Writing from Glendale

I'm writing this from Glendale having come here on the bus yesterday. Tomorrow is our cookie bake. It turns out I am making the base for the Italian wedding soup for lunch. I also have to see if I can still make cookies.

I understand there is a big snowstorm on the east coast. We have had snow, too and it is very, very cold.

Wednesday we went to the library. It was the first clear day in a while. I wanted to get a book before it got sent back to its originating library and I had several to return. I also thought it would get us out.

Well, they're digging up alongside Wingra Creek. The intersection of Park and Wingra is not well shoveled and the sidewalk was deteriorating as we approached. I decided to go back. Elwood, who does not like backtracking, suggested we cross Wingra at South. There's a crosswalk and the down curb was shoveled. Normally I don't do this because there is not a stop sign on Wingra nor a light, but traffic was light enough and slow enough I thought we could manage it. Then I discovered the snowbank along the bike path. Okay, we'll walk along it to Fish and get onto the sidewalk there. I also found half a dozen cars parked along the road. Go around. Eventually we found where someone had shoveled through the snow to the bike path./ Much joy.

Our next surprise, or at least mine, was finding myself crossing a street and continuing on open sidewalk. Well, I thought it was open sidewalk. It turned out to be one of the lanes on the main street. In Elwood's defense, the opposite curb was plowed in and only a cut less than the width of a dog gave access to the sidewalk.

But here we were, in the street and we needed to get off of it. So we climbed the snowbank, me on hands and knees because it was too high to step over and too dense to slog through. This happened twice more on our return trip. Boy was I sore. I don't use those muscles. I did have that wonderful feeling of snow on my pant legs I remember from childhood. I haven't felt that for a long time and was quite surprised to find it locked away in memory.

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I am using the new little netbook I got recently with St. Luke's purse gift. It is easy to carry with me and J. resolved some of my issues with it last night. It has a web cam so hopefully skype calls using it will have video. My home system defaults to my telephone which does not have video but I will see how the wireless connection behaves when I return and we'll go from there.