I think I’m becoming a gear head. I had breakfast with a friend yesterday. When we first sat down, the restaurant was quiet–too cold (15 degrees) for people. Then four people came in and sat and started talking.

Bobbi said, “I can’t hear you,” and pulled out a small, flat control panel with buttons to tap. She showed me how if she pushed one button, another place lit up. “It’s louder now.” She pushed it again and I could hear a small noise it made, a tick-tick.

“I want one of those,” I said. I asked her how much her hearing aids cost. She told me. They were about what I paid for mine. Why didn’t I get a  control panel for my hearing aids? Should I have told my audiologist I was becoming a gear head and needed more flat panels with places to touch that made a red light go on?

Of  course, the ultimate control panel is an i phone. I want one.

Snow, lovely snow. It fell in the night and covers all the dirty piles of snow, the ugly ice, sand, salt and dirt on the pavements and lawns.

It’s light, powder snow, full of glittering crystals. The ugly mounds of snow are now like hills of confectionary sugar. No wind has come up yet, at 6:30, to blow it all away.

The trees are still, with white icing on their limbs. They wait for dawn and perhaps a wind.

It’s now 34 degrees and that means melting. The giant icicles that hang from the gutters on the main building at Creamery Brook will loosen today. First they’ll start dripping and then–if it goes up to 44 degrees–drip faster and then some will lose their grip and crash to the ground.

The small forest behind our cottage is white this morning with accents of brown. (I know it’s a swamp but in this time of perfection, it’s a forest.) I want to go out and frolic in the snow piles, but it’s all a stage set and I would stub my toe.

to write about the snow. I’m not going to talk about the snow. I’m not going to complain about the snow. I shall sit here and contemplate it

It is falling. It is falling fast. It is falling thickly.

It has started to blow.       No it hasn’t.

There is no reason to talk about the weather. It is very boring. It is particularly boring here as it is snowing. Now it is medium size flakes. Soon it will be tiny, eensy, beensy flakes that you can only see when the streetlight outside my living room is burning. In the dark. It is not dark now. I shall relieve my boredom by going to the weather channel on my computer…again…and reading the latest estimate of the amount of snow we will get. Did I tell you it is snowing here?

Soon I will write about something different.   Soon.

Talk about poor planning. We leave Fort Myers Beach on a lovely Sunday morning–sunny, breezy, a forecast for the high 70’s–to return to North Eastern Connecticut. where it was promised to be in the twenties–but sunny! And it was. there seemed to be a lot of snow on the ground.

The next day it snowed. And stopped. Just about the time I said, Oh, guess that’s all, it started blizzarding: ferocious wind and snow. And since i hadn’t yet had a chance to do a thorough grocery shopping, we fought our way to the Big House for a hot dinner.

Now, at the end of the same week, we face a milder storm, but one that lasts for several days. Tuesday or maybe Wednesday, we’ll have sun again. And what do I see on my handy weather station by LaCrosseTech? It’s -3 out there at 5:30 am.

Why, oh why am I living here!

My daughter-in-law gave me a gift. It’s a book called My Dysfunctions. It’s published by Knock Knock, “…a trademark of Who’s There, Inc.” Published, where else? In Venice, California.

 At the bottom of every page are four little pictures under “What would make it better today”: a burning cigarette, a martini glass, a pill and a syringe, which at first sight, I thought was a knife. A knife! Not a knife: something to use to inject yourself with a feeling-good liquid. Hm, I never thought of that.

Dysfunctions. Now why did she give me a book about that? I don’t have any dysfunctions. I know I might have had, but that’s in the past. This is the present. And I’ taking a wonderful new drug for my depression.  All that dysfunction stuff is in the past.

Tra la!

Isn’t it?