Petronia

I am not in Somalia, I am not in Gaza, I am not in Minneapolis, so mustn't complain. But there are still fretful niggles.

There's been a musty smell in my house for several days now. Something has died somewhere. Probably a mouse, because trust me, rats smell worse. Went down to the basement to do a wash and found no corpuses so must be in a vent somewhere. If I didn't have a super nose I probably wouldn't even notice it but I do and it bothers me. It will disappear eventually and meanwhile I've broken out my stash of incense. 

My garbage hasn't been put out this year and is beginning to pile up. I never do have much garbage and once a month usually does me, but I think we're at seven weeks now. But my garbage bin is under two feet of snow. No matter. I have those pricey tags you can put on extra bags so the garbage guys will take them. They're on the kitchen table. Only they aren't. They're not to be found anywhere in the kitchen. No doubt I put them in the proverbial Safe Place and will never find them again until I buy new ones, available only at Shoppers where I will not be going any time soon. So fine. Put on boots, take shovel, and remove snow so I can heave my bin from its snowy bed. Of course there's no place to put it afterwards so it's lying on its side, half on the path. Must put garbage out tomorrow afternoon because there's not enough space for the walker on the path.

Since my lenses have been on backorder for six weeks now, with occasional updates saying Still on backorder should come in soon!, yesterday morning I ordered another box of 30 from the pricey but reliable company. And I mean pricey: for what a month's supply cost me I could have got a new bar fridge. So of course yesterday afternoon, comes the email from company 1 saying Your order has shipped. Well, great. I am well-supplied with lenses now. Only, this morning company 2 tells me their lenses are on backorder too. I wish there was a way to cancel that order only I'm not seeing it. But at least I'm supplied until September.

Going downstairs in the morning means going back to weighing myself every morning. To console me for everything else, I dropped another half pound yesterday,  to a weight not seen since 2022. Yay water and bike machines!

Rabbit, rabbit.

Slightly warmer today, with sun, and I had thoughts about going out and shovelling more snow off the bins, but instead sat on the couch with hot beanbag wraps and finished Flora's Fury. I'm a little sad that she didn't finish the series but on balance, maybe not. Flora is really hard to take for long. Impetuous characters who never stop to think are so not my bag.

I distinctly remember buying lean hamburger once and registering it as a mistake because it was too dry to make good fried rice with. Something must have changed in the rubrics because I used lean to make beef stroganoff on Friday and it was so fat I had to soak it up with paper towels. Couldn't drain it because I added it to the vegetables I'd sauteed first-- mushrooms, onions, broccoli and cabbage. If I eat meat, it's going to be well padded with veg. Maybe if I'd served it with rice or noodles but I'm still trying to keep the starches low.

To which end it seems I lost 5.7 pounds in January (that's 2.5 kilos more or less), so my modifications are working. Yes, no alcohol works wonders. No, I still hate it.

Didn't want to get up this morning. Bed so warm, world so cold. Checked my phone in bed and saw 47 has taken to wearing a glove on his left hand to hide the bruising,  like Cosmo Gilt. Yeah, could be because of aspirin use-- I used to get amazing bruises back in my aspirin and codeine days-- but someone cheerfully remarked that the Queen had a similar bruise on her hand when greeting Lettuce Liz, and two days later she was dead. Of course if he's taking aspirin he's less likely to have a stroke, which is unfortunate, but maybe the Big Macs will do for his heart.

Is still freezing out because wind chill. Went out and scraped packed snow off front walkway and a bit of the sidewalk, but there's ice underneath. It comes up if you hack at the right angle but that irritates my touchy neck vertebrae so I couldn't finish. Removed a bit of the snow mountain in front of the bins and the gas meter. Bins aren't going out any time soon and new company is making noises about not taking bagged recycling like the city used to, but the gas reader is coming next week. Mind, the gas co. should just do another estimate this month and cut their losses.

Reading is still Dr. Siri but I wanted a break and some easily understood classical English mystery,  so I got a .99 special (and why doesn't this keyboard have a cents sign? I can have £ and € and ¥, but cents, no.) It was very silly and I deleted it from my account so I don't even know what it was called. Then had recourse to a Dr. Priestley, but Rhode has a verbal tick that increasingly grates. Whenever a witness is asked about an event, the answer begins with either 'I'll tell you how it was' or 'It was like this.'  Ah well. Back to Dr. Siri.

Dead tree is Flora's Fury to get it off the shelf. I should read at least Flora's Dare to refresh the memory, but Libby doesn't have it and it's non-circulating at the library. Still, the world building is a lot of fun and I'm enjoying it.

No, sorry, that's no 7-10 cm out there. It's damn near the 30 cm/ 1 foot they said would happen with lake effect, if not in fact more. Can't tell with the wind blowing: my porch alone had 15 cm piled up on it. My good neighbour(s) (plural because both J and C have snowblowers-- saw them hobnobbing as they cleared their respective frontages) snowblew the front walkway and sidewalk some time this morning. I went out at noon and did the steps and the accumulation on the walkway. Four hours later I went out and removed a foot off the steps and six inches from the walkway. Came in and as I was taking off my boots good neighbour C came and cleaned my steps again. Yes it is snowing that hard. My icon is exactly what's happening. Am bitterly regretting that dry January I decided on.

My weather memory is off, which disturbs me. I keep thinking this amount of snow is unusual, but it's not. We had a lot last year, not just the big dump in February, a major snowstorm in 2022, and enough in 2023. It was only 2024 that was dry enough for shoes. And for that matter, we had a January thaw in the second week. It was 15 on my birthday.

A balmy 'feels like -9 / 16F' out there so, having survived the high winds and -20 of yesterday, thought to try my luck getting up to Loblaws, because of course tomorrow is Moar Snow. Again, not forecast to be the huge dump of elsewhere. 7-10 cm ie 2-4 inches, like Wednesday. But not easy to be out in and possibly making home delivery a problem, what with snow berms on either side of my street.

Walking wasn't too bad. Ice ridges in the street where snow plows dumped their loads but the corners themselves flattened enough to be passable. A few houses on my block had cut narrow passages for the able-bodied, a few hadn't shovelled at all, but the next block was clear all the way. Except it was clear because someone-- and it must have been the city's contracted snow cleaners because no one else has that kind of largesse-- had dumped piles of salt every few metres and then spread a cm over the entire sidewalk. I do not understand how any of this works, and I'm not even sure the city is still contracting their cleaning out.

Being on a Dr. Siri roll and having exhausted the paperback versions, got the next one in ebook from the library. (Parenthetically, this is a typical winter in that getting dead tree from the library is suspended until at least March.) But either the format or the actual three-strand plot of I Shot the Buddha had me beat. Half way through I had to go back and start again, and when finished, had to go back and reread several passages a third time.  Almost as bad/ good as Diana Wynn Jones or early Ima Ichiko for twistiness. I think there are only three more of these so on I go.