Seriously? You're vacuuming? On a weekday? This was Ed's reaction when he saw me run the machine under the couch. I know what you're doing. You're filling your hours with busy work.
He is wrong. I'm just vacuuming because it hasn't been done for a couple of weeks and I can see from afar all that accumulates underneath the furniture. It's really remarkable: popcorn, okay, I get that. But feathers and buttons? Who even wears anything with tiny buttons around here? Oh, oops: Snowdrop and her tiny sweaters.
Well he's wrong anyway!
The early morning walk had been a little chaotic. We have the usual below freezing temps and what seem to be the ever present gray clouds, but the fog has lifted and I guess the animals prefer the dry winter air because they are all out and about, including the cheepers.
(the younger crew...)
That's well and good, but the old girls quickly get disoriented in the snow.
(the elderly hens, lead by Tuxie the cat)
I find myself carrying Java (the oldest and calmest) to the garage to rejoin the young ones there. I try hustling the others to follow. To no avail. Ah well, as Ed says, at the end of the day, all chickens end up on the barn wall.
Over breakfast, we talk chickens. It has come to this.
Vacuuming isn't the only catch up activity on my list for today. Budgets -- mine, my mom's -- emails, I mean, I'm sure your imagination allows you to think of all that can pile up if you've just spent five weeks doing few if any of your household jobs.
Ed and I do go skiing, this time along a trail that isn't part of the park system, or at least not the park that is our favorite haunt. I offer a mild protest. There is, in my view, nothing pretty here -- no forest, no prairie. In the summer, the path abuts the wetlands. In the winter, well, there are a few trees, a few scraggly bushes, and lumpy patches of frozen ground. Too, it is just close enough to Madison's Sewage plant that I swear I can smell the stuff every now and then, when a stiff breeze brings it our way. (Ed claims I'm making it up and that there is no smell. He is wrong.)
Still, I agree that one must occasionally vary the repertoire and the end destination here -- a bridge over a stream -- is pretty enough. We pause for a while and discuss if the swimming bird is a duck or a goose. Let's just call it a guck.
By dusk, I am home. In time for these two!
Great plans for the remaining winter months have not been hatched yet. I offer no excuses. It could be that they will never be formed let alone hatched. It could be that I'll spend too much time reading news analyses and by spring my eyes (to say nothing of my brain) will be glazed over by virtue of an over- abundance of screen time.
You never know what the next day will bring, right? We could all be pleasantly surprised.
