Fun In The Snow Part 2....

.... or how an American and his ice hockey are never easily parted.

  We have had visitors from Columbus, Ohio. They had mixed feelings watching the dramatic shootout after the USA vs Russia game. The Russian goalie, Sergei Bobrovsky, plays for the Columbus team, the Blue Jackets. (They call him Bob). In fact most of the Russian team play in the American National Hockey League. A far cry from the Cold War days, not to mention the fact that they wear the Imperial double-headed eagle emblazoned on their shirts. (Actually most of the players in the Winter Olympics seem to play in the American National Hockey League, including a Slovene, who plays for Los Angeles. And yes, there is a Los Angeles ice hockey team).
  After the game, the visitors, all fired up, headed for our neighbour's frozen pond with their hockey sticks and a couple of brooms and snow shovels.  "Of course it's safe", hubby said in answer to my anguished wails, "You could drive a tank over it."
"Let me take a photograph", I said, "Of my husband speaking his last words."

Fun in the Snow

 When the big snowstorm was signalled last week and everyone told to stay indoors, we had to be in Rochester, which is two hours away. We thought about it and hubby being, in my opinion, the best snow driver in the western hemisphere, we decided to chance it.
This was our lane. Believe me, there's a road under there somewhere.

And this was the motorway. Ditto.

 Someone once told me that, when you're going to drive in snow, you should have a checklist: a blanket, a shovel and a bag of cat litter. Cat litter? (Or rather kitty litter, as the Americans call it. They've now invented a lightweight kind, I notice from the TV commercials. They show someone throwing it at their next door neighbour. Not at their cat at least. Can't see the point myself.)  That's for scattering in front of the car to help get it out of a snowdrift. Oh yes and long underwear, a full tank and make sure your phone's charged up. Of course real people never remember all that.

The sign below says "Text Stop". These are new signs and the latest careful use of taxpayers' money.

We passed four cars, a pickup truck and a school bus skidded off the road. Luckily none of them looked really nasty.

The trick, hubby says,  is to find the right set of ruts to drive along. Of course there wasn't a snowplough in sight.

Until we reached the outskirts of the city which was no longer two hours away. More like four.

But we got there. It took two days for hubby's hands to unclench. If it was me, we'd have been in a ditch in the first five minutes.

A Great Bear Story

 

As we shiver in the vicious cold, all self-respecting bears are hibernating. But I still yearn for the day when I might see one. In the meantime, I continue to collect bear stories . And I heard a good one yesterday from a lady I met ski-ing. Always when you get a few Western New Yorkers together, the conversation turns to bear stories and this was hers.
  It was summer. Around 11.30pm and she was in her kitchen. The back door had one of those screens that keep mosquitoes out that everyone has around here. It means that, when it's warm, you can leave your door open and let the air in through the screen. It was very lucky that she hadn't done this. Extremely lucky in fact. Her back door was closed. She heard a rattling sound. She looked out through the glass panels and saw, to her horror, two giant paws up against the screen. And not just up against it. Shaking it. She screamed blue murder, her husband, aroused, grabbed his gun and the bear went lumbering off. But the next day it was back, grabbed the screen with both paws and wrenched it off the door. Point made, they didn't see it again. Never a dull moment here.

Cuba in the Snow

 Well it has been a bizarre winter....

 All right, I mean Cuba, New York, a pretty little town some 20 minutes from us along the motorway, famous for its lake and Cheese Shoppe. Above is the Church of Our Lady of the Angels, one I thoroughly recommend because, a) there's very little yacking in the pews as you come in, b) they have proper hymns with proper tunes and best of all, c) no one asks you to stand up and introduce yourself, hugs you, or tries to hold your hand. This is highly unusual in American churches and for me, pure bliss.

Cuba is full of sweet, old Western New York houses, some in better repair than others.

The beautiful place below sold last year for - guess how much?

165,000 dollars. That's a hundred grand to you and me. You couldn't get a broom cupboard in London for that. And it was in good nick too. But there's a reason. I did a little research and discovered that the property tax on it was over 12,000 dollars a year. The same goes for a big old farmhouse with a gigantic barn and a couple of hundred acres around the corner from us. It's been on the market for years. It's the ridiculously high taxes in this non-affluent area that put buyers off. Which explains why so many people and businesses want to leave New York state. And so much for trying to regenerate Western NY.

Still, in more prosperous times, Cuba, like its namesake, must have been a swanky place to live.

Life in the Freezer

 

Until now I never appreciated just what the term "biting cold" meant. It's so cold I don't even want to go outside. Every foray to the shops demands fur boots, a long, quilted coat (marketed for "hockey moms" forced to sit for hours in chilly arenas) and my silly hat with ears and scarf attached that hubby says makes me look like a bobcat. I bought it as a joke but it's come into its own. My car still has the layers of snow on it from days ago, even sitting in the garage, it hasn't fallen off.
  And our furnace (what Americans call the boiler) packed up this morning. I was woken by a grim-faced hubby, "I've called them out but in the meantime the oven's on and open so at least the kitchen'll be warm." He had also rigged up the old toaster oven in the sitting room but I counselled against it as I could already smell burning.  Maybe we should get a wood stove, like many of our neighbours. Though of course, these days, you have to get one to comply with all sorts of environmental regulations which make it cost a lot more. Which will be extremely bad news for people here in rural Western New York, struggling to make ends meet. But of course the ideologues sitting in their warm Manhattan pads couldn't give a monkeys.
  Anyway, I'll say one thing for this country, the repair people were out in about 20 minutes and fixed the problem. I doubt I'd get that sort of service in London.

Cookies* (Kukis) to Canada

As in coals to Newcastle. Sort of, anyway.  When I was in Jakarta last month,  I acquired a packet of coconut biscuits. "Kukis Kelapa" in the local lingo.Homely with a nice exotic twist, I thought. Maybe it's all the Dutch influence, I thought. Good pressie for hubby, I thought. So I lugged them back in my wheelie bag via Tokyo and Washington and Tampa and finally what remained of them at least, to Buffalo. And delicious they were too. Then I read the wrapper. And guess where these biscuits I got in Indonesia and dragged half way across the world originated from? Canada. More to the point, Burlington, Ontario, which is a couple of hours from us across the border. Is this what they call globalisation? I was just a mite disappointed but would have been more disappointed if they didn't taste so good. I'll have to look for them in WalMart.

*It is very rarely and with great regret that I bring myself to use the word "cookie", trying as I am to cling to the English language. However in this case it makes a catchier phrase. As, apparently, the Indonesians think too. Kukis. Huh.

I Counted Them All Back

I must admit that, during all my travelling jaunts of the past month, part of me was worrying. I heard tell of the terrible cold blast back home in Western New York, of plunging temperatures unheard of for decades, even in that chilly corner of the world. And I thought about our bird feeder hanging sad and empty on the porch and kicked myself for not making better arrangements to keep the little guzzlers fed. Coming back late last night, I half expected arrays of tiny frozen corpses - well all right, I do have a vivid imagination.  Before I'd even started to unpack, I rushed to fill the feeder again, risking life and limb climbing on the wicker porch chair, which always reminds me that I have to find a better means of ascent before I break my neck.
  This morning, things started slowly. Just one chickadee. A lone survivor?  I waited in trepidation. Then, a sudden flash of red - the cardinal, safe and sound. Then along came the nuthatch, feeding upside down in his disconcerting way. Then the finches appeared and soon left, disgusted I'd forgotten to include the thistle seed. Then more chickadees - four, five six... and finally, with a flourish, Woody the downy woodpecker. All present and correct! That just leaves the juncos and doves but they don't use the feeder anyway. I felt like BBC correspondent Brian Hanrahan in the Falklands War, famously watching the Harriers return safely to the aircraft carrier and not being allowed to say how many there were, announced, "I counted them all out and I counted them all back."
  (And any more complaining squawks about tardy filling of the feeder will from now on fall on deaf ears.)