Given the dreary nature of the world in November, I find myself spending more and more time doing more cerebral activities these days. Activities that include reading, listening to music, and thinking. The thinking part might be considered daydreaming or perhaps, if I'm being generous, meditating. I find if I sit still and just let my brain roam freely, it sometimes takes me in directions that lead me on to explore some interesting topics.
Last week, the reading part was fun. My new Sherlock Holmes volume arrived on Monday. It is in perfect condition. I retired my old paperback and took up where I'd left off in the this new book. If you've never experienced the pleasure of reading a well made book, I recommend you do so. A leather bound book with high quality paper, beautiful end papers, gold tooling on the cover, and gilded edges on the pages is a wonderous thing. The weight of it in the hand, the smell of it as you ruffle the pages, the beauty of the type on the pages and, if you're lucky, excellent illustrations -- is magical. It could be a book about the diseases of horses, a text in Latin about cultivating olives, a thrilling mystery, or a dry history, it could be ancient or modern, but no matter what, a well crafted book is a tactile, sensuous pleasure. I found that The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, already a great read, is even more enjoyable when the book containing the stories is beautiful.
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| My set is now complete! |
The musical part of my week was far-ranging, entertaining, and mentally stimulating. A few months back, I discovered a radio station broadcast from the UK called Classic FM. I listen to it live on an app on my phone. There is an added interesting element to listening to it because of the five hour time difference. In the mornings when I'm listening, the hosts are already talking about it being midday and when they mention playing things for those listening in the middle of the night, here in Gold it is still early evening. They play classical music, mostly the more popular stuff, but sometimes I hear pieces I've never heard before and when I do, it launches me on an adventure of musical exploration, which I love. Last week in addition to classical music, I also spent time listening to Johnny Mathis, Karen Carpenter, Patsy Cline, Ella Fitzgerald, and Patti Page. I love a beautiful voice and those are some of the very best. For a few hours one morning, I listened to my favorite opera arias. One afternoon I queued up my favorite '70s rock music. Music is such a powerful thing. Often I have it playing while I'm doing other things, but sometimes it demands all my attention and I have to just sit and listen without distraction.
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| Johnny Mathis, Karen Carpenter, Patsy Cline, Ella Fitzgerald, Patti Page. |
The daydreaming/meditating part of my week was heavily influenced by the music I was listening to. Depending on what's playing, I can be caught up in deep waves of nostalgia. I find more and more that this is so. Memories, almost forgotten, spring up. Although I think it isn't healthy to live in the past, visiting it from time to time is nice. Sometimes my meditations are random, odd thoughts that catch hold and take me on a mental journey. For instance, last week as I was driving around doing errands, I noticed that I needed to trim my fingernails. That started me thinking about how often I trim my nails. I wondered how quickly fingernails grow on average. I had to look it up. I found that on average, fingernails grow a tenth of an inch per month. I think mine grow much faster than that. Toenails are slower, growing about .06 inches in a month. On further reflection, it occurred to me that trimming nails is one of those trivial things I don't really retain in my memory. I have no recollection of ever trimming my nails while I was living in Japan, or away at college, or even last year, although I know I did. The only memories I have involving fingernails or toenails are when something exceptional happened, usually an injury -- a finger smashed in a car door, a toe crushed while roller skating. And that started me thinking about all the other things we routinely do that we don't bother remembering. I suppose it's good that we don't remember everything. Our brains would be so cluttered with it all, we wouldn't be able to process anything. This then led me to reading several articles on memory and how the human brain functions. An interesting path sprung from a rather silly beginning.
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| A game of Star Wars Trivial Pursuit. |
Aside from my mental meanderings, we did have physical tasks to keep us busy during the week. Monday during the day, Malachi and I were the only ones home. It was a lovely, sunny day. I wanted to find things to keep Malachi busy and also take advantage of his youthful energy. I cleaned off another section of the back porch and set him to loading more firewood. We have enough wood on the porch now to last a few months.
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| Firewood stocked on the back porch - thank you Malachi! |
While Malachi was doing that, I worked some more on the outdoor Christmas lights. I ran the electric lines we'll need around the house and hooked up timers. When I was finished with that, I did a few last winter prep tasks. I put the garden hose away down cellar. I put the garden wagon in storage down in the barn. Out in the orchard, I wrapped my little persimmon tree in burlap, hoping it will survive another winter and grow strong enough to not need such coddling. Then I stood on the back porch steps and looked out over the property, trying to think of anything else I needed to do before the snow came. I could only think of one more thing, emptying the rain barrel and putting it in storage. I always wait until the last possible moment to do that because after that, I'll have to carry water down from the house everyday.
Monday evening for Family Home Evening, we went to the movies. Stacey arranged for us to have a private showing of Red One at the Coudersport Theater. We wanted to give Malachi a chance to experience going to the movies at our little theater and that was the movie this week. I wasn't expecting it to be a great film, but it turned out to be better than I anticipated. It was a silly, action packed, sometimes violent Santa movie. I actually enjoyed it.
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| Monday night at the movies. |
Tuesday the Big Event was taking the pigs to the butcher. It was a gruesome, grungy experience. Several weeks ago, before he left for their trip out west, Kurt set up the trailer for transporting them. He put it at one end of the pen in a place where we could shift one of the fence panels and drive them in. It was a good plan. The execution of it did not go as smoothly as we wanted. The pigpen was a miserable mess, a swamp of mud and manure. It took the efforts of Stacey, Miriam, Hannah, Malachi, Tosh, and me to get them into the trailer. We had to get into the pen and try to direct them using boards. The female went in first, but the male did not cooperate. Finally, after much maneuvering, he got on. Tosh and I drove them to the butcher, just a few miles away. When we got there, we were surprised to find out that we also had to unload them from our trailer into a trailer at the butcher's. It was too much for two people, so we called home and had Stacey, Miriam, and Malachi come to help. This time the male cooperated and moved right into the other trailer, but the female put up a strong resistance. We pushed, we prodded, we poked, she would not budge. We tried tempting her with food. Malachi and Tosh got into our trailer with boards to try and move her to the other trailer. Her weight and strength was to her advantage. Moving a resisting 300 pound hog is not easy. At last, they managed to move her. We closed up the butcher's trailer and, mucky and messy, we came home.
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| Where late the pigpen stood. |
Tuesday evening the Fosters came over for dinner. It was our farewell dinner for Malachi. We had hamburgers and home fries. Afterward there was a heated game of Dutch Blitz. Miriam and Hannah taught Malachi how to play and, over several games on Sunday evening, they told him of Sarah's prowess at the game. Malachi wanted to see for himself and try his skill against hers. He didn't realize how formidable a player she is. She trounced everyone. She always does. It was a fun evening.
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| An intense game of Dutch Blitz. |
On Wednesday, early in the morning, Malachi left to return home. Miriam drove him to the airport in Buffalo. They left at 2:30 a.m. to catch a 6:40 a.m. flight. It was fun having him here. I think he had a good time. He now knows a little of what life here in Gold is like. It's a different world from the one he knows at home in Texas.
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| Good-by to Malachi. |
Wednesday was an errand day for me. I drove up to Wellsville for chicken feed and other supplies. For a moment, I felt a little sad to not have to buy hog feed anymore, but the feeling passed quickly. When I got home, I worked on putting up more outdoor Christmas lights. I added a strand to the driveway fence and put another strand along the chicken yard fence. Now I'm done with Christmas lights, the outside ones anyway. The indoor ones will wait until December. In the afternoon I performed one of those helpful rituals I do at the end of the gardening year. I cleaned my shovels, forks, and other garden tools and rubbed them down with boiled linseed oil to keep the rust off and their wooden handles smooth and then hung them up in the woodshed. I like the smell of linseed oil. It reminds me of my Grandad Rathfon who painted with oil paints. So my garden tools are stored, the garden is at rest, and I guess I'm as ready for winter as I'll ever be.
I was home by myself during the day on Thursday. It was cold and gray outside. After the morning chores, I sat and read a while. I was almost done with my first (new) volume of Sherlock Holmes and I decided to take a break from the book and see what Sherlock Holmes I could find on the television. According to Guinness World Records, "Sherlock Holmes is the most portrayed literary human character in film and television history, with more than 75 actors playing the part in over 250 productions." I did a search on our television to see how many of those productions were available to view on the various streaming services we have access to. I found ten movies, two television series, and two made for TV movies. From 1939 to 1946, Basil Rathbone played Sherlock Holmes in fourteen movies, but many of them are not true to Conan Doyle's stories and some of them even have Holmes battling the Nazis. My favorite Holmes adaptation is the series that ran from 1984 to 1994 starring Jeremy Brett as Holmes. There are 43 episodes and they are faithful to the original stories and excellently done. My second favorite adaptation is Sherlock which ran in thirteen episodes from 2010 to 2017 and stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes. This series is a modern setting, which you'd think I would not like, being such a purist, but it is a great series. I never liked the two Holmes movies starring Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes. They are okay as action films set in the Victorian Era, but they miss the mark somehow. His Holmes doesn't feel much like the literary Sherlock. So after all of that, what did I end up watching? I didn't want to start a TV series. That was too much of a time commitment. So I opted for just one of the longer Jeremy Brett movies, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1988). It was so good and the perfect entertainment for a dreary November day.
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Top: Original Holmes illustration by Sidney Paget, Basil Rathbone.
Bottom: Benedict Cumberbatch, Jeremy Brett. |
Around noon it began to snow. It was 35 degrees, three degrees too warm to accumulate. As I was coming back from doing the afternoon chores at 3:30, the temperature had dropped and the snow started to settle on the colder surfaces -- tree branches and tall grass. By 4:00 the weather service had issued a Winter Storm Warning and it was starting to stick on the ground.
Friday morning we awoke to two and a half inches of sticky snow with more coming down. It was beautiful. I can't deny it. I took a walk after the morning chores to take it in. It transformed the drab November landscape into a lovely winter spectacular.
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| Down to the barn. |
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| Out in the meadow. |
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| The beaver pond. |
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| The house viewed from the meadow path. |
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| The long border. |
The snow accumulated on the metal roof of the house and when it got deep and heavy enough, it slid off. All morning I heard the thud of sheets of snow falling, first from the second story onto the porch roof and then from the porch roof to the ground. It shook the house sometimes. There was a flurry of activity at the bird feeders. There were cardinals, nuthatches, chickadees, finches, blue jays, woodpeckers, a few late-staying grackles and red-winged black birds, and various sparrows. And with the snow's arrival came the dark-eyed juncos (
Junco hyemalis), a dozen or more, the first time I'd seen so many at once this season. John James Audubon called them snow birds, and for good reason, they seem to love the snow.
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| Sheets of snow sliding off the roof. |
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| Snow Birds by John James Audubon. |
Friday evening Hannah made pizza, as always. The Fosters came to dinner and Kurt. The Shilligs arrived home from their long trip out west on Thursday. It's nice to have them home.
Saturday was an easy day. We didn't have anything in particular to accomplish. Those that wanted to slept late. We kicked around most of the day, doing this and that. The weather was gray and just warm enough to melt away most of the snow. In the afternoon we went over to the Foster's to help Sarah and Tosh build a chicken run. There is a barn on the property with a coop at one end. We cleaned the coop and put up a fence to enclose a yard. We didn't finish. There was a cold drizzle falling the whole time. As it got dark, we stopped and stayed and ate dinner with them. The coop and yard should be finished tomorrow and then we can move their hens from my coop to theirs. I'm hoping to give them one of my roosters too.
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| Working on the Foster's chicken coop. |
Today is Thanksgiving Sunday. We sang three great Thanksgiving hymns --
Come, Ye Thankful People,
Prayer of Thanksgiving, and
Now Thank We All Our God. Our speakers today were Sarah and Tosh. They spoke on gratitude and they both gave great talks.
This coming week will be full of fun and maybe some surprises. On Tuesday morning I have an appointment with my doctor to go over the results of the test I took to see if I have prostate cancer. I'm hoping for good news and no unhappy surprises. Later in the week the Thayns will arrive to spend Thanksgiving with us. We are gathering at the Foster's new house for the feast. The menu has been set and the assignments given. We will have a full house and it will be great. There is so much to be thankful for. I wish you a happy Thanksgiving!
