we were sat in traffic late yesterday afternoon, listening to CBC Radio (think NPR... with Canadian accents), when the program paused briefly for a weather update. it went a little something like this...
voice on the radio: it is currently -16° (3°F), feeling like -25° (-13°F). it will go down to approximately -25° overnight, with the feels-like temperature hovering around -38° (-36°F), and temperatures will remain low throughout the weekend.
then we just looked at each other. i am pretty certain that he could tell from my expression just what was going through my mind at that moment. "what the hell am i doing in Canada?"
there is one tiny point of beauty in all of this gloom. i am absolutely fascinated by the frost patterns that form on every bit of glass when it gets to be this cold. the bottom edge of the car window looks like a line of pine trees in a watercolor painting.
i was (almost) inspired to pull out my box of painting supplies when i got home. then i made the mistake of looking at the bedroom window. if you squint a bit, you can see a swarm of dragonflies in flight. so beautiful. so cold.
so, that is where we are at present. i have zero plans of going outdoor anytime soon. mostly, i will be tucked up under a blanket on my favorite sofa, sipping hot beverages, catching up on a few YouTube podcasts, with a cat or two keeping me company. the third cat may stop by for a brief visit, but she mostly hangs out in the studio where she can be close to him. i am not the least bit jealous. nope. not a bit.
speaking of YouTube...
i spent December mostly avoiding my usual lineup of fiber-crafting podcasts/blogs, so i was eager to return to watching them come the start of the new year. unfortunately, i have discovered that there is something worse than Christmas cheer... New Year optimism.
we are at that uncomfortable—for me—time of the year when people cannot stop themselves from speaking enthusiastically about all the problems in their lives they plan to solve and all of the bad habits they will break... "for sure this time"... over the course of the year. it is like being cornered by someone who wants to tell you about how they 'found faith' or how their life is about to be changed by some new self-help book they just started reading.
naturally, this sort of thing is like torture to my brand of stoic-cynicism, so i will spare all three-and-a-half of you reading this any such nonsense coming from me.
it is a new year—a new decade, even— and i resolve... nothing.
life is too short to go around adding even more layers of guilt/stress to one's daily existence. should i decide on some random day—maybe in April—to make some major change in my life, then i will be sure to share that pivotal decision with the rest of the world... all three-and-a-half of you, that is. until then, i will stick to my ongoing objective in life of trying to stay (relatively) sane in an increasingly lunatic world. that is as much of a challenge as i can handle most days.
it is now almost two in the afternoon. i crawled out from under my blanket just long enough to go from room-to-room, turning up the heat as i went. there is snow in the forecast and the temperature is going to plummet again. sigh!
Nodding in enthusiastic agreement about resolutions. All you do is set yourself up for failure, and guilt, and an extra five pounds at the end of it.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, you have our weather. Or rather, we have yours and I cannot (and will not) thank you enough.
We got radiators installed this last summer, and while that alleviates the up-at-2-AM feeding of the stoves, it has given us an entire new range of arguments. He now expects the house to be yards warmer (which it is) and the stoves to burn hotter (you can only push these things so far) so in a way I am in the interesting position of telling mr. Mechanical Engineer, Heat and Design Division, that what he proposed last summer is working out exactly right.
I think age has suddenly attacked him.
And I agree, there is nothing more magical and intriguing than frost patterns. Our often resemble paisley, other times we get the pine trees. It is a temptation to paint them, like a paint by number picture, but I dont think that stuff washes off that easily from window glass. =)
But the days, dear heart, are getting longer. yeah, they are.
it is sheer madness with all the resolution talk. i was watching one knitting podcaster go on about how she was learning to forgive herself for having broken her resolution... and that was about a week-and-a-half into the new year. i stopped watching after that. i will check back in a month or two, when she has abandoned the self-inflicted guilt trip.
Deletethe one bright side to this deep-winter is that it seems far less gloomy than was the case a year ago. of course, we still have another couple months (or possibly more) to go before it is all over with, but i am definitely in a far better mental state than i was last time around.
meanwhile, mom is back home in Brooklyn, already thinking about her garden. i am fairly certain that she is not-so-secretly mocking me when she speaks of such things. life is so not fair.
I have a friend who lives in Missouri, which is a discouraging distance south of here--and he used to goad me about his tomato plants going in the ground in late January, and picking peas in March...
DeletePeople like that should not be allowed to live near gardens.
I can't see the point to setting oneself up for failure over resolutions you have no intention of keeping. OMG she whimpers, I gained five pounds and I had resolved not to do that... Maybe they like the guilt, who knows. They've been exonerated for trying, at least. Two days is not trying.
I notice now that the sun is rising beyond the trees much earlier. Why I should be suprised by that, every damn year, I have no idea. The last time my husband reminded me on the summer equinox, 'well the days start getting shorter now" he realized that was probably the last time to ever mention it. Now he sneaks up on the subject in, maybe, October. it's okay then.
And mothers do know how to push those buttons, don't they. =)
we have a running joke around here about the first day of Spring, as it is usually either snowing or has recently snowed... or there is snow in the forecast... when it rolls around. he goes around all day telling me that i should smile "because it's the first day of Spring", while i sulk and question (aloud) the life choices that have landed me in this illogical place.
Deleteyour Missouri friend sounds a lot like his father. there is a mountain range between them and us, and the weather is like night and day at times. their garden is always already in bloom before it is warm enough to put anything outdoors here. naturally, his dad insists on sending us photos almost every single day, just to rub it in.
Yep, my friend Harvey is now my age and can't bend down any longer. No more crowing over early tomatoes (in May) or early potatoes or early anything. I find old age restful, when other people do it too.
DeleteYour consolation is, FiL doesn't live next door. Somehow I get the feeling he would have a greenhouse to offset the wintah weathah and send samples over.
Your last post was numbing. Wonderful, but numbing. I don't think I've ever even owned that many veggies at once. The high point of my culinary skills is when the bread comes out of the oven nicely browned and sliceable for sandwiches.
Oh what a great combo. Your soup, my bread. =)
we take our fruits and veggies very seriously. that is the only part of "healthy living" that comes naturally to either of us, so we do our best to have as colorful and diverse a diet as we can where fresh produce is concerned.
Deletewe usually spend more time in the produce section of the market than the whole rest of the store combined, so there is always a lot of leftover bits on hand for making soups of this kind. this batch was about three or four week's worth of odds-and-ends.
and, yes... a loaf of your bread would be a great addition to that meal. i used to bake every now and then, but that was before my food allergies became a problem. nowadays, i know that every wheat contact is going to end in possible misery, so i have very little motivation to make bread. but i really miss the bit of meditation that comes from hand-kneading dough.
don't joke about his dad living next door. i'd probably wake up every day to find him with his tools out, rebuilding something in my home. someone would have to move.
Yep. I have a husband like that, who is both a joy to live with and a pain in the butt. He can turn his hand to almost anything if it involves motors, power tools or Putting Things Together. We both had Erector sets as kids, and he took his seriously. His workshed is the awe and envy of the neighbors. I suspect if he died, I'd get proposals from all of them, just so they could inherit his tools.
DeleteHe is also a non-finisher. No idea why. He gets just so far into a project and then the glow goes out of his eyes and he shuts himself off, like a Golem in Terry Pratchett's novels.
I love dealing with bread, it's magical stuff, isn't it. And what a shame about your allergies. I tend to sneeze a lot when I knead it, now, the flour annoys my sinuses, but I find a face mask keeps me from making too much sneeze bread...
When I got sick last winter and was in the hospital it fell to my husband to tend the stoves for the first time in nearly 50 years here, and of course it was the middle of January, cold, cold, and the poor guy was getting up every two hours. And now of course he knows all there is to know about how to run woodstoves except how to run them properly. We have Arguments about it. lol.
What is there about ham that creates so much of it? It's like popcorn, what looks like a tiny block of meat somehow expands in the oven to something worthy of a state dinner. I have never used up a ham, bone in or not.
your husband sounds like me when i catch the bug to make a thing. i get all of the tools, and i am one-thousand-percent focused... until i get bored.
Delete