Winter Escape

It was so sunny and gorgeous last weekend I need to show you a bunch of pictures.  I just have to, I can't resist.  Remember that if it's sunny in the pic, it's no more than -5 degrees outside and Friday was windy as hell.


One the way up I took the Lake Michigan side highway as I usually do, the small towns are farther apart so you don't have to slow down and then speed up again and again, plus I like the views of the lake.  When I went through Jacksonport I couldn't resist stopping to take pictures of the lake.  You can drive right down to the beach so it was easy to get unobstructed views.

Once I turned off Garret Bay Road onto The Clearing's entrance road it was like the rest of the world disappeared.  In the other seasons the underbrush is leafy so it's dim and cool there but in winter the trees and bushes are bare and the sunlight streams through.

On campus it's a whole new world.  You can see between trees all the way to the bay in places and the stone buildings look to me as if they've grown out of the pristine snow.  This small spray of red berries was a treat to see, not easy to see, but I caught a hint of red out of the corner of my eye when I walked out of the room and there it was, waiting for a hungry deer or bird.

I took on the job of building a fire in the fireplace Friday and Saturday, and hauling out many fires' worth of ash so that it burned well.  A fire has to breathe and all that ash was just choking it.  I felt bad that I'd sat on my duff most of the weekend but then I realized that in order to go potty or haul out ash or get more firewood I had to go up and down a not inconsiderable flight of stairs or stone steps, depending on which I was doing.  My knee let me know that I'd done plenty of exercise, thank you very much.

Instead of writing (others were more industrious in that regard) I cast on a Choco-Cherry Hat for donating to the elementary school along with the trio of mittens I knit out of this same yarn.  I got pretty far.  (f.y.i.--this view is of it folded in half, it's not a preemie hat, really, it's more for a 4th or 5th grade girl-type kid)

January 12--Robert Llewellyn, Blue Monitor.  Pathway to the Universe was the pretentious name of the painting.  Chloe shook her head at the ego of artists, young ones especially.  "Roberto Lewelyn" was scrawled in the lower right corner of the canvas and she'd bet dollars to doughnuts that the painter was some pimply-faced kid named Bob Lewis, maybe even Bobby.  Years of curating student art exhibits had made Chloe cynical about art and its place in modern life.  She loved art in theory but if she had to look at one more assemblage of gouache and computer parts she thought she just might go mad.

It's cold, but not as cold as it has been, and it might be sunny-ish today which means the temps could go either way but I confess that last weekend has cleared out a lot of my mental cobwebs so I feel like I can better deal with whatever Mother Nature throws my way.  Time for food, showering, and work.  I get to wrassle my way through setting up the new POS Rental framework today (with constant teaching from the tech woman, I'm not doing it alone, nosirree-bob).  I think it'll be a long one, but at least my brain feels like it might actually be able to absorb things today. Au revoir, cheries.
--Barbara