DollsArtCats

Though today I woke up and there was no snow! Maybe Canada has finally shut the freezer door.

I saw this on an endcap at Target, and as a perfectly happy drinker of box wine at chain restaurants, I thought, "How bad can it be?" My first clue: Also the label says that it is a "blend of wines". It does not say "reminiscent of the water left on top of glasses in your dishwasher mixed with a hint of rubbing alcohol and perhaps a touch of Windex"; because then even the gorgeous label would not help make you buy it. There are several tarot cards/labels you can buy of the same vintage; but for the price of three of these bottles, you could buy a very lovely, complete deck and not have to dispose of the "wine". And now a blurry photo of the January Supermoon.  Outside temperature: (The plumber who helped stop the flood came this morning to work in the unheated garage and do a bit of pipe removal outside. It helps that he is a Chicago native, but still.) Cat thermometer:               And this lamp came today, a Christmas p...

It's early to be this cold--I had to unplug my bubblers because the pond froze solid even with them running.

Over at Bored Panda there are some incredible photos of the interior of a cold storage building in Chicago. It was neglected for years and ice built up inside, annoying for the new tenants, but fun for photographer Gary Jensen. Closer to home, J has made a rake to pull snow off the roof, hoping to prevent more ice dams. And Home Depot has taken a beating this winter--one of the support columns is drooling ice and the parking lot is in tough shape too. It was already busy in there and once the weather warms up, we will be swarming all over the store, to fix all the winter-trashed things.

That was the temperature when I got up this morning. The horse trough heater seems to be working, heating my kettle o' fish (if these koi are alive in the spring I will be amazed.) One degree doesn't seem to bother Chicagoans..there isn't much snow and the roads are so salty, ice can't get a foothold, so they are bare and dry, and busy with morning traffic. Schoolchildren wait for the bus inside a local mom's van, though, parked at the side of the road. I had to go walk down to the mailbox to mail a letter, a distance of about 200 feet from the door, and I had clogs, wool socks, long underwear, jeans, a t-shirt, a fleece hoodie, a Costco "pelt" (basically a polyester leopard skin lined with goretex and a zipper up the front), sheepskin gloves and a batik sarong wrapped around my head and neck, (since I was only going to the mailbox, I could look insane). I still got ice crystals on my eyelashes. A good thing about Chicago is that you can find cold wea...