Mulberry Jam

Okay, another twelve inches on top of the 23 inches Saturday, we can handle it. Third crippling storm in a single season? We’re cool. Having more snow than my old hometown of Rochester, New York? Unfair, but I’m able to be philosophical about it.

But all the other snowy cities in the U.S. laughing at our struggles? Now that ain’t nice. Way to hit a town when we’re down.

More video this morning as we are socked in with another winter storm. This time we don’t have as much accumulation but high winds are making visibility very poor.

This video shows the whiteout conditions looking across our street to the neighbor’s house.

Here is video of a fuel oil delivery truck that’s gotten stuck blocking the street. I don’t know why he was even out in these conditions, unless someone in our neighborhood is almost out of heating oil.

More shots of the birds at the feeder show how visibility can suddenly go to nothing.

And another shot out my back office window. All my friends are complaining that they can’t get to their offices. I tell them hey, some of us are still working. Hah! Now’s my chance to get ahead of the rest of the world!

And this one I’m posting at Mark’s request. He wanted a movie that shows our very storybook-looking shed with all the snow on the roof. Check out the icicles you can see hanging from the roof of our next door neighbor’s house!

Don’t give me the blame for calling this storm “the snowpocalypse”. The media have been calling it that since Thursday, before it even took shape. It’s still snowing heavily right now (11:20AM on Saturday). I took some video this morning when the snow was light enough to see out. Right now it’s coming down too hard for video to really show what’s going on. I’ve no idea how much we’ll have by tonight, when it’s finally supposed to stop!

Freelance life has its compensations.  This is why I love working at home! At 4PM I get my cappuccino pulled by my own personal barista (Mark). No need to go anywhere on a day with a sloppy cold rain. Aahhhh!

It’s been a busy week, juggling two consulting clients, one new client proposal, five yoga classes and my part-time work at Unity Woods. I love the variety, and am becoming much better at juggling after a few months practice. Part of the secret seems to be maintaining as much yogic detachment as possible. I do the best job I can, and then try to let it go. That’s not to say that I feel I’m doing a slapdash job, just that I try not to get over-involved in politics and non-essentials. I serve my students, my clients and my employer, and then I put it aside and try to give my full attention to my husband, my home and myself. That’s the ideal, anyway. None of it would be possible without a supportive spouse who pitches in to do the grocery shopping and bathroom cleaning in weeks like this. Thank you darling!

Well I couldn’t NOT write about this one. 24 hours of constant, unbroken snowfall has left us buried under 20 inches. We vaulted into the top ten of historic Washington snowstorms, taking the number six spot for most snow in a two-day period. It started at 9pm on Friday, and didn’t stop until about 9pm on Saturday. Lovely to look at. Hell to shovel. At least this time we got plowed steadily through the day. In the 1996 storm (number five) we didn’t get plowed for nearly a week! Looks like we’ll be making a farmer-style breakfast before we go out to start digging ourselves out.

Mark struggled all day yesterday just to keep the doorways clear enough that we could open the doors, since our lack of porch overhangs means that our front and back doors are easily blocked by the snow. I was inside trying to finish a big presentation that’s due Tuesday to a client in Baltimore. Wonder if that meeting will still happen?

I’ll update later after we get out into it this morning.

11:30AM:  After 90 minutes of shoveling, we’re about done in. Maybe another burst of activity later this afternoon will get the cars dug out. This may take a while! New photos posted to flickr…

Doesn’t it figure? On the first day of meteorological spring (March 1) we get the biggest snow of at least two years. By the time we went to bed last night it looked like Norway outside, with snow blowing sideways and everything covered in sticky white snow. This was the view out to our patio table:

Yesterday was Sunday. Mark and I looked at each other after breakfast and said, “What will we do today?” Both of us had worked on Saturday, so it would be our only day off together of the week. We look around the house and the bathrooms need cleaning, there’s laundry to do, and the backyard is full of leaves that need to go down to the curb in time for a Wednesday pickup. But our hearts are saying, “Nooo! It’s a nice day! Go out and play!”

After a bit of debate– will we be grasshoppers or ants?– we decided to be bad and go have some fun. We drove out west to Leesburg and north from there to the Old Lucketts Store. I wrote about the Lucketts Store a few years ago. It’s the world capital for shabby chic. Three stories in an old house on a crossroads, packed with everything from antique radios to vintage clothes to full size stained glass windows from actual churches. We had a ball. We followed our successful shopping expedition with a long Italian lunch in a little cafe in Leesburg and roamed the old town center until it got dark.

After we returned, I was straightening up a pile of books and found this quote from Albert Schweitzer:

Do not let Sunday be taken from you…If your soul has no Sunday, it becomes an orphan.

I like that. No more feeling guilty about taking a day off from responsibility now and then. And if I’d missed the trip to Lucketts, I would never have found this little fellow:

A little bronze frog sings and plays the violin

He reminds me a bit of Toad from The Wind in the Willows, and made me smile so much I had to bring him home. He is now sitting on top of a bookcase in the office so he can serenade me while I work. He ought to do wonders for my soul.

The chill of November can already be felt on this overcast October afternoon. Although most of our leaves are still in the process of turning, the cold gray sky seems like a premonition. We’re looking forward to Halloween here on Summerfield Road. As many of the neighborhood children have grown, my neighbors don’t go in for quite such elaborate front yard displays as they used to. But many houses are still decorated with pumpkins or some fake cobwebs over the bushes.

Halloween always seems to me like a pleasant throwback to an earlier era. It’s one night when I actually see most of my neighbors (at least the ones with children). The whole street comes alive with happy noises and light. I’m always glad to be around that night, since the rest of the year I often feel disconnected from my neighbors. While I used to know all my near neighbors, that’s not true anymore. The language barrier isn’t helping. Next door is an extended Hispanic family that speaks very little English. On the other side is a semi-reclusive Filipina lady who rarely leaves the house.  Across the street our long-time neighbors Joe and Jonita retired to North Carolina, and their house is now occupied by renters whom I haven’t met. Thank goodness for Nicolette, who still lives directly across from us, and our good friend Chris who is just down the hill.

The build-up to Halloween may help me survive the final weeks of campaign season. We’ve pretty much stopped answering our phone, we’ve had so many calls exhorting us to vote one way or the other. At least two or three every day. If we didn’t know before that Virginia was a hotly contested state…  So many people here in Washington and elsewhere across the country seem gripped by a kind of temporary madness, passionately declaring their support of one candidate as though the other guy’s victory would mean the end of the world. I know how I plan to vote, but I don’t expect major changes no matter who wins. After all, isn’t that the great thing about the U.S.? No matter which party wins the presidency, the government and the rest of our lives continue quite smoothly.

The sky reflected in a new window

After fifteen years of living in this house, Mark and I finally bit the bullet this fall and put in new windows on the front of our forties-era house. For quite a while we’ve had mismatched windows on the façade, with some new windows where we’d renovated rooms and some old, where we still had the house’s original steel frame windows.

Partly we’d left the old windows in place for cost reasons. Windows are shockingly expensive! But also partly we’d left them in place because I loved them. I’ve written before about my attachment to the old swing-out casement windows. With their small panes and wide swing-out style, I always felt like Snow White opening the windows out into space. The black-painted square leading dividers were a real design feature of the house’s distinctive and sort of retro-modern look on a street full of colonial Cape Cod style cottages. For the first ten years we lived here I fended off all itinerant window salesmen with vigor. (If I only had a nickel for every time I opened the door to hear “We were doing work in your neighborhood and noticed you still have some older windows…”)

But in the last two years even I had to admit that the windows were past their natural life span. The single-pane metal frames leaked heat and cold like sieves, and in winter were so cold ice crystals formed each night on the inside of the panes. The condensation would melt with the sunrise, only to drip onto the wooden sills, rotting them out unless we left stacks of old towels on the sills to protect them. Sound also came right through, so we heard each car and conversation passing on the street. The screens were battered and ill-fitting after sixty years of constant use. And each fall there was a string of repair work to be done to fix panes that had been cracked by the constant flexing of the metal frames with changes in temperature.

At last we had the time and the cash to make the change, but I admit I gave my go-ahead with a lot of trepidation. Windows are such an essential part of the style of the house, would I still be happy after the work was done?

I shouldn’t have worried. The window installers did meticulous work and we are now enjoying the interior quiet that the low-e windows provide. I’m even happy with the outside look, now that all the windows match and have a clean appearance. I’ll be even happier snuggled into a warmer, cozier house this winter. And with the price of heating oil having jumped so much this year, we will definitely be glad to have a more efficient home. I hope now we can rest up from the summer’s extensive renovations and just enjoy the house. At least until next year. Anybody know a good roofing company?

Last night I went out the ball game with a couple of girlfriends. This was my first opportunity to see the new Nationals Ball Park even though my husband has been, oh, dozens of times!

It was a beautiful night, not so hot as it has been. The end of the game was a total nail biter. The visiting team was the Arizona Diamondbacks, and most of the game had been a pitcher’s duel, with lots of great defense. The score going into the ninth had the Nats behind 0 to 2, but they tied it up with some good hitting (finally). So there we all are with no outs and bases loaded.  The whole crowd is on its feet, but the Nats can’t get their men home before the inning gets closed out. So the game goes into EX-tra Innings (as George Carlin says).

In the bottom of the tenth the D-backs go ahead, 5 to 2. The Nats come back and tie it up again, but again they are unable to eke out the winning run. No-one in the park has left or sat down since the ninth inning. Finally, in the eleventh inning the D-backs score one more run, which the Nats couldn’t match. Game over, sigh.

But it was a great night anyway. Jamie’s five-year-old daughter caught a tee shirt AND got onto the jumbo-tron, and there was much enjoyable junk food consumed. All in all, a terrific summer night.