Winter on Maple Hill Lane

It’s a cold morning on Maple Hill Lane. It started snowing at 7:45 yesterday morning and probably 5 inches were dumped before it was over. Our daughter and her family came for a birthday lunch but couldn’t past a driveway at the bottom of my street. SIL worked to put chains on while the others walked up the hill to Grandma's house. The new Les Schwab chains were the wrong size! So he-who-drives-in-anything decided that they’d better go right back home while the getting was good. I put half the uncooked meat in one container and ¾ of the potatoes in another and sent them home to cook their own food. They made it.

But it’s not over up here with the wind whipping and blowing around the house and sounding like some screaming banshee on the loose. We’ve battened down the hatches and plugged any gaps in windows and doors and are staying relatively toasty. Periodically one of us has to take a heat gun outside to melt the ice where water drips through a pipe from the furnace because when it freezes the furnace turns itself off. Pipe insulation doesn’t do the job so now I’ve covered it with a plastic box to keep the wind off. I didn’t cover the Phormium planted between 2 big rocks in front so it’s probably history along with a few other barefooted plants.

A big fir tree just fell in a yard up the street and they're out with chainsaws. Ours is at the farm so we can't offer any help and are glad of the excuse. However, the sun is shining, I have company because DH wasn’t needed at work this morning, and there's a project on my desk to keep me happily busy. Life is good.

Here's a recent watercolor painting:

Summer in Venice

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