Nordic dreams

“I've a friend who worked on an ice breaker ship that went to the Arctic regions. I have a feeling you would have been a good shipboard companion.”

So commented Bill Stankus in response to my post (scroll down a bit), “Your Wren at Work.” In it I bragged about shoveling a path through the snow from the patio slider, around the house and up the steep driveway to the lane. Now there’s a lot more snow out there and my path is buried. We’ve had 7 fresh inches since 5 a.m. Since the snowfall has finally stopped for a while, I’ll be out there again soon, but my muscles are a little sore-ish today. Heh. Guess what? I’m not looking forward to shoveling that snow quite so much this time.

But back to that comment. Bill, your feeling is spot on. In fact, you made me grin because one of the things I’ve most wanted to do in my life is to take a journey by ship – icebreaker or otherwise – to the Arctic. The fact of the deep cold and that I might get seasick doesn’t deter me in the least. Given the opportunity, I’d go. Tomorrow. I dream of icebergs, with their incredibly beautiful array of blues and purples contrasting with the white of snow and the black of the ocean they float on. I dream of seeing the mysterious and otherworldly aurora borealis shimmering and folding and flickering in the night sky. I dream of puffy parkas, mittens, scarves and hats, snowsuits and boots, blizzards and when they’re over, the primeval silence that falls over the world. And I have to admit, I dream of the comfort of coming in from the cold to the toasty warm, of tingly fingers and hot cups of joe spiked with a dollop of good brandy. Yes, I know. My dream is of something outside of the hard, actual reality I’d encounter in the Arctic. But it doesn’t stop me.

I really do think that my attraction to snow and cold is ancestral. A strong quarter of the blood in my veins is Finnish, and I have the blonde hair, blue eyes and pale skin to prove it. Another dream, this one less unrealistic, is to visit Finland someday and see it for myself. I’d like to go there and stay a few years so I could experience all the seasons and meet as many people and do as many things as possible. I’d write about it all. I’d take photographs. What would I do? I’d love to take a ride on a Finnish icebreaker; I’d love to go Nordic skiing through the vast forests of birch and pine, then bake for a while in a sauna before crawling beneath a thick feather blanket to sleep. I’d love to see real reindeer and again, the northern lights. This particular dream also includes train travel, a journey up the coast of Finland to Lapland and across, over to Norway and Sweden. Perhaps I’d even venture into Russia and see St. Petersburg, and Moscow. And of course, it would need to be winter. For the snow.

I know I’ve written way too much about the weather lately. But I can’t apologize. My delight in the snow, that cold, clear grey light that comes with it, and the glowing ultramarine of the snowy dawn is seated deep in my bones, my blood, my being, and my soul. I’m going to enjoy it while it’s here, because this is California. It won’t stay long.

Note: Once again, Blogger won't publish with the usual spaces between grafs. Anyone have any idea why?

Be careful ...

... what you ask for. You might get it.

I took these shots about a half-hour ago.

8:15 a.m. It's still snowing. Wind's gusting. Inside, the woodstove is blazing, the beasties are snoozing in front of it and I'm near it too, telling you about it. So much for my path-making yesterday. If it keeps snowing like this much longer, I won't be able to tell where it was. Once again there is no sound outside, as if the world has been wrapped in cotton. It's 28 degrees, by the thermometer. Dog went out, came back in covered with snow and happy with it. He barrelled past me, headed for the pantry, from which his breakfast appears each morning. He shook all the snow off just as I caught up with him, giving me a snow shower.

As long as the electricity doesn't fail, life is good.

Your Wren at Work

Rumor has it that there's another storm coming in tonight, with another 3-5 inches of snow. So I donned my trusty fleece jacket, my snow boots with the grippy soles, my gloves and a hat and set to work shoveling a path up to the road. I figured if we do get another good snow, I'll only have to shovel the new stuff.

The wood ring on the hearth is down to about half-full, too. So de-iced paths from the stacked wood to the door will also make life a little easier.

It took me about an hour and 15 minutes to make my path, and shovel the area in front of the mailbox up on the street so the mailperson can get to it. Did my neighbor's box too, since I was right there. And our other neighbor, J, was out on his little tractor with the snowplow on front, scraping the lane so that everyone living along it can get down to the main road.

I like J. He and his family have lived here almost as long as we have, and I've never seen him without a big smile on his face. A few winters back, when he first got his tractor and snowplow (he's one of those boys who loves his toys), I happened to be out shoveling the first time he used it. The sheer joy on his face as he scraped a half a foot of snow off the lane was contagious. When he saw me watching him, and saw the shovel in my hand, he offered to scrape off our entire, steep driveway.

I wasn't going to turn that down. I still had the steepest part to do, the snow was the wet kind -- very heavy -- and I was getting tired. So J got busy and just did it for me. That big smile of his never left his face.

Just because ...

... deep winter has swooped back into Northern California with a series of cold, wet storms all the way from Alaska. Naturally, I had to take photos. This first one is a close-up of nandina berries.

We've had snow over the last two nights. The first storm left about three inches. Last night's storm put us up to about 8 inches. The hush that has fallen over the immediate world is striking. So this is what it was like 100 years ago, before highways and cars and chainsaws and sirens.

Mr Wren put suet blocks out for the local birds. They'd gotten used to the warm, spring-like weather, but now have to hunt for food in a world gone icy and white. Below is a rufous towhee, but a brown towhee, a variety of sparrows, and a small flock of Oregon juncos have also been enjoying the feast.

I took this shot at around 5:30 yesterday morning. It's a strange one and probably not the best, but I like the way it came out. It's of the top of an arbor-style bench and table on the side patio and the steep, vinca and kamchatka rose-covered hill. At its top is the road.

Yes, I do love the winter snows, particularly since I don't have to struggle through it to get to work each day. Soon enough, I won't have this luxury anymore. I'm savoring it while I can.

Bacon sarnie

So, I was surfing the BBC News site this morning. It's a nice way to start the day – the bad news in Great Britain doesn't seem quite as bad as ours. Or maybe it is, but it's a different sort of bad. Anyway, the BBC is enticing. Before I move on to other websites, I've usually read four or five news stories from across the pond.

One that I read today was "In Orwell's Steps," by Paul Mason, BBC2's Newsnight economics editor. Mason decided he would follow the route taken in "The Road to Wigan Pier," written by George Orwell during the Depression in 1936. The book is an account of how the dismal economic times affected the people and countryside of England.

And today? Mason wondered. Roughly 2 million people are now unemployed in Great Britain, a great many of them recently. How is the recession affecting the people living along the route from London to Manchester and Wigan Pier these grim days?
Mason's article is excellent. Do go read. Then come back, because I'm not done yet.

You're back already? OK, we'll move on. At one point in the story, Mason describes stopping to eat a bacon sarnie. Well, the name stopped me. What in the world is a sarnie? So I Googled, naturally.

A bacon sarnie* is a bacon sandwich, I discovered, "sarnie" being British Cockney rhyming slang. I also discovered a recipe, which I devoured with my eyes.

I'd been thinking, vaguely, of having some breakfast. What to have, what to have? A bowl of granola? Maybe some of that brown basmati rice I made a couple of days ago to eat for breakfast, with a banana and a sprinkle of cinnamon and a little soymilk? Egg on wholegrain toast? Lowfat and un-sugary, yes, but none of those sounded very appealing. But after reading that recipe, I had to try a bacon sarnie.

Trouble was, I didn't have any bacon. And even if I had, it wouldn't have been the meaty, British-style "rashers" they love so much. But I did have thin-sliced, packaged lunch ham from the deli section at the grocery store. Might that work? I decided I'd give it a try, got out the fry pan and went to work.

Ohmigod. That has to be the most delicious thing I've had since Christmas. I've been eating very carefully these days, slowly dropping excess poundage and keeping it off, so something as decadent and fattening as a bacon sarnie hasn't passed my lips in, well, just about forever.

Substituting the ham for the bacon worked well, for me. It's still very rich, and when fried until it's starting to brown and crisp, it's delicious. I always have wholegrain bread on hand, and by a strange stroke of serendipity, I even have a bottle of HP "brown" sauce, that British staple, in the fridge. And, because of all the mild, sunny weather we've had around here, The Girls (our five Rhode Island Red hens) have been fooled into thinking Spring is here and have started laying eggs again. So I fried one of those, breaking the yoke on purpose and cooking it until it was soft, not runny, and then put it on the bread with the ham.

The world seems to be righting itself, for now, and the weather is how it ought to be the second week in February – cold and snowy. Having that bacon (OK, ham-and-egg) sarnie really hit the spot. Was it calorific? Yes. Was it probably bad for me in a variety of nasty but subtle ways? Indubitably. But it was worth every single, savory and sensuous bite. Besides, tonight's dinner is spaghetti squash and salad. Look at the recipe I found!

Note: The photo is of the second half of the sarnie I made this morning. I ate it immediately after shooting the photo. There WAS a second photo, for a while, of the snow outside my window. But I didn't like it stuck at the bottom of the post, and Blogger wouldn't let me place it anywhere else without screwing up the text. Sometimes I hate Blogger.

*"bacon sarnie" is also Cockney rhyming slang for "Pakistani." I'm not gonna go there.

Voodoo heart

watch more at aniBoom

Saturday night cat blogging ...

... because only a cat can be this comfortable.

It's Witch Hazel!

"I love seeing the witch hazel outside the window when I wake up," Mr. Wren told me the other morning. "It's just so bright and cheerful."

I hadn't noticed that it was blooming, myself. But a little while ago I went out and looked, armed with the camera. I picked my way down the soggy path behind the house, trying not to get my feet tangled in Mr. Wren's wisteria prunings, which he left for picking up later. And then, there she was, illuminated by the setting sun: Witch Hazel.

We actually have two witch hazel shrubs. We planted them beneath the master bedroom window when we first moved into this house. Now they dominate the window, but witch hazels aren't at all dense with foliage. Instead, the long, whippy branches have big leaves every six inches or so along, alternating sides. In summer, they're thick and greeny-yellow and leathery. In the fall they slowly, slowly turn brittle and brown.

In winter, the leaves still cling to the branches, shriveled and rattling in the breeze. But then the tiny buds open, right in the coldest part of the year. The flowers are no bigger around than, say, a quarter, but they're all over both shrubs, tiny wild yellow mopheads, like scraggly pom-poms. They've no scent, just brilliant color. And, I discovered today, the local honeybees are quite fond of them.

I wanted witch hazel because of the winter-blooming flowers. But this is the first year -- 11 years after they were planted -- that they've had so many. It may be too warm around here for me these days, and too aggravatingly nice, but my witch hazels lift my spirits and remind me that winter isn't quite over yet.

The bare truth

I just have to say that I'm pretty tired of hearing the same ol' BS from the Republicans that we've heard for most of the last decade. That our Republican senators are so partisan, so politically motivated, and so full of their own sense of power and worth that they'd allow their own country to fall apart, literally and figuratively, just for the satisfaction of having thwarted the opposing political party, disgusts me.

Fortunately, since Jan. 20, my fellow Americans and I have someone on our side:

"In the last few days, we've seen proposals arise from some in Congress that you may not have read but you'd be very familiar with because you've been hearing them for the last 10 years, maybe longer. They're rooted in the idea that tax cuts alone can solve all our problems; that government doesn't have a role to play; that half-measures and tinkering are somehow enough; that we can afford to ignore our most fundamental economic challenges -- the crushing cost of health care, the inadequate state of so many of our schools, our dangerous dependence on foreign oil.

"So let me be clear: Those ideas have been tested, and they have failed. They've taken us from surpluses to an annual deficit of over a trillion dollars, and they've brought our economy to a halt. And that's precisely what the election we just had was all about. The American people have rendered their judgment. And now is the time to move forward, not back. Now is the time for action."

-- President Barack Obama,
speaking at the Energy Dept., Feb. 5, 2009

Thanks, Mr. President. Most of the Republicans are not going to listen, but we are. America is. And we'll remember who was working for who in the end.

Singing for love ...

Our local wren, as he sang for his mate in Italian musical terms:

Allegro, forte, delicamente, dolcessimo, expressivo, festivimente, fuocoso, animato, bravura, brillante, calore, con brio, gaudioso, magico, pastorale, scherzoso, soave, e sognando.

And in English: Brisk, loud, delicate, very sweet, expressive, cheerful, fiery, animated, bold, brilliant, with sparkle, warm, spirited, joyful, magical, peaceful and simple, playful, smooth and dreamy.

We heard this fellow while bringing in groceries from Costco a few afternoons ago. His song stopped Mr. Wren and me in our tracks as we listened and smiled and said, almost simultaneously, “Oh, I love that!"

To hear the Bewick’s wren’s songs, click here.