Over the weekend we "gobbled" up the rest of the first season of Downton Abbey and took a small bite out of the second season. We are loving this series! The costumes, the acting--everything makes it a top-notch production.

We have also been gobbling up the food from this cookbook:

This is the cookbook I've talked about in another post that is British, but with American measurements and vocabulary as well as the British. (Remember: take one Swede …?) Not only is it a beautiful book to just browse through, but everything we've made so far has been a big hit: Chicken Pot Pie with Tarragon and Leeks (simple and delicious); Tamale Pie, that you top with a cornbread mixture that has green chiles mixed in; and this delicious lunch yesterday, Creamy Pancetta and Onion Tart. Yum!

Rick has declared the Chicken Pot Pie to be the best he's ever tasted! Unfortunately I don't have these recipes entered in to our recipe book just yet. But soon!

We didn't do much else over the weekend, it was too cold for most outdoor activities since we are below freezing again. We had a little skiff of snow, maybe an inch, on Saturday night. Just enough that Rick felt he had to clear the driveway. Nuisance snow. And we're supposed to get more of those in the coming week.

We managed to take the dogs for a walk and split some more wood for the wood stove and fireplace.

Other than that, Rick worked on our web sites--getting us running under new software and fine tuning things. Some of you may have experienced difficulty leaving a comment, or possibly searching the archives. We think it's working properly now, but please let us know if you encounter anything odd or can't leave a comment. (Use the Contact Me button at the top.)

P.S. The cookbook is available on Amazon.com.

Today our house will be without power for about five hours. On purpose! Today is the day we have a new electrical panel installed complete with a transfer switch for routing our generator into the household circuitry. It’s not the best planning since it’s still below freezing during the daytime, but today is the day the electrician had the time.

We’ve bumped the heat up about five degrees higher than we normally keep it to get the house really warm and the wood fire is burningly brightly.

We plan to hang out in the sun room around the wood stove for the duration of our power outage. We’ll put up the card table and start a puzzle. I’ve got plenty of books for reading (thanks to my library visit) and my iPad is fully charged. For lunch we’ll probably load the dogs in the truck and eat somewhere in town or maybe we’ll venture up to the winery café.

It’s an inconvenience, but one we hope we’ll be glad we did next time the power goes out for real. Until then we’ll just do all we can to stay warm!

(photo: eBay last night cuddling with Rick’s wooly hand-knitted slippers [knit by me!])

High atop a snow bank in the grocery store parking lot, there sits a lonely little grocery cart. It’s been stuck in the snow since the Christmas storms when it got swept up by the snow plows. It almost made a break for freedom during our recent thaw, but got caught once again in the plow’s path in our storm earlier this week.

I feel kind of sorry for it. Left out of the daily cart round-ups. No one to push it through the heated, well-lit aisles. It’s spacious basket not filled up with goodies that it was meant to hold.

With our expected below-freezing daytime temperatures this coming week I think it might be there for a while.

Do you see what I see? I was correct when I said Alex would find a use for my squirrel.

Even though I am not proud of this particular snow sculpture, I wanted to show you that I actually did go out yesterday and build this little squirrel. You probably could not identify it as such if I hadn’t told you what it was, right? I have to admit that I did not take a lot of time in its creation.

I tried to make the tip of the tail curl outward but it kept falling off.

My Snow Bear was much better a few years back. Take a look.

My father was the master snow sculpture person. I spent a good hour this morning going through the old family photos looking for one in particular. I finally found it at the very bottom of the last stack of photos. Here it is:

The back of the photo says that my father created “The Masterpiece” on May 22 (?) 1951. It must have been a late spring snowstorm or the date stamp is incorrect! I call her the Snow Lady. She must have been huge by the looks of her. (In more ways than one.)

He also created an igloo for my sister and me one year out of a huge snowdrift. We’ve both looked high and low for that photo, but it seems to have gone missing somehow over the years. A shame, that.

I’ll try and do a better job with our next packable snow. Until then the Snow Squirrel will probably be used as a leg-lifting post for Alex.