Enough Already!

At first it's romantic. A gentle snow falling. You remember playing in it as kid, you recall the how good the hot chocolate tasted after sledding for hours or how nice it felt to slip on your gloves after they've been sitting on the radiator all night. But now we put aside our childish notions and take out our shovels and shout, Enough Already! I am sick and tired of digging out the car. My driving skills have been tested enough by parallel parking between snow mounds.

Will I ever see the car again?

Even though I have had enough of the snow for this winter and the next few winters, I have to admit it adds a dignified, graceful beauty that causes us to notice the everyday objects we generally take for granted, and ignore.

And it brings out the kid in all of us...

So don your best ermine...


Take a friend by the hand...


and get out there

I won't last forever (thank god!).

The best comment overheard today..."honey, they don't need any snow, they have their own".

S.W.A.K./Gung Ho Fat Choy/Happy Birthday Abe and George

It's Valentine's Day!
I have Valentine's Day chocolate hearts that my sweetie gave me. Yum!

We still have lots of snow on the ground. All the snow and packed ice around the car's tires makes it hard to get the car in and out of parking spots, so we decided to leave the car at home and go to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens this morning by bus. The snow was still white and pristine in the Gardens, with no yellow, no brown and no gray stains. Fields of white with no footprints. Small bushes looked more like vanilla frosted muffins than shrubs. A mermaid statue in the pond filled with snow, looked like she was riding a sled. Cardinals stood out like Orissa Garnets against the snow. The first bird we saw was a Mockingbird sitting on a crabapple tree. The big treat of the day was watching a hawk chase a small bird. We went back and forth trying to ID the hawk, but finally decided it was red tail because of it's white belly.

In addition to Valentine's Day, it the Chinese Lunar New Year. In celebration of the New Year we will have Chinese Food for dinner tonight. I have been looking forward to this meal all week. Tomorrow is President's Day. It's the triple crown of holiday weekends.



Yet another picture in the series of self portraits.

Snow Stormitis

It finally arrived. THE BIG SNOW. THE BLIZZARD.
It's here complete with wind, snow and of course all the media hype. Twelve to Eighteen inches of the white stuff, 40 mile per hour winds. None of that bothers me so much, because I don't have to go out in it.

What will bother me is the mess tomorrow and on Friday, when all the pristine white snow will become shin deep slush and you have climb over mounds of it to cross the street.

How many indoor projects can I find to do? I cooked a little, made toasted egg barley with mushrooms, I worked on my necklace, I watched a couple of videos on PBS.org. And now I am sitting on a heating pad because I pulled my back sitting all day. Only me.

Husbands are just big kids!
Husbands make me laugh. Here I am doing the dishes with just 2 left to do, when my husband says to me, just do the wok, I'll do the rest of the dishes. I guess it was a delayed reaction on his part, I had already been at the sink for a good 5 minutes or more. It's the thought that counts.

Super Bowl=Superb Owl

Today we went to one of the best kept secret parks in NYC (and I hope it stays that way). We went on an Owl Prowl that turned out to be owl-less, but really fun. The park combines second growth forrest with ancient forrest. We saw many trees, old Oaks, Cherry trees, Sassafrass trees, Sugar Maples, Tulip trees, to name a few.

I have always wanted to be able to identify trees by their leaves, by their bark, by their shape. It's makes life as a birder a lot easier. It's so frustrating to hear, "It's in that tree, over there!", when you want to see a bird in a grove of 20 trees. It's so much nicer to say, "it's in the snag, to the left of the Serviceberry".

Sometimes we take a our NYC tree guide with us and try to identify the trees in the parks. I now know that most of the trees on my block are Little Leaf Lindens, or Black Locust trees. We also have male Ginkgos in front of the house. I go to the little park down the block with the guide book and identify the trees there. The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens is great fun, all the trees have name plates on them.

When I was learning to identify birds, before I went to bed each night, I studied my field guide. I would go through all the pictures in a section and really look at the field markings for each bird. I should do that for trees and for butterflies. There really is a lot to learn.

Birthday Thoughts

Friday is my birthday.
I will be 52. It's a strange age to be. I am not quite young and I am not quite old. I am somewhere in the middle.

Numerically I may be 52, but I still think of myself as much younger. Although the reality is my hair is graying and I have lines on my face. I see frown lines, laugh lines, worry lines all getting deeper. I look at older people on the subway and notice the lines and wrinkles on their face and think, one day that will be me.

Birthdays are depressing...
I think I will eat some cake.