Sunday, March 22nd, 2015 -( -9°C / +16°F – With light ‘Snow-Globe’ snow falling at 11:30 am in Atlantic Canada )-

2 young deer seen through plastic from Cathi’s Zen Corner on March 16th.

— This is Cathi’s and my 13th Anniversary – based on our first face to face meeting. Seems impossible that it was thirteen years ago tonight that I caught a glimpse of her before she unchained the hotel door and decided I didn’t look like a serial killer and let me in. That glimpse filled me with “Holy [snar] – On a scale of 1 through 10 – She’s a 15. And I feel like a 5, and that might be stretching it quite a bit.” After driving from Fairfield County, Connecticut, up through and across New York State, crossing at Niagara Falls and finding the right hotel – close to her home territory – close enough to her home so if she took one look at me and wanted to run away screaming, she didn’t have that far to go – And if felt like it took me a whole lot longer than I expected to drive from 34 miles East of New York City to Buffalo and up to Niagara Falls, cross the border – and get a little bit lost in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada – I think I felt more like a “2” on the 1 through 10 scale. But, miraculously, she didn’t see it that way – and that one first hug probably saved my life, in more ways than one. I am definitely a lot happier than I imagined I ever could be. — I have this problem — fifteen or twenty minutes after meeting anybody I pretty much ‘know’ all the ‘reasons’ why a close, loving relationship with this or that person could never possibly work, unless I ignore the pain of dealing with intolerable attacks on my most precious sensibilities and sensitivities – or something like that. And I never saw, heard, of felt a hint of any irreconcilable differences between us. This was, and continues to be – magical.

— Today is also my cousin Debi’s Birthday –

— I was up early this morning, doing computer schnarr in my office here. And, glancing a bit to the left as the world outside’s detail emerged from the dark background that was all our ‘deer-cam’ / security camera could see earlier as it was pointed toward the back of the house and more precisely, the hill where the ‘committee’ of deer show up when they’re starving enough to come near humans who have, suspiciously enough, tossed oats or day old bread their way, and don’t smell like gunpowder… The light dusting of snow we got overnight looked like hallmark card material and I thought I better grab my camera and take some photos while wandering around in a reverie about thirteen years zipping by in a land that is not always this white on white – and holy cow, how can this be?

— At 7:30 this morning it was warmer, more like -1°C / +30°F . And Moe, the orange cat and a half, had been driving me nuts trying to scratch down the barrier that keeps him out of the office where he would be driving me even crazier, trying to scratch away any skin on my legs in his campaign to convince me that my job as a human is to serve the cats, which means I have to drop everything and either feed them until they explode or pet them until they let me know they’ve had enough by turning around and shredding my hand with one incredible quick bat of a paw before they bound away and meet and crack jokes about how they drew blood on those stupid humans they keep around for amusement.

Hallmark cards? Currier & Ives? Picturesque?

— Either Currier and Ives or the quality control freaks at Hallmark would ‘photoshop’ the slight imperfections out before signing their names to scenes like the one above. It was barely snowing and warm enough this morning so I didn’t get the ‘unreal’ feeling that sometimes approaches ‘suspended animation’. There are times when I look at these trees and the macrocosm around them and feel like I’m looking at something in a terrarium or a museum display.

March 18th, my father’s birthday. I was trying to capture the feel of the snow’s texture. – That and the depth it had blown since I’d shoveled it a few hours earlier.

Almost the exact same shot. I stared at both of these and compared them to see if either one ‘told the story’ any better than the other. I changed my mind several times.

— Last Sunday – ‘during’ -, and Monday – ‘after’ – Sunday’s ‘Ides of March Blizzard’, I was barely able to stand the cold and the whipping wind and felt something like overwhelmed past the breaking point by the task of digging out the driveway. My fingers felt like they’d been hit by hammers and burned with aggravated ‘pins and needles’ for quite a while every time I came in and tried to warm up. — Wednesday’s snowfall was almost a ‘why bother?’ but when I did wake up enough to jump up and check outside, I saw that the delightful snow plows had left us just enough of a ridge – two and a half feet tall? – at the end of the driveway to make it impossible to get out  of the driveway, and they’d also managed to swing by fast enough to throw a pile of snow more like four feet high where I had valiantly struggled to slice into the six foot high mountain along the driveway so we could actually get in and out –  but for whatever reason, I felt a whole lot better on Wednesday than I did on Monday – more like I had sunshine inside my head and could feel love for the whole universe even while digging down and tossing shovel loads of snow up over my head.  — oh, the snow-blower went on strike last week. It’s either frozen or needs a new widget to fix the gizmos that tell it to move after you put the shifter into either ‘Forward’ or ‘Reverse’ with its various gradations of power or speed or whatever those degrees between neutral and ‘all the way’ mean.

Yes, the mountain of snow blown and shoveled from the driveway is higher than the van.

— I took almost 40 photos this morning and some of them are more interesting than others. Of course, that’s subjective. Last night’s storm brought rain to Halifax and the southern extremities of New Brunswick. The local news people are warning people with flat roofs – businesses or whatever – to check and clear their roofs of snow before warming temperatures and rain adds weight to the already incredible amounts of snow on many rooftops up here. Several buildings have collapsed this winter, including at least one barn that was nothing like flat –  and that collapse killed several of one farmer’s best milk cows. This is our second winter in this area and people are telling us that this is unusual – and some of the climate change believers are saying, “Get used to it – even worse might be coming in the near future.” And some conspiracy believers are pointing at HAARP and explaining in scientific terms that what HAARP does is block the usual flow of moisture, creates droughts in California and send the ‘weather’ up and over their blockage and exacerbates the polar vortex nonsense that brings these previously unbelievable dumps of snow here in our little corner of reality.

This shot was taken from across the road, and maybe five yards or meters to the east- a different angle, but you can see the other side of the mountain here, and maybe recognize the jeep that began to emerge from beneath the snow piled around and on top of it.

— Here’s where the world begins to look like ‘white on white beside white against white’ and you don’t want a white car or a white house, because you might not be able to find it when the definition of snow-blind takes on a few new shades of – white – meaning. I probably should have ‘enhanced’ the above photo, but I don’t know if that would have only tortured PhotoShop – which is a noble enough endeavor – because when all the values are ‘white’ it’s hard to see what you’re doing – or trying to do.

A few steps farther east from the whiteness and this is our local cedar tree, a variation that seems to be really local. We had a hard time identifying it when we first got here.

— As I’ve been wondering if this entry or ‘post’ has gone over the line into ‘overkill’ I think there were a couple more photos here worth ‘sharing’. The above is one of them. Last winter I think a couple deer were able to get under this tree and maybe chew on a couple of evergreen bits – They’re not exactly needles. This year the deer can’t get anywhere near this tree. At least not in the past couple months.

“Deer Cam” – I like the “Q-See” brand, the colours are really good. Most other security cameras are way off. Maybe the idea there was – you should have to pay some geek from the company an extra hundred bucks to invade your privacy, ‘case’ your home for valuables, & then maybe adjust something esoteric to get the colours closer to reality, and make you feel like an idiot in the process. Oh, the black tape is electrical tape mixed in with duct tape. Helps me feel like a real do it yourselfer.

— I took this photo this morning and thought as I took it and again as I uploaded it from the SD card, that it looks like it could have been taken any time during the year.

We built this frame around and above the steel shed as a place to store our firewood. Looks like this year’s snow broke the frame, I think the middle and back pieces of wood are both broken. 🙁

— Yeah, you can see the snow that blew in around the shed and covered the last of our firewood before even more snow broke the frame there. 🙁

Two out of 42 photos this morning had either bits of snow reflecting the flash that I didn’t notice went off or we got our usual dose of ‘orbs’ These are a bit too golden or yellow to feel like reflected flash to me. I don’t know, what do you think?

— There are a lot of birch trees just to the right out of this shot, I actually did take several shots of those birches, and a couple more shots of evergreens looking picturesque or artsy – Maybe I’ll torture you with those some other time.

Cats in Cathi’s ‘Zen Corner’ – which is a bit more crowded this winter than usual, with the plant shelves from our mini greenhouse coming inside this year. Domino on the chair is wondering why Moe is inspecting my shoes so closely. Maybe he thinks a mouse might run out? & Oh, my pants on the chair to the left, got really wet while I was shoveling, and here they are almost fully dry.

—  Domino, the stripey – spotty Bengal rescue on the chair – spent the first year and a half since we moved here hiding out in ‘his’ bedroom. Now we’ve been trying to move his food out so he has to get brave and explore the world beyond his self imposed boundaries? And he’s strutting around and pulling stuff out of cradenzas and acting like he owns the place and if we’re nice, he’ll let us stay here with him. I couldn’t finish this monologue without bringing the cats into it. I might have already mentioned the orange guy, but here he is, staring at my running shoes, and I have no idea what he finds so fascinating about my shoes either, but he likes to try to get between my feet and whatever shoes I’m trying to put on, quite often. One of these days I might tell you that he almost looks like he’s grinning after sniffing my feet when they come out of shoes, the sweatier and stinkier the better. One of these days, I just might figure out cats. Then I probably will need a straight jacket.

— Happy Anniversary, Cathi, Traditionally, I’m supposed to give you something made of lace? The modernists think I should give you ‘textile furs’ instead. Last year’s ‘modern’ gift would have been Pearls – If I had any pearls of wisdom, would that count? So would a ‘textile fur’ be a ‘fake fur’? Um, I’m sorry, but I can’t think of any pearls of wisdom to elucidate that with.

~~~~~ Jim