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Brrrrrrrrrr
It’s weird to think that this is the same winter during which I’ve complained about the lack of cold and snow and overall winter-ness. This week Mother Nature decided to show us that, yes indeed, winter is real and it’s
spectacular. Not only have the temps been somewhere between
Ice Station Zebra and freezing, we’ve had a parade of storms.
There’s another one due this Sunday, and then more on Tuesday. A few inches expected with each one, though the TV meteorologists haven’t been exactly on-the-nose with their forecasts. There’s so much technology, so many fancy mobile weather vehicles, so many computer models (European! American! That other one!) that it just confuses everything. When you give all of the possible weather outcomes, you’re really giving none.
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Just to live in New England in winter is a full-time job; you don’t have to ‘do’ anything. The idle pursuit of making-a-living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.” E.B. White,
A Report in January, 1958
Sadly, the weather that Mr. White described in his essay hasn’t materialized around these parts this winter. We had a couple batches of snow early in the season, but since then there hasn’t been much at all, certainly nothing you could describe as “wild.”
Random notes I jotted down this week …
January is a weird month. Christmas is a nice distraction from our regular lives, but there’s always a bit of a letdown when the new year rolls around, even in years when we don’t have to social distance and wear a mask to buy milk. It’s those post-holiday blues that make everything feel a little “off.” No more trees in our living rooms or lights in our window or peppermint bark for another year.
We stay inside more during the winter months and even more so right now. I’ve gotten to know my friends Mrs. Smith, Sara Lee, and Little Debbie a little too well. But whatever gives us comfort.
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The Best Laid Plans …
This is the week we really dug in and started to concentrate on all of the New Year’s resolutions we wrote down after the holidays. This is also the week that many of us abandoned those resolutions. Humans are very hard to figure out sometimes.
The experts there are resolution experts say that if we want our resolutions to be successful, they have to be specific and not the general proclamations we make every year. Small steps. So instead of saying, “I’m going to save money this year!” you have to figure out exactly how much money you want to put aside every week and make concrete plans on what to cut out. Instead of saying, “I’m going to lose weight!” you need to actually keep track of what you’re eating and figure out how much exact weight you want to lose and give yourself a deadline. Instead of saying, “I’m going to be happier this year!” actually deactivate your social media accounts.
’Tis the season of Zuzu’s Petals.
I’m gearing up for my annual viewing of
It’s a Wonderful Life. Contrary to old jokes and expired trivia, it’s only on broadcast TV a few times a year, ever since NBC bought the TV rights in 1994. (It airs Christmas Eve at 8 p.m.) But if you miss that, it’s playing on the E! Network, which is owned by NBC, all day long on Christmas.
It’s a Wonderful Life is not only my favorite Christmas movie of all time, it’s my favorite movie period. It’s a perfect blend of realism and fantasy, of light romance and dark themes (parts of the movie are practically film noir), a film that pretty much sums up what life is all about, or at the very least what life should be about, beautifully acted and written and directed. It’s the movie the Earth should put in a time capsule to tell future visitors what we were all about.