reach for the chocolate covered raspberry gingerbread square

When you have one more day like the ones before it -- foggy, drippy, dreary, gray, this is when you go to the cupboard, take out a few chocolate covered raspberry gingerbread squares, make a wee cup of coffee and revel in the deliciousness of it all!





And the color! What, you don't have a golden tea towel to park underneath your afternoon treat? Get one! How else do you survive a colorless northern winter?

A few updates for you:

Do you ever read that column in the NYTimes where a person is described with symptoms, then you are given a bit of background, and finally the author invites you to comment on what might be ailing that person? Well now, I felt like we benefited from your thoughts and comments in much the same way here, with Ed's wheezy symptoms! I cataloged all your ideas and will put them into the pot of "things to consider" when Ed gets his next asthmatic flareup.

Right now, things have calmed down, leading us to think (and hope) that my thorough cleaning of dander and such in the basement and from all surfaces elsewhere did the trick. Keeping dust levels low and opening the windows now and then surely is a good thing, even without having a person who is sensitive to such stuff. I felt I had been too harsh with our farmhouse: it did not let us down. It continues to shine and sparkle for us. Perhaps the inhabitants are the real problem. It's we who are imperfect. We have our quirky organisms. We must learn to make changes and compromises as they get quirkier and quirkier over time.

And so it was a good day for us.

Beginning, of course, with breakfast.





And here are a few more items that were up for repair today (in addition to Ed's bronchial tubes!): after an overnight at the Apple Store and a replacement of a few vital organs, my laptop came home, only to tell me it still has trouble accepting the new Operating System. Sometimes it seems I will never have my nifty, reliable little computer again, but in more optimistic moments, I know that in time, Apple WILL fix the issue of the dropping WiFi.

Too, the gentlemen from the phone company came in response to Ed's complaint that his land line has a buzz to it. This happens every year, right about now. And as in years past, the repairmen, in opening the pedestal where the phone lines surface from below ground, found five mice having a ball with the wires. We may have driven the mice from the farmhouse, but they aren't gone from the fields around us.
We'd never seen so many in one place! one repairman commented. Tell me about it!
Ed asks -- you can't close it off from them?
We can send a man to the moon, but we have not been able to figure out how to keep the mice out of those pedestals. 

And so our simple days roll forward, one gently moving into the next and the next. The farmette, missing a snow cover, is still brown, but if you look hard, it  has its own gentle beauty.








The cheepers continue to lay eggs (at a rate of about two per day for the three of them), the mice, apparently continue to frolic. Just not in the spiffy clean farmhouse, where all is golden and bright.