Thursday

To finish yesterday's thought -- it pours. (When it rains...)

No wet drops today. No clouds, not even a threat of a shower. It pours sunshine and friendship and the kinder features of a November day.

So, here's the morning sunshine:

And breakfast, with Ed actually asking -- are we eating yet?

(And muffin baking, which somehow came out to be nine today instead of ten. So -- puffy muffins!)

And a long talk with my beloved Polish friend. 

And finally -- a walk (in all that bright sunshine) with Ed. The skies are so blue! And yes, he's in shorts. Absent frost, he defaults to shorts.

Kind of ordinary stuff, kind of predictable in a very delicious sort of way. Until we come to the matter of The Lights.

The observant Ocean reader may have noticed that certain Christmas lights never quite get turned off at the farmhouse. Ever. They twinkle over the porch, they brighten up the stairwell. I like them. I see no reason to limit their cheerfulness to the winter holidays. But they do have a limited life and in the past year or two, some of the lights have failed. And when one bulb fails, the whole string grows dormant. Ed, not one to throw away or replace anything, ever, was determined to find the burnt out bulb so that he could plug it a new one and save the entirety for continued twinkling. For months, there have been odd little bulbs lying around the mud room bench as he sporadically picked one up, fitted it to a string, and, finding that it failed to change a thing, put it down, and promptly forgot about it.

So this year I just gave up on his efforts and ordered a new string of lights. And they came and they have been sitting in the box waiting, because in our lives, most things that do not have the word EMERGENCY emblazoned on it tend to have a very long wait before they are given any attention. 

This morning, however, I got tough and said - I'm taking over the light-replacement project.

And in opening the box, we found the usual crazy blinking popping swaying dimming flickering strings of very ugly lights. All this is trivial stuff: we tried them out, we hated them, we packed them up and I went back to Amazon in my search for the simple, the colorful, the delightfully straightforward little lights that bring cheer year round but especially now, during the bleaker months of winter. And that took a very long time.

I tell Ed - the new lights are coming tomorrow. He responds -- guess what else is coming tomorrow? The little tool that you can use to figure out which bulb burned out on the old one.

Project The Lights is revving up for another race around the decorating track and no one can tell which colorful little strings of bulbs will shine brightly on us tomorrow.

And so if you sometimes wonder -- what is it that I do in between the meals, the walks, the animals, the friends, the kids. Well, there is always a project waiting at the sidelines. And it's usually a very stupid project with very trivial consequences. But when it sucks us in, the day can fly by, devoted to moving it forward to the next level where it will stay for X number of days until the next inspiration will rise up and we will again devote hours in our attempt to move it to completion, usually without success.

And now for the rest of the day -- much more calm, ordinary, predictable, and ever beautiful: the kids.

I had said Friday is ice cream day. End of the week celebration. Deferred gratification. All that. Secretly I was waiting to be persuaded that this day, this sunny lovely November day should beat out this week's Friday.

I am and it does.

Two of the three kids have now had their autumnal parent-teacher conferences. Sandpiper, the youngest, has been tagged at happy, social and totally able to concentrate forever on getting a tower built. Snowdrop's leading comment is today as it was last year -- great going with the school work, but here's something worth noting: the girl is really kind. Empathetic. Teachers say this as if surprised that a third greater should be concerned about the well being of others. But there you have it. Every year, same thing -- she is really empathetic.

And the evening? I wanted to make that lasagna-like farro cauliflower combo. Baked with marinara and with parmesan and mozarella -- it smells like you've just set up a pizza joint in your kitchen. It doesn't look especially exciting, but the flavors? Heavenly!

Without any twinkling lights, inside or out just yet, but gettin' there!