Tuesday

Two loops?
Okay.

Two loops around the county park hill on skis, two kittens now back on the porch, two people at the kitchen table for breakfast. (Not necessarily in that order.)


















The motivation to go out and be active sags right about now -- in the middle of February. In another couple of weeks, the California poppies will begin their wild display of orange. And you don't have to wait until then for west coast wildflowers to start their thunderous blooming season. Desert marigold, desert lily, sand verbena, desert sunflower, apricot mallow -- they're on now! You'll say -- that's an unfair comparison. You're listing desert flowers! Fine. But on the Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara, lupine and poppies and paintbrush and yellow coreopsis are also on full display.  How heavenly is that!

So you get a tiny bit wistful, even on pretty days like today, when the sun shines down on your wintry landscape and your windshield is covered with frosty designs.






But, we push ourselves out and as always, we're happy as winter clams to be on the now groomed snow trails in our local park.






The kids, at play, in the afternoon:
















In the evening, I'm out again, this time for a dinner with former colleagues. This is the month when you never feel like going out, but when you do so, you're always glad you did.

Monday

Classic beauty. You know the type -- one that everyone agrees on. Take a vote and you have near consensus: stunning!

Of course, even though there is near universal agreement, it does not take away the fact that beauty is subjective. I once listened to a report disputing this. Research had indicated that there are objective indicia of beauty. That they act like magnets, creating attraction even if there isn't an ingrained social belief that something is a marker of beauty.

And maybe that's right: symmetry and harmony are pleasing to the senses. You are at peace when you are in the presence of near perfect alignment.

I am, of course, talking about the weather.

I wake up to what surely has to be a classically beautiful winter day. A fresh snow cover, temperatures just below freezing, plenty of sunshine. It's stunning!






Everything is perfectly aligned!






And yet... Maybe I am drawn to things that are a little bit off. I'll take classic beauty, but I'm one of those who is intrigued by skewed, mismatched vignettes. And of course, perfect weather days torture you: good bye quiet morning with a book. The great outdoors beckons. You'd be a fool to turn your back on this!






Still, Ed is sleeping in and I am not going to wake him. Not even for a late breakfast.






By noon he's feeling better and wakeful and so yes, we pile the skis into the car and head out to our nearby park.






And it is a gorgeous run. Crisp, exhilarating.





Though you know, I'd be okay with some rain and mud in the next few weeks. A sprinkle perhaps, a melting snow, the first appearance of a green stem...

One can dream.



In the meantime, the kids just can't resist a snow drift.











In the evening, Ed asks -- want to go out to dinner? 
Sweet thought, but clear skies make for cold nights. Let's stay home. I'll cook up a couple of chicken brats...

Sunday

The snow is coming down steadily, just as predicted. It's pretty, but it feels cold outside. Or maybe it's that I am officially looking forward to spring?







I want Ed to sleep in today and so I am extra quiet as I come down to do morning chores. I see that Stop Sign is on the porch, but Miss Calico is gone. Silly girl, putting herself at risk for all the wrong reasons.






Everything moves slowly. There is no rush. I want to savor the quiet. The rest of the month is super busy for me and so a day of calm should be a good thing, right?






I must have clanged a dish or perhaps cleaning the coffee maker caused too much of a rumble. I hear Ed stirring. So we have breakfast together after all.





He thinks we should ski. I look at him and shake my head. Is this any way to kick the bug that's been ravaging your system all winter long? It's windy and cold outside, I tell him.

We go out anyway. For a handful minutes. To shovel. Then home again.



We play a game Ed has taken to lately: if you could not live where you live, where would you set up home? It used to be that Ed would say New Zealand. I'd laugh at that. Neither of us have ever been to New Zealand. Still, a quite, kind, and beautiful landscape tugs at him. Today, he's drawn to British Columbia (which he has been to, so it's fair game).

He brings up houses for sale in Victoria on his computer. Would you live on a houseboat? -- he asks me. Then he checks himself. No, you need a garden. Let's look at houses with garden space.

We pick one we like. Small, clean, bright.

So we're set? I ask.

We laugh and go back to our various reading materials.

No Sunday eve dinner of note. No kids, no parents of kids, no need to pop open a bottle of Prosecco. Just quiet. Ed rests, I read.

Saturday

Such a curiously off balance day! Or perhaps it feels that way because Ed has not yet fully recovered from a cold that first hit him at the end of November and the noise that accompanies a dragging recovery makes for a very interrupted sleep. For both of us. I tell him -- you should have it checked, even as I worry that the mere suggestion of a need for a check up makes it less likely that he will follow through. With Ed, you need to use triple psychology to get him from point A to your desired point B, otherwise you may well push him back to point Z.

Other oddities? Well, when I look out on the porch this morning to see if Stop Sign is around, I see none other than Miss Calico. So! She has figured out how to leave the sheep shed! Unfortunately, she is anything but happy to see me. Well no wonder. She associates me with her traumatic experience and then with an entrapment in the sheep shed.

It's a pleasant if somewhat cold day and the big cats are mostly prowling around hunting mice. When I go into the sheep shed to feed them all, I see that Calico's sister is still hiding in the corner. So, she's the slow learner. I wonder how long it'll take her to follow her sister's brave leap out the cat door.

Breakfast...






Miss Calico comes back to the porch, but only to grab a few bites of food. Then she is out again and unfortunately, I see her aiming toward the road, most likely to return to her second hide out. Oh, silly cat! I'm not your danger point! It's the cars that will get you if you dont be careful!

The sun comes out for a little while and even though it's below freezing, I use this rather pleasant moment to clear some of the branches that were cut down by the MGandE tree trimmers. And while I am at it, I take out the sheers and trim some of the nearby hydrangeas. These beautiful bushes are terribly invasive and if I don't do a heavy pruning job in any given year, I am bound to regret it. I may as well hack away at them now, because during springtime, I have far more interesting things to do in the flower fields.

It feels odd to be pruning your garden in February. Odd, but in a pleasant sort of way.







In the evening, the young family comes over for Sunday dinner. This was my idea. We are expecting a snowstorm tomorrow and though the path of this weather event is not yet certain, I sure hate to have them driving even in only moderately bad weather.











After dinner, they want to see what video clip he's watching. He diverts them to something more child friendly.





Okay? -- he asks. Are we done?
No! She begs him to read. He never turns them away.

Friday

You could say that the sails of the ship carrying my mom to her new living arrangement had been temporarily dropped this week, as we wait for that stiff breeze to push her forward again. Meaning -- I'd done the application for benefits, and when she was approved I'd selected her managed care program, I'd moved her stuff out of her apartment, and I inspected her next possible residence. Now came the wait for the managed care organization to interview her, draw up their own assessment, and send all the paperwork to the worker who would partner with me in the search for her new placement.

The sails were hoisted again today, the day of the big interview with her new care program. I am present for it and it takes up the whole morning (followed by an afternoon of phone calls to her various docs, with requests for goods and services that she will need going forward).

I'm neither surprised nor discouraged by the process, since I think everything has sailed as per expectation, with no glitches or snafus or ill winds. I don't think my mom shares my enthusiasm for it, but then, as the case workers confirmed after the lengthy visit, she has yet to accept the new reality. (The new reality is that she moves at a much slower pace than she did two months ago.) Nothing about it is particularly satisfying to her. Really, nothing. The hope is that once she is in a new place, her mood will improve.

All this means that my day has to be arranged differently. Oh, I still get up to feed the animals. And it is unsettling to go to the shed, because the two newly fixed kitties are still in hiding and indeed, I'm not even able to locate one of them -- Miss Calico. I hope she isn't stuck somewhere behind a machine, wasting away. Ed tells me that's silly and she can surely extricate herself from wherever she is hiding, but I'm not so sure.

Oh, and the poor guy does drag his sleepy self down for breakfast with me.






And then I am off to my mom's and I don't sit down to exhale until the tail end of the afternoon.

The kids are at home with a parent and I promised I would come over to read a book or two to whichever grandkid is hungry for a snuggle on the couch with a good story. After the reading comes the play!










And I pause to have a catch up chat with my daughter (and her entourage)...






(winners all!)





And then I return home. The farmhouse looks so sweetly quiet and serene tonight. There is a pale light cast by a near perfect moon. A cat moves stealthily across a field of snow, another sits on the path and watches me, hoping perhaps that I'll veer to the shed and open another can of cat food.

I do head that way first, just to make sure the kitties are there and still breathing.  And they are and so I head back to the farmhouse, throw down my jacket, my bag, my camera, and take out the frying pan. Salmon burgers tonight. Followed by popcorn.

Thursday

You must never feel 100% certain about anything. With the exception of love: if you feel love for someone, then you're good: you can trust your emotions. Otherwise -- proceed cautiously and listen to the evidence.


It's a pretty day today. Any day with this much sunshine feels like a gift. But again, I have to take pleasure at watching the sunshine stream into the farmhouse. I am too busy to spend time outdoors. (Too, it's cold. And icy and slippery. I'll leave the trails and paths in parks and preserves for the surefooted, or at least for those with spikes in their shoes.)

I seem to have permanently moved grocery shopping to Thursdays. Between our breakfasts, and the refrigerator raids of my fruit loving granddaughter, I have a fruitless fridge once again. (The girl has developed a great love for mangoes. Add that to her love of all cherries, all berries, oranges, apples and baby tomatoes!) Time to stock up.

But before I set out, I, of course, visit the shed. I see that the little kittens, just back from the vet last night, have been exploring. (In their sniffing expedition, they seem to have missed the litter box we put out for them!) That's a good sign. Nonetheless, they are hiding when I come in. Ed's sheep shed is filled with papers, tools, machines. It's tough as hell to find two kitties among all the workshop junk (he would not call it junk). And even when I do locate them, they stay put, out of reach. Cowering in fear. I leave them alone.

There is, of course, breakfast. But my afternoon coffee break makes for a prettier photo. I have added a fresh bunch of daffodils and freesias! (Here you have it -- a tribute to that pause at the kitchen table, be it morning or early afternoon.)





Later in the day, the clinic sends the documents with info about yesterday's kitty visit. I was positive that the little Calico is a girl and the bigger kitty is a boy. I was so wrong: they are both girls. Snowdrop's name for the bigger one ("Cutie") seems more fitting!
 

In the afternoon, the kids are at the farmhouse.






It's a day of intertwined play.











Sparrow has figured out that his family loves hugs. You may be in the middle of baking a souffle or making strategic decisions about where to invest your life's savings and out of nowhere, you'll hear a plaintive "Huh! Huh!" and you'll know it's Sparrow, looking for a hug.






(In an attempt to participate in Snowdrop's story with babies, he finds his own (Lego) baby and takes her for a long, circular ride around the farmhouse.)






(All's well that ends well around the dinner table!)






Thursday is also Storybook Ballet day. Today's tale is Aladdin.






In the evening, Ed and I try to coax the kitties out of hiding in the shed. It's slow going. As we walk back to the farmhouse by the light of the beautiful (nearly) full moon, I wonder if they'll ever warm up to this new setting, and the shed cats that live there.
Maybe... Ed responds, in the safe way that you can respond when you simply do not know.

Wednesday

Ed and I do not agree on everything. And there is one thing about which we really disagree: it is the matter of trees.

The farmette has many, many trees. Firs, maples, walnuts. Lotus, birch, box elder. Willows, northern catalpas, russian olives. And that's before we even start listing the overgrown crabs and the fruit trees in the old orchard.

When I look at photos of the farmette from, say fifteen or twenty years ago, the landscaped reveals many unobstructed sunny areas. The trees were all here, but they were considerably smaller. Over the years, the sunny areas have receded. There are very few spots now that get six hours of sunshine each day.

This makes growing flowers or vegetables a challenge. Our tomato bushes yield far too few tomatoes. And increasingly, the flower fields, at the edges, are showing less vigorous displays of blooms.

I keep bugging Ed to trim the trees -- to remove some of the bigger branches. But he is a reluctant tree trimmer and honestly, his trimming would be like sucking out a drop of water from an ocean of branches. I surely would be happy to completely remove some of the more invasive trees (box elders!) altogether, though I know Ed would never agree to that. He'll chop down trees that are near death, or that have fallen precariously on top of something vulnerable (a barn, a shed, another tree). The others just keep on growing.

So of course, I get very excited when Madison Gas and Electric sends its crew of tree trimmers our way. Every five or six years, they come out to cut the branches that are growing into the electrical lines. I view this as my one tiny opportunity to at least clear the front, street facing flower bed of shade.

This morning, both Ed and I are out to greet the tree trimmers. My message -- be generous in your pruning! It's good for the power lines! Ed's message? Well, he doesn't have one really, except to grimace as they talk about removing one limb or the next.


Breakfast. We talk about trees and cats and Iowa. There was a photo, but in some moment of great distraction, I erased it.


The afternoon is slightly different in that I pick up Snowdrop earlier and we go over to the haircut shop for a much needed trim. We have a few minutes to kill, so we walk over to the nearby coffee shop...





... for a cookie treat. (It's the first time that I see her cross her legs like a person four times her age. Out of curiosity, I google this position to see if it is gender specific and I find out that in the US, men, in fact, rarely cross their legs, whereas in Europe it's far more common. You can come to your own conclusions as to why.)






Snowdrop does not want to wear clips in her hair, so the project of growing out her bangs has to wait until an age when she can control her cascading-into-her-eyes hair better. Today, her bangs get a good trim!






As I watch the now familiar hair cut routines, I have to smile. Snowdrop is such a cheerful kid. Throughout the whole time, she looks as happy as if she were eating birthday cake.






Okay, done.






We go together to pick up Sparrow, who is still in the thick of a deep sleep. Not for long. A few violent shakes from his sister and he's up, pleasantly surprised to see the both of us bending over his little cot.

To the farmhouse!






... where we also break with the routines. Snowdrop is inspired to make up a game with her babies and so I take charge of the little guy, as she creates a fantasy story the whole afternoon she is here. The little guy certainly does not mind the one-on-one attention from me!






In the evening, Ed picks up the two kitties at the vet clinic. We take them to the sheep shed, where we had set up a temporary litter box for them. We open the cage door. Both scurry out, but the boy has just that much more confidence. He hides, but when I bring food to him, he eats. The calico is more traumatized. She walks in circles and trusts nothing. Some of the shed cats come in and in finding the kitties there, they go on guard. They may be friendly when they visit the porch, but this is their turf. For a minute, we wonder if the kitties will be okay left alone with their bigger half siblings.

Ah well, at least they will be warm for the night. We are crossing our fingers that they wont discover the exit door today. They do not know the lay of the land. Fleeing into random darkness could be catastrophic for them.

Ed plays volley ball tonight and I read a book that the reviewers called the best beach read of 2019. Funny that I should get to it in February, when it's so cold and icy outside.

Tuesday

With the animals, and with Ed you never know what you're going to wake up to.

He is momentarily up in the early morning, rumbling around, making just enough noise to wake me. I glance at the clock. Animal feeding time is coming up. I give up on the idea of more sleep.
You know, you need to fix the cage: the opening is not large enough for both kitties to go in comfortably.

He had lugged the animal cage to the porch. Now that the two young kitties -- Calico and brother, the last offspring of Stop Sign -- are hanging out on the porch, we feel that we have an obligation to catch them and take them to the vet for spaying and shots. They are the last holdouts and at almost 6 months, they are quite capable of getting pregnant (my guess is that Calico is a girl).

On the one hand, trapping the kitties should be easier: the shed cats mostly stay out of the porch and Stop Sign insists on having her own bowl of grub. So you can put their dish right inside the cage. Too, she sometimes takes off for a few hours to prowl around. She is a true feral: she never stays in one spot for long. She goes off for a day, two days, five hours. It varies.

Once the little guys get in the habit of going in the cage to eat, Ed can set up the door, pull a string and shut them in. So far though, Calico is resisting. I thought perhaps Ed should open the door more, giving her more space to wander in.

This morning, he mumbles something that sounds like he's in agreement and crawls into bed. I'm up feeding the cats. And I notice that Stop Sign is away.
Ed! So long as you're awake (ha ha), this is a good time to adjust the cage door.
He asks -- should I set up the trap?

We have a confluence of good factors: Ed's up, Stop Sign is away, the kitties are hungry.

Half an hour later, he has accomplished that awful job of shutting the door on the two innocents. You throw a blanket over the whole thing and they quiet down instantly. He gets in the car and drives them to the vet.

At breakfast...





... we talk about how to treat their release. In the summer, we let the teenagers out in the sheep shed for the night. (The recommendation is to keep them indoors at least for a day, until they recover somewhat from the surgery.) They were so terrified -- of the unfamiliar shed, of the unfamiliar us -- that they hid in weird places all over the shed and once we opened the door, they flew out at lightening speed. (Since then, we trained them to go for their food into the shed by way of a cat door and though they are on the prowl a lot, they consider the shed their home, hence the name "shed cats.")

Releasing the kittens in the winter is going to be a problem. If we let them out in the porch (a place that they heretofore believed to be safe), they may flee. These are very cold nights. After surgery, in the wild, they may not survive.

And we have this idea: maybe they should become shed cats. Why? Well, it's not as if Stop Sign treats them with any gentility.  So feeding them when she is around is always tricky. And here's the bigger problem: they like to climb up the screen netting. That's darn good netting, but it wont survive their constant clawing at it.

Still, we don't fully understand cat thinking. These kitties seem okay in the presence of the shed cats and thus far, the shed cats have displayed a sweet temperament toward each other, toward us, and even toward Stop Sign and her kids. (It's she who claws at them and shoos them away, nice mama that she is.) But will they be able to learn the shed routines? Will they know to exit when nature calls? Are we asking for trouble?



The day is cold and I stay indoors. Mom paperwork, with a sprinkling of travel daydreaming and a healthy allotment of time for reading. It's a good morning.


And a good afternoon! Filled with grandkid antics.

(Sparrow likes to dump out all the puzzle pieces from all his rubber puzzles into one big heap; Snowdrop patiently helps him fit the pieces into the right frame... then hides the puzzles so he wont do it again. Repeating a toddler's game again and again can be exhausting!)






(She plays with a ball, so he must have one too!)






(the man who would be king...)






(She wants to draw...)






(He likes to... do stuff that makes us all laugh.)





The animal clinic calls to let us know that they did not have time to do surgery on the kitties today. Poor guys, huddled in a cage for such a long time! Ah well, it gives us another day to think of what's next for them. It's a very cold night. At least we know the littlest guys are warm. And together.

In the evening, after dinner, Ed says -- gorgeous, watch this.

He plays me a youtube that just makes me smile. It's a lively lecture on Possibilianism. After it, we "argue" over which one of us has a more open mind. Which one, when asked, is more likely to answer "I don't know." 

Day is done. Goodnight clouds, goodnight cold air. Be kind to the kitties when they come home tomorrow eve.