for the birds

You know it's going to be a brittle day when you wake up to 12F (-11C) outside and the thermometer decides to go down from there rather than up.

Neither Ed nor I wanted to let the cheepers out, but my sense of duty prevailed. (Ed always puts the girls away in the evening -- which truthfully involves only latching the coop, but still, it's dark and cold then and very uninviting.)

I haven't raised the camera toward the farmhouse recently. Today, it looked noble and grand. (And warm and welcoming.)





I told myself -- I'm not going out today again!

Idle promises. In fact, I did go out again, but that would come later.

It's Sunday, so farmhouse cleaning comes first. After, we sat down to a really flower filled breakfast. I mean, I brought every blooming thing to the table. The sun came out strongly then and you could imagine that spring was just around the bend.






I will report on nothing else today. I spent most of the hours preparing for next week (it will be an exceptionally busy one!) and looking out the kitchen window. Bands of robins would come to our trees, eat the apples and fly off and this was rather entertaining in a tame sort of way. (Do you see the awesome foursome here?)






And this is when I saw that the sunshine had enticed the cheepers out of the barn. I ran to greet them with more slabs of bread. Honestly, sunshine will make the deepest Arctic air feel grand. Or at least okay.





The evening was quiet. My daughter is away on a business trip and I hadn't the heart to drag my son-in-law and Snowdrop out for a farmhouse supper. Ed asked if I wanted to go bowling, but I told him the idea of stepping out in the dark and cold had absolutely no appeal. I did bemoan the missed exercise opportunity, but he assured me that bowling wasn't exactly aerobic. Perhaps he was feeling a tad lazy about it too.

To compensate, I did something I haven't done for well over a year -- a "yoga on youtube" session. If you want to test yourself to see how much you've aged from one year to the next, do yoga at yearly intervals.

I resolved to stretch more going forward.

I cooked up a hearty soup for the week and felt deeply grateful that the furnace in the farmhouse has never failed us. Yet.