This morning I went through the house and changed all the calendars. It felt good to be rid of January at last. The only problem is that now it’s February. The 28 days of February seem just as long, and usually longer than the 31 days of January. We get some of our worst winter weather in February. The cold is colder, the snow falls deeper, and with March looming just a few weeks away, it’s barely tolerable.
Sure there’s Valentine’s Day in there, but I don’t consider it a real holiday. I think it was hijacked by the candy and card industries a long time ago. We don’t even get a day off for it. Then there’s Presidents’ Day. We were supposed to get a day off for that, but we missed a day of school on account of snow so we lost our Presidents’ Day as a makeup day.
Today is Super Bowl Sunday and I’m glad to report that I’ll make it though yet another year of my life without watching it. I’ve been listening to people blather on and on about it for weeks now. I find it interesting that the things they seem to anticipate the most are the food they’ll be eating and the commercials.
Yesterday Josiah, Daniel, and I finally got haircuts. The lady who cuts our hair had hand surgery and couldn’t cut hair for a while. We were getting pretty shaggy. We came out of her shop yesterday feeling and looking like new men.
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| Haircuts, finally. |
For years we’ve had a problem at our house. Sometimes the upstairs bathtub leaks into the downstairs dining room. Several years ago we tried to fix it, but it didn’t work. The dripping through the dining room ceiling kept getting worse. A spot in the ceiling was starting to crumble. A spot in the bathroom floor upstairs was starting to sag. So yesterday Stacey and Daniel decided to pull up the linoleum and see what was going on. What a mess they found. They ended up ripping a hole through the upstairs to the downstairs. The problem seems to be that water goes through the tiles on the back wall of the shower and then down through the floor. So we know what the problem is – now we’ll have to fix it and, not being especially handy when it comes to that sort of thing, who knows how long that will take. In the meantime, we have a temporary floor in the bathroom and a bowl positioned on the dining room floor to catch the drip water whenever someone takes a shower. Old houses are such an adventure.
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| Repairs underway. |
One of my most anticipated winter gardening events is underway. One of my potted clivias has sent up a flower stalk. I have three potted clivias. The other two plants should soon have buds too. When they are all in bloom with their bright orange flowers, they make me so happy.
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| The first clivia buds emerging. |
Last week we had several spectacular sunrises. The one on Thursday was especially beautiful. And the old saying “Red in the morning, sailor take warning,” is true. That gorgeous red morning sky was the herald of an approaching winter storm. There is another storm arriving as I write this that is supposed to dump another 6 to 10 inches of snow by tomorrow morning. I think it’s natures way of saying “Welcome to February.”
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| Sunrise on Thursday. |
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| Same sky ten minutes later. |
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| Sunrise through a frosted window. |
