Time for a breather

     Busy month around here...anyone else?!?  (So much for the it's-winter-and-I'll-get-caught-up-on-projects idea.)

     Let's see, we've spent a lot of time in the car getting from here to there.  Sweet Pea's done gym classes, an oral report skit with required practices, drama class with final performance, piano lessons and special practices for a performance, five most-of-the-day sessions of a free enterprise mock-town experience, a Valentine party, hang-out times with friends, church and church activities...you get the idea.  Then there's the round of colds that went through our family (SP's on her second one).  Oh, yeah, and we did school.

     So I think things are settling down a bit, at least for a couple of weeks.  It's time to get well and get back to our routine.

     I have to give a wonderful recommendation for an audio version of Great Expectations that we listened to from the library.  It's a BBC production and is narrated by Martin Jarvis--absolutely outstanding.  He does all the voices so distinctively that you think it's a whole cast of people.  After we finished it, we checked out the Masterpiece Theater version of the story, but gave up early on because we so loved the characters we'd come to "see" in our minds with Jarvis' performance that the visual seemed a betrayal of it!

     As much as I enjoy the Olympics, I'll be glad when they're done--they rather dominate our evening time.  And they're so...cold.  I guess my Arizona upbringing still stirs in my chilled winter veins.  I'm trying to remember what it feels like to sweat.

    

Mid-winter doldrums

February tends to be the month where I would like to pack my suitcase, get in the car, and go anywhere (except where it's colder or grayer).  I'm daydreaming about yard work, Vitamin D that comes from the sun instead of a bottle, vacation destinations, no school, birds singing, and the glories of spring.

It's not that I don't like winter; it has it's own beauties.  I like the lack of yardwork and outdoor projects so I can get caught up on indoor stuff.  I love the beauty of snow, the coziness of slippers and afghans and hot tea, of the fireplace crackling of an evening. 

Today God shared a special winter scene with me.  I was out for a walk circling a frozen lake in the thin mid-afternoon sunshine, and there, spread before me on the lake, were hundreds of Canadian geese, all fluffed out and settled down for their naps on the ice--and all facing the same direction.  So peaceful, so striking with their dark heads and markings against the white ice.  Behind them, the dark, jagged skeletons of bare trees edged the lake and in the distance, the long blue mountain range stretched out as far as I could see in either direction, topped with snow-capped peaks.  Wow.  Wish I'd had my camera.

So I'm trying to savor the season and fill my restless mind with thankfulness, and do things that refresh my spirit. 

Is it spring break yet?