It's been a challenging couple of nights, what with deep freezes and polar vortexes and people expecting their morning newspaper to read all about it.
It was damn cold Monday night. And windy. Last night wasn't nearly so bad, but everywhere was still covered in sheer ice. Even the snow had a glazing of ice over it. Unfortunately, during the earlier part of the night before the deep freeze started, it was mild and raining. This meant there were deep puddles of slush everywhere. This meant there were deep indents of my footprints on all the driveways and paths I walked. They are still there. In some spots I tried to follow my footsteps, thinking it might be easier. It was not. There are now dozens of bits of evidence that I do not walk with a regular gait. (though, to be fair, some of that was due to trying to avoid the deeper puddles of slush). Had I known what a lasting impression I was making I might have taken more care to walk in a straighter line, both to-ing and fro-ing. It brought to mind a childhood memory of my friend Kay and I walking backwards down the middle of the road to school so that on the return trip home we could walk in our footprints of the freshly fallen snow. Sometimes, we would bob and weave and make patterns in the snow which looked like we'd been dancing (remember those lessons with the printed feet you were suppose to follow?). There obviously wasn't much traffic on the dead end street that we could do this and have our snowy footprints still visible hours later. No traffic or ploughs.
On another note, I felt a touch flu-ish over the weekend but had passed the 'chills' stage by yesterday. Still, you know you are at least a little sick if, on the coldest day in decades (-40 with windchill), you can lay in bed snuggled under a warm duvet with the window open and be thinking "what a nice refreshing breeze...". I'm all better now and am feeling every centigrade degree of the cold. So bring on the +10º for Saturday!
a few of the hundred or so ducks out on the water
