After a 17-day break, it's time to get back to the routine. But on the last day of a break, one needs to make it special. And so it was, in an ordinary way...we slept in, had some breakfast, then went to Kroger. I pulled out our heavy coats and hats to do so, because it's downright frigid out there. It would be cold even by Rhode Island standards: 20s with the windchill driving it down to the teens. And in the evenings for the next few nights, it will be in the teens. Nevertheless, it was a bright blue day with patchy white clouds, almost the same color as Schuyler.

We were lucky to pick up some pork chops at Kroger, along with the usual things—milk, bread, bananas, orange juice—and even my oatmeal on sale! That was quite nice.

And then we spent the day together at home. I ended up doing a bunch of chores on and off—washing and drying the towels, sweeping the bathroom, refilling the water bottles for the car (before we went to Gatlinburg last year; ooops, in 2008, I mean, we got a 24-pack of bottled water and now we just refill the bottles from the water dispenser on the fridge), rearranging things in the truck and tossing some useless things away, sorting the magazines and putting together some to drop off at work—and I even did some brief craft-y items.

James was busy in the kitchen much of the afternoon. Juanita had given us not only a second turkey carcass, but also a spiral ham bone, so James started another stock pot of turkey soup, then went online and hunted up a ham bone recipe. He put the bone, a couple of cans of chopped tomatoes, some celery and onions, and some wheat berries in water and cooked up a soup which is rather like minestrone. James tossed some extra elbow macaroni in it, and we had it for supper.

In the meantime I sat and read the novel version of The House Without a Christmas Tree by Gail Rock and Kathryn Lasky's Christmas After All. These are two of the Christmas books I read every year. Christmas Tree has enough minor differences from the television version to make it all new again, and the Lasky book is just lovely: an Indianapolis family trying to survive the Depression. If there's any one thing I don't like about it, it's that the ending is a little bit "fairy tale" with the radio program becoming a big hit. Otherwise the characters are vivid—probably because Lasky based them on her own family—and the hardships of the Depression are realistically portrayed.

After more laundry stuff, we settled in to finally watch "The Waters of Mars" and the specials that accompanied it. Yeah, we're that far behind. I was having Doctor Who dreams that finally goaded me into it. "Waters" is a nice scary "monster tale," a bit like "Seeds of Doom" with the Doctor electing to play God at the last moment and getting "bitten" for it.

We'll have to watch the remainder as the week goes on (in between cleaning for the party...LOL).

Labels: books, food, television, weather

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