Saturday, January 18, 2020

Saturday

The snow is lovely. Not perfect (at just under half a foot, covering up another couple of inches already on the ground, it's not enough to be rated as stunning!), but still, it's pretty good!

(morning glance outside, right before sunrise)


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I feed the animals with an eye out for Dance. She has been sick and basically living on the porch in the lair we set up for Stop Sign. But, dare I hope? Today, as I leave the house, she follows me to the sheep shed...


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And she nibbles a little on some food. So maybe she is on the mend? (She then returns to the porch. I do not understand animal preferences! How is the porch better than a warm sheep shed??)

(Tomato, not liking the snow...)


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(the beauty of a good snowfall...)


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Breakfast.

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And after? I offload my dresser to a student who comes with his dad and dad's big car, glances rather indifferently at the dresser's stylishness and asks "is anything broken in it?" then pays the full amount ($80). Ed's amused as he always is at cerebral types who put all their eggs into abstract reasoning (this student is a math major at UW), perhaps forgetting about the mundane practicalities of life.
I opened and shut all the drawers for him. It's not a complicated piece of machinery: they opened, they closed.


Since the temperatures are about to start their precipitous decline this afternoon, Ed and I go out on the early side to cross country ski. It's getting to be windy out there!


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The trails aren't groomed so it's a little slow, but still, between all the shoveling, ice chipping and now skiing, I'd say we've had our outdoor fun for the day!


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Chili, reheated for supper, never tasted so good!


In the evening, Ed brings in a huge cardboard box that we'd hauled in from the storage facility. It's full of those envelopes that we once picked up from photo shops where we left films for development. Each envelope has negatives, plus a handful of photos that I deemed unworthy for the family albums. So many photos! I want to go through them all before discarding them. I wasn't quite sure what was there, but I have a window of a couple of hours today and so I dig in.

They are, for the most part, pictures taken by me during my girls' adolescence. Perhaps predictably, many of them were taken during our various vacations and travels.

When you do a project like this -- sorting through countless, most often imperfect photos of people you love -- you feel torn. Throwing something away seems heartless. On the other hand, keeping photos in old envelopes almost ensures their ruin. So I pull out a huge stack to keep, even though I know that keeping photos in this way is also not too cool. In my view, in photography, choosing a good way to display your pictures is hugely important. Creating photo books, or online albums ensures that they will not be forgotten. A stack? It'll collect dust.

I did pull two photos for today's Ocean post, both taken nearly 25 years ago. Pictures that make me smile, because of where the girls were at the time: Polish highlands and Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. See if you can guess which is which!


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