Winter Survival Kit

Isn't this the best way to survive winter??  Our darling little neighbor went sledding for the first time in her life and loved it!!  Winter, however, is the bane of my existence.  Living in Wisconsin, there are few choices other than enjoying it or coping with it, and as hard as I try to choose the first option, it never seems to work.

Winter arrived a little later this year, thank goodness, and that gave me time to develop a new approach.  I'm...chronicling my days until spring (which to me means no more snow and high temps at least in the 40's) to see if they really are as bad as I think at the time.  I hope to be pleasantly surprised!

Today really did start out rather nicely.  David let me sleep until almost 7:00, just in time check email and to slip into some very warm clothes (it was below zero at the time) and head out for the weekly breakfast with three other couples.  As we tend to have a great deal of fun at these events, we choose different restaurants so the same place doesn't have to put up with our nonsense week after week.

This morning the conversations ran from the frustrating to the hilarious.  The frustrating was hearing that the Sheboygan middle school teachers are each going to have to pay $50.00 of their own money to insure the I Pads that the school system has purchased and mandated for every student.  Because all of us are retired teachers or spouses of retired teachers, that was hard to swallow.

Good thing that breakfast was not!  This particular restaurant serves Swedish pancakes with lingonberries which is one of my favs and the hilarious conversations covered everything from different types of honey produced by bees who pollinate different flowers to remodeled bathrooms.   I'll leave it to your imagination to imagine the on and off color jokes that followed.

Then we tackled one of our least favorite chores, the semi-monthly trip to Wal-Mart to pick up items that are definitely less expensive there  I'm pleased to say we survived without David getting too impatient when I can't find things.


Then it was back home to put items away, sweep the sidewalk salt away that we had been tracking in the last couple of days, do a load of laundry, unload the dishwasher and check our mail and Mom's mail.  That left me an hour to continue my new book, In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson the author of The Devil in the White City.  It deals with the Ambassador to Germany in the early 1930's at the time of Hitler's rise to power.  I'm finding it fascinating and a great review of that period of history.  Also it provided great dinner time conversation!

Good thing dinner was quickly prepared (we eat our big meal between noon and one) thanks to great leftover enchiladas.  Even clean up was a breeze.  That left time for playing a few internet games and read more before my afternoon nap.  Now let me do a little explaining here.  I do get a little more than 8 hours sleep a day, but I do it in shifts....about 6 1/2 hours at night and almost 2 most afternoons, a great pattern for someone almost 70 years old.  Even more reading was on the docket while David cleaned up the snow that had fallen this afternoon.

After a quick supper, which I have to admit included some great blueberry pie, we got comfy in the den and watched a little mindless TV,   The only crafting today was making seven scrubbies completed at this time.  Guess it's really time to get cracking on my crafts and Etsy shop which has been in the doldrums after the holiday.  Perhaps tomorrow will bring more inspiration!

If you've lasted this long through a rather personal and uneventful day, I have the feeling you are thinking,  "That's a pretty good life", and I must admit it is!  Even writing this has made my winter mood more mellow!

So I'll post this blog, finish my book, and as Samuel Pepys would say, "And So to Bed"!