at 5 am but there was no way anyone was getting out of here at that time. Plus, it was still snowing.

 

My son and I took turns shoveling. This was my section.

 

 

Then it began to rain and sleet.

 

 

We who have rejoiced in Spring, and luxuriated in the summer sun, we who have wandered in autumn's rich colors and gathered in her bountiful harvests, we should not feel cheated when Winter at long last takes its turn...

A friend wrote this on my FB page yesterday. I thought it was appropriate.

 

You just have to find the beauty.

Because it’s there.

And so are you.

Thanks for being here ~

Blow, blow, thou Winter Wind,
Thou art not so unkind, as Man's Ingratitude...
~William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Things Fall Apart

I mentioned that so many things went wrong last week that I didn’t even know where to begin. But the week is over now and I’m not going to whine about it all.

I will tell you a funny story, though.

After I show you some icy scenes taken on the property last Wednesday.

 

The ice that came last week was damaging to so many areas around us. But where I live, we didn’t have much damage and it had melted by late morning. When I was coming home from running some errands, the only ice that could be seen was up at the top of the hill where we live.

 

I decided that I’d better get out and get some photos while the getting was good.

In the photo above, you can see some equipment left over from the power line repair that had to be made earlier in the week.

 

It really was pretty.

And our power had come on by this time, so that was great.

 

 

On Thursday, however, as I sat at the doctor’s office for a check-up, I received a text from my son. He informed me that he’d just cleaned up a big flood on the kitchen floor from the washer that had overflowed. He said he’d used every dry towel in the house but he got it done. He checked the washer hose and it was backing up from the drainpipe into the house, so he texted to tell me that I might want to call the plumber.

Yay. Immediately, I felt my blood pressure rise.

My son had to pick me up from the doctor’s office when I was done, because he’d borrowed my car that day to get to work. So when he picked me up (and after I had called the plumber), I then asked him what he’d done with all the wet towels. “Oh, don’t worry about it,” he told me, “I took care of everything.”

“Yeah, but what did you do?” I asked him. I told him I was thinking of putting them all into a couple of laundry baskets lined with our biggest plastic trash liners. And he said he’d had a better idea. And that I would see.

When we pulled up, I was appalled to see that he’d lined up all the towels along the concrete walkway that leads from where we park the cars to the mudroom door. My good set of Ralph Lauren white towels plus all of the towels we use on a regular basis were lined in a row and I said, “Noooo!” We then had some words about it and I decided to just let it go after trying to get them off the ground and realizing they were already frozen to it. So we walked on them. And the team of plumbers walked on them the next morning when they came to fix the kitchen water line. It was the end of a very long and lousy week and I just felt like I didn’t even even care any more.

On Friday, I texted my son before I came home from work to tell him that I didn’t care what he did to get them up, but I want my towels off the walkway by the time I come home. And when I arrived, there they were – all piled up against the house – like so many boards of wood. It was so ridiculous that it made me laugh out loud.

And that night, I stayed up until I had every last one of them clean. And I just want to thank the stars and the moon for Tide laundry detergent. That’s all I’m sayin’.

 

Here’s wishing everyone a good week to come ~

Book Review: The Sense of Touch

I was contacted again by a representative of TLC Book Tours to write a review on a book of my choice from their upcoming selections. I chose a debut collection of stories entitled The Sense of Touch by author Ron Parsons.

From the jacket description:

 

Sprung from the variously lush, rugged, and frozen emotional landscapes of the North Country, this luminous collection of stories captures the progress of a diverse ensemble of souls as they struggle to uncover themselves and negotiate a meaningful communion, of any kind, with the world around them. A brilliant but troubled Bangladeshi physics student searches for balance, acceptance, and his own extraordinary destiny after his father disappears. When a Halloween blizzard immobilizes Minneapolis, a young woman is forced to confront the snow-bound nature of her own relationships and emotions. During an excursion to an idyllic swimming hole hidden in the Black Hills, two old friends unexpectedly compete for the affections of an irresistible, though married, Lakota woman. Like  mystical expedition to reach the horizon of the quest to distill truth from the beauty around us, the revelation confirmed by these imaginative stories – elegant, sometimes jarring, always wonderfully absurd – is that the very act of reaching is itself a form of touch.



Let me preface this review by stating that I am a fan of short story collections. This one piqued my interest primarily due to the fact that all of the stories take place in the North Country and many of them promised to be full of cold and snow. I reasoned that this would make it a perfect book to read in the dead of winter, when my review was due.

I loved this description of bitter cold, from the nameless narrator of the title story, a freshman attending the University of Minnesota. He decided on the school which was 16 hours north of his home in Fort Worth, because he wanted to head north and was “thirsty for a clean break in a place where [he] didn’t own a wisp of history”:

I was ready for wind chill advisories and blizzard conditions. I wanted a sturdy, honest, decisive winter, where the air feels like a sharpened weapon, and everyone hides behind beards and scarves, ski masks even. Every now and then, we can all use the feeling of a long deadening freeze. It makes you appreciate the mercy of a thaw.

He quickly tires of the brutal winter, which he found out later was actually mild that year, much to his surprise. Not all of the stories revolve around harsh weather, however. In The Black Hills, the description of the secret swimming hole left me wanting to add it to my bucket list of places to visit in this lifetime.

They were relaxing at the top of a waterfall, in a small, still pool where the mountain waters hit an upward slope of folded granite. It was sort of a rounded bathtub, carved out of the rock throughout the centuries by the rushing river, a river so hidden that it was without a name. Just below were the falls, about a 30-foot drop into another much larger pool of clearest water that was gathered for a respite, a compromise in the river’s relentless schedule downward, between split-level decks of flat rock. It was a perfect place for sunbathing.

One of my favorite stories was also one of the shortest: As Her Heart Is Navigated. In it, a young woman named Haley discovers that her presumptive boyfriend, a young man who seems to have such a kind manner, has a violent streak. The city she lives in has been taken by a surprise storm that has dumped four feet of snow in a short time. While digging out her car which she had to park two blocks away, she discovers a house that has been drifted shut, and in it dwells an old woman who Haley ends up saving.

The characters in each of the eight stories in this book are diverse and interesting and the truth is that most of them are looking for a connection. I found Ron Parsons’ debut collection worth my time and am still thinking of some of the stories long after having read them. The writing flows with a certain grace and I say well done, Mr. Parsons. Well done.

Ron Parsons is a writer living in Sioux Falls. Born in Michigan and raised in South Dakota, he was inspired to begin writing fiction in Minneapolis while attending the University of Minnesota. His short stories have appeared in literary magazines and venues such as The Gettysburg Review, Indiana Review, The Briar Cliff Review, Flyway, Storyville, and The Onion.
The Sense of Touch, his debut collection of stories, was released by Aqueous Books in 2013.



This book has been read and reviewed as part of a TLC Book Tour. You can check out the other stops of the tour [here].

You may visit the author’s website [here].

Respectfully submitted,

Hold tight

It’s been a heck of a week here at the old manor house on the hill. It began with my laptop freezing up and I was without it for nearly a week. Immediately following that, the electric went out for two days due to a tree that fell on the privately-owned line that runs to the Delmarva line. Then the plumbing went in the kitchen, followed by other assorted minor maladies. I guess I should have never said that I’m not crying uncle yet (written in my last post). Ha!

 

All is well now, however, but I am busy working on a book tour post with a deadline of tonight. I signed on as a tour stop a couple of months ago and then sort of forgot about it. And I haven’t yet finished reading the book . . .

Today is a perfect day to read, however. It’s cold and gray, just like the photo of the dark-eyed junco above.

So take care, keep warm, and I’ll be back later this week.

Your friend,

The whole story doesn’t show

I’m writing this on a Sunday morning and I have no set plans for the day, which is unlike me. I always like to have a plan, even if it’s just a loosey-goosey kind of thing. And I never say loosey-goosey so I have no idea where that came from. It’s cloudy today and I had thought it was forecast to be much nicer but as it turns out, yesterday was the prize of the weekend as far as weather is concerned. So I’m glad that I spent as much time outside as I did.

After my chores, and my grocery shopping, and my soup making, I went outside and sat in the snow and the sun with my camera and shot photos of my bird friends. Surprising, isn’t it? Hahaha.

I also did several loads of laundry and hung a couple of them on the line because it was so sunny. Hanging laundry on the line is a very calming thing. At least, it is for me. Plus, why waste power when the sun can do it for you, right?

These are some of my favorite images from yesterday ~

 

 

Tufted titmouse eyeing up one of the feeders.

 

 

A male cardinal who refused to come to the feeder because of my presence.

Cardinals are very skittish.

 

 

Tufted titmouse? Not so skittish.

They are no fools. They knew I had the good stuff in the one feeder.

 

 

The black-capped chickadee makes a lot of different noises for such a small bird.

The vocalizations of the Black-capped Chickadee are highly complex.^[14] Thirteen distinct types of vocalizations have been classified, many of which are complex and can communicate different types of information. Chickadees' complex vocalizations are likely an evolutionary adaptation to their habitat: they live and feed in dense vegetation, and even when the flock is close together, individual birds tend to be out of each other's visual range.

~ Wikipedia

 

 

Hiding in the brush.

 

 

Chickadee on the wing.

 

 

The prize seed.

 

 

And the prize shot.

 

 

Tomorrow it’s supposed to snow again.

I am not crying uncle yet. It’s winter, people. It snows in winter.

It sure is a lot of work though, isn’t it?

 

:   :   :

 

Hope your weekend is going well ~

I prefer winter and Fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape — the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show. ~Andrew Wyeth

A winter’s night

It was a good day. I’m sitting here under my warm quilt, the one that some of the parents at school made for me last fall. I’m having a cup of peppermint chocolate tea for dessert and hey, it actually tastes good without adding sweetener.

It’s been nearly three weeks since I went off sugar. I’ve had no cookies, candy, jarred pasta sauce, ketchup . . . you get the picture. I also cut way back on bread although I do have some every now and then.

I didn’t have any photos planned for this post, so I took these with my cell phone using the Retro Camera app.

 

My tea.

 

My cereal cabinet.

Please try to control your laughter. I mean, who takes pictures of their cereal cabinet?

 

 

Or their cupboard filled with plates and bowls.

You would think I had a family of ten living in this house with all these plates and bowls, wouldn’t you? It’s just me. And my son.

I was just looking for images to share. And for the record, that box of frosted mini wheats you saw up there needs to go. It used to be my favorite and then I switched to Weetabix, a cereal from the UK that my husband used to like. It’s really good, although it does tend to get mushy in milk pretty quickly. Oh, and those potato chips are my son’s. I don’t even buy them anymore.

Today I found a top hanging in my closet that I didn’t know was there. Then I remembered buying it last October before I went back to work. It was on sale at Ann Taylor for a great price and I remember trying it on when it came in the mail but I couldn’t get it to lay right because of my hips so I set it aside, hoping to fit into it one day. Amazingly, today was the day. Win!

It’s still bitter cold here but I have good winter gear and am really not feeling it. I hope that wherever you are, you are safe and warm. Unless you live in Australia where it’s summertime! Then I hope you’re nice and cool ~

 

What good is the warmth of summer without the cold of winter to give it sweetness. ~Author Unknown

Winter is not a season, it's an occupation. ~Sinclair Lewis

In the midst of winter

Hello, all, from the frigid land where I live. Normally, our winters are a little more mild here in Maryland, which is technically a southern state. But I have no complaints at all. I own an excellent car that can get up and down the snow-covered 1/3 mile-long driveway, and if you dress properly for the weather, it’s really not a problem. I’m thankful for the power and the oil, and I keep the house at a slight chill. When it’s too cold, I add another sweater and maybe a scarf.

I worked today for a half-day because we held our annual Open House for our school. Saturday, however, was a mixed bag of interesting weather. In the morning, between chores, I took some photos through my kitchen window of the birds at the feeders. It was pretty gray and the images reflect that fact.

(some of you have already seen these on FB)

 

I love the bright red of the male cardinals at this time of the year. So beautiful.

 

Late morning, I happened to glance out the window to see a wild mass of snow flurries. All-told, we had about two more inches that fell and it looked beautiful on top of the snow that’s already on the ground.

I decided to capture some images during the snowfall, which I have below.

 

It’s so much brighter because of all the white in the sky.

 

Hello, little lady.

 

This one is my favorite.

I keep a chair by the kitchen window and the camera is right there with the long lens on. Sometimes I just sit there and wait. Sometimes I’ll walk by and notice a lot of activity, so I sit down for a bit and wait.

 

And then the little tufted titmouse took to the wing. Lucky shot!

 

I took this image earlier in the day of a white-throated sparrow who was hanging out at the bottom of the bush that’s right in front of the window. He was there for quite some time, napping and resting. He looks a little sleepy here, doesn’t he? Actually I’m not sure if it’s a he or a she.

 

:  :  :

 

Tonight I’m having leftovers for dinner. Last night, I made Fried Lemon Parmesan Chicken Paillard, a recipe I found on Pinterest, which is one that’s become a regular here at the old manor house on the hill. I made enough for leftovers tonight and as a salad topping for part of the week.

I served it with roasted butternut squash & carrots, and a salad topped with feta cheese.

I went off sugar about two weeks ago and all my clothes are fitting better. I also cut way back on the bread (although I love me some bread, I really do). I also cut way down on the salt and caffeine and have tried to up the exercise routine which mainly consists of walking. Someone asked me if shivering counted as exercise and I told them to put on a heavier sweater and suck it up. Ha ~

Hope your week is a good one. I really do.

Thanks for stopping by and visiting today ~

"In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."
-Albert Camus

Fun in the snow with George

I was trying to think of a clever way to share some of my snow photos with you as there were too many to upload to a single post. I thought maybe a Flickr slideshow so I uploaded all 18 of them to Flickr, watched the slideshow, and thought, “meh”.

Boring.

So I made a movie. I haven’t done that in a while and forgot little things. So, for what it’s worth, here’s a movie with photos taken during yesterday’s snow day with my favorite buddy. Hope you like.

 

 

To view more movies I’ve made over the years, just scroll to the bottom of the page. That’s where I keep ‘em.

 

Until next time, my friends ~