Out the Windows - the View from Here

 West

South

East

North

We didn't get the feet of snow that others got.  Though it snowed all day it was only several inches to clean up the snow we had already.

Phone Snaps

Had to travel an hour south to Keene, NH for a preop appointment for cataract surgery.  Returning I snapped this photo of the frozen Connecticut River as we crossed from VT to NH.

 

And then through the windshield this snap of Mount Ascutney.

It's snowing as I write this and forecast is a bit vague on the amounts we'll get.  Thermometer is reading 8º so the snow is very fine and dry.

As to the eye surgery - just my left eye has the cataract and surgery will happen in April.  All elective surgeries are on hold because of staffing shortages right now.  Timing is fine with me.

TIme to Laugh

 

Thanks , Marilyn for sharing these with me.

Baby Blanket

 New granddaughter coming soon.

I crocheted this blanket for her.  The yarn was a mix of white, yellow, aqua and gray and to enlarge it after that yarn ran out I added the border of aqua.  When I showed the colors to my daughter she realized that she had a rug in those colors that she could move to the baby room and the color scheme worked for her.

Won't be long to wait now.

Distraction Completed

 On January 12th I posted here about a new distraction -  a puzzle.

Monday of this week, two weeks later, I finished it.

Here's how it looked Monday morning.

I'd left the large house for last.  I even had sorted out as many of the pieces that I thought were for the house.  That's what went into the bowl pictured to the right below.  It helped take some of the pieces from the box lid.  With the funny shapes of this puzzle it was all about color matching and then shape though many times a piece was bigger or smaller than expected.

Now it's done.  I won't get another one out to do for awhile.  There are going to be other things occupying my time in the weeks ahead.

Feathered Visitor

 Monday, Dan called me before breakfast to come look at the woodpecker he'd spotted on a tree bordering our driveway.  It was a pileated woodpecker hard at work drilling holes to feed on insects. 

I knew I couldn't open the door to take a photo and had to try through the window - not very successfully.  I tried two different cameras in fact. The first didn't get the colors right or focus and the second couldn't focus on the moving bird. Later I went out to take the photos of the tree.

Any suggestions on how I could have had a better photographic capture?

The Game of Wordle

 By now you must have heard of this word game: Wordle.

My oldest brother introduced it to us, his siblings and now 5 of the 6 of us play every morning and share our scores.

If you're not familiar with it, here is the set up. You're trying to guess a five letter word.  You type your first guess in the first line. Green letters are correct and in the right spot.  Yellow letters are correct but not in the correct spot.  As you can see above the R & T were correct but only the T was correctly placed in my first guess of HEART. My second guess established there was an O but I still didn't have the R correctly placed.  By the 3rd guess I placed the O but forgot about the R. My 4th guess identified a B in the word but not as the beginning letter again forgetting about the R.  I got the word on my 5th guess.

Here are my statistics as of Friday. The very first time I played I didn't understand the color coding and didn't guess the word at all. Since then I have gotten the word  every time.  As it shows above I have gotten it 3 times each on 3rd and 4th try and 5 times on the 5th try. Friday I got it on the 3rd try.

Above was Friday's guess.  I did better than the day before but it was a lucky guess!

Exercising

I find the best exercise is walking with Leslie below

or doing aerobics and strength training with Curtis below.

I've bookmarked a number of their workouts and vary them from day to day.

Works for me.  What do you do?

Link to Leslie

Link to Curtis

 

Lunch today

Daughter Emily and son in law Matt are coming for lunch today. Matt works from home so every once in awhile we get together for lunch  without granddaughters.  Makes for a bit easier conversation since we can discuss things not appropriate for their ears plus we don't constantly get interrupted because both granddaughters are great talkers and like to share.

I made pizza last week and the crust recipe makes two crusts so I'll be making pizza for our lunch today. I had roasted cherry tomatoes to put on this one but those are all gone so I'll try just using some canned tomato pieces without the juice.

It will be good to catch up on their news tidbits and eat pizza and salad for lunch.

The View From Here

Early this morning the view from the kitchen window. 

Mountains of snow

Our road gets plowed and sanded - no salt treatment.

Look closely here at the side of the barn.  Two figures are working in the cold to put up the remaining clapboard on that side. I don't know how they do it.  My face was frozen just walking to the library and back and my fingers frozen as I took these photos.

Another Snow Shoe Walk

 Bitter cold weather and then a snow storm is coming our way this weekend. That means staying inside out of the cold.  Knowing that I put on my snow shoes Friday morning and headed out for a walk in the field to the woods beyond. I wasn't the only creature walking in this expanse in the last few days.  There were animal tracks all over the place but with the lighting I couldn't manage a photo of them.  Here is what I did capture.

The bridge goes over this small stream which surprisingly wasn't frozen solid.

The bridge connects this forest blueberry patch to the field. These are old, old blueberry bushes.

When I picked blueberries last summer I never even ventured across the bridge to pick.  There were too many on the bushes in the field.

The woods are quiet.

Looking back at the field the other blueberry bushes are to the left.

A better photo of my snow shoe.

Spotted this color in the snow - a young pine tree.

I started to take more photos but my battery was done.  I look forward to more walks in new snow next week.

Promise Fulfilled

 

[Tom, I had to bring the flowers to my nose to smell any scent on these. There's no scent wafting through the kitchen as I expected from your earlier comment.]