Not So Deep, but Crisp and Even, Yeah

and cold as a MO-FO! I mean, Jesus Mary and Joseph did the temperature ever turn north, or, south, depending on your perspective.

Yesterday we had snow the better part of the day. A few stray flurries for about an hour or so, at which point the pace picked up and the flakes feel steadily and with great purpose. I decided to use this and the bum knee as an excuse to stay in and de-clutter my digs for a few hours. Between Christmas wrapping paper and paper-paper - magazines, newspapers, loose bills, stacked, three-whole-punched and sorted in binders - I have a knack for collecting paper. I went ahead an recycled some of the Christmas wrap, which made me feel mildly guilty because I feel I should store and use a second time. But who, I ask, has the room to store stuff for 11.5 months in order to use it but once more? Not I, I reason.

I also took some of my fabric stash and having cleared my white wooden bookshelf of old family photo albums (now on my hall closet shelves), placed it there. I have decided that I really could use a small basement storage space for things like paint tins and theses research and summer clothes-filled valises, but I don't have one and so I make do.

So it snowed and it snowed and because I like being out in this kind of weather - it makes me feel hardy, in touch with the elements and not at the mercy of winter, therefor subject to cabin fever - I decided to take a walk. I needed a new special sewing needle and decided to see how far I would get in making my way to the downtown Fabricville store, where this week they are half-off. By the time I made it as far as Westmount, the snow had picked up. I back-tracked a block to pick up an album I had admired a few days prior, still in a bin outside the shop but now covered by a think layer of snow. The sticker I had seen on it must have been the original price, because when I went to pay I learned the cost was, in fact, a dollar! A dollar for dream. Heading west again, I made it as far as Greene Avenue, where I eventually ducked in to the metro and finished the remainder of my walk courtesy of the subway. I spent too much time at the fabric store, and used great restraint only to exit the premises and see a full-blown blizzard had developed! The first of the season.  A 1970s-era whopper of a winter storm.  I trudged northwards to catch the bus on Sherbrooke at Parc, which for all the wind and blowing snow might just have been called Snowlandia. I imagine it was only around 4:30 pm by then, but it was cold and blowing and kind of exciting, too. Came home and made myself some warm milk with a dash of egg nog and Lordy, was it nice! Made me drowsy, too and so I fell asleep on the sofa, far too early, tree lights blinking close by.

One would expect to wake up to many feet of snow after such a storm, but no, there's actually very little. We have, for all intents and purposes, received scant snow this winter of 2010. I don't expect it will last, but the fact that we have made it this far already already shortens the winter substantially, which means a lot when you live in a place where the first tiny blooms are only expected to poke their heads up from the earth come April.

(I guess this was a "neither here, nor there" kind of post, not about this and not about that. A bit about paper and the cold, and yesterday's snowfall and my new-old record album. Should these posts have a focus? Is there a responsibility there? I'm not sure. I am thinking on it, though).