Whiling away the winter hours

I've got two winter activities for you--whether your winter days are snowy or sunny, both should be good for these. The first is the latest "rage" in word games. If you haven't found it yet, it's called Wordle. Your task is to find the day's five-letter word. You get 6 chances and only can play the one time each day. This is what the board looks like. Your first guess is just anything you want and the color of each letter indicates whether or not it is in the word and, if it is, if it is in the correct position. Lots and lots of fun, especially trying to figure out your strategy! Click the ? in the upper left for directions on the colors. The link is here.

The second idea for your winter/spring/summer, really all year round hobby, is this wonderful app. from the Cornell Ornithology Labs. It's name is Merlin (see logo below) and it offers casual as well as serious bird watchers, assistant in finding what is the bird you're looking at! Part of this app. for your phone is a short download to take a photo of the bird, another to tape its song. I can't wait to try it. 

If you enjoy seeing birds and wish you knew all of them, let alone their songs, this may finally be the answer. The link for the app is https://apps/apple.com/us/app/merlin-bird-id-by-cornell-lab/id77345673

Reading, reading, reading

 If you need to remember our storm last Monday, read the last post! So, the whole week continued in this vein: not much more snow, but the winter cold was something--every morning the temp was something like 10 or 15---cold! My ministry car takes about 3 miles, until I get to the former GE plant, to even begin to give me something warmer than cold air through the heater and fan. 

Things were taking a nice turn until this afternoon. From noon on we got one of those snows that makes us feel as if we are living in a snow globe. It was light and fluffy and absolutely beautiful. Here's my resident male cardinal that I caught right in the middle of the snow eating at my window feeder. We have birds everywhere eating the food we put out. Fun to watch throughout the day.

Of course this brings me to talk about one of our favorite cold, wintery hobbies: everyone is reading. 

My latest was one of those James Patterson mysteries, this one with a clever twist. It takes place in 2080 in a very Hunger Games type New York City. Lamont Cranston soon appears on the scene, the 1930s fictional figure The Shadow, also the name of the book. It got some real panning on amazon reviews, but since I didn't really know the radio show from the era, I enjoyed the light, easy read of it. When people can make themselves invisible to fight the bad guys, that's enough for me on a cold, wintery evening!

On the more literate side, I recommended one of John Hart's magnificent novels to one of my friends this weekend. I told her to get ready to read some really great writing. I think the one she started was Down River.

Winter storm Izzy

Here's a shout out to my friend Isabel, whom some call Izzy. We have a winter storm named after her! I waited until Monday morning to post this week because the prediction was for loads of snow over night and I wanted to share ours with you, especially those in sunny climates

Here is what greeted us this morning: 12 " on my snow board, but the drifts must be 16-20" for sure.

One of our sisters gave us a "fun" snow measurer. I put it in the inner courtyard where all could see it--however this is a high drifting area, too. I think the markings on the left may be at the 14-16" level!

Here's one of our many bushes, covered with heavy, wet snow. Note the windows and side of the house.

Here's a tree right outside the northeast door. Pretty scenes everywhere, if you can get to them.

And here's the path I had to shovel to even get to my snowboard, which you see on the right, after I dug it out of its 12" coverage. When I tried to open the door to get outside, it would only open about 6-7". I thought I was pretty clever to grab the shovel and step sideways a foot out the door and scoop the snow away with the shovel and keep opening it inch by inch. Finally got it fully open and saw the amount behind it--WOW!

Untrimming the Christmas season

The (liturgical) Christmas season is now officially over. 

Our poinsettias have left the chapel and been delegated to the foyer, 

to be picked up by any sister who wants to try and keep a poinsettia alive for awhile.

 Here's the community room tree...sans decorations. See it in all its glory a couple blog posts ago.

And for the untree trimmers--an ice cream bar!

With cookies!

A resolution to consider for the New Year

     

                                                                Three Things to Remember

As long as you're dancing, you can break the rules.

Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules.

Sometimes there are no rules.

Mary Oliver