A rather indolent day.

I woke, enclosed in mist and fog and darkness

and more or less confined to barracks because of snow and ice

These great drifts of snow that engulfed us on the week-end are piled high beside driveways and sidewalks, as folk try to clear a way through.

The temperature rises, and occasionally it rains, and then freezes.

My son, on the Chilcotin Plateau, told me last night that there were at least five levels of ice buried in the snow drifts there, which makes snow removal by hand treacherous on the heart and muscles, but not too bad if you have some heavy equipment handy (which they have).

  I have a video to show you just how easy it is up there in the Caribou!!  A piece of cake.....

I spent the first part of the morning devising a makeshift bird feeder that I could hang from the railing on the porch, there being too much snow for me to reach the regular feeders which now look like a cross between a ski chalet and an asian pagoda.

A long length of linen from my weaving stash and a deep aluminium pie plate that I could use the hole punch on, and the little birds were once again frequenting the food bar.

That finished, the fog began to lift a little, and as I had mid-morning coffee

I could see trees on the mountain, outlined faintly.  The air a quarter of a way up the mountains 

is a pretty blue, but beyond that all is overcast in grey.

The rest of the day I have been spinning. disciplining myself to finish the 

brilliant green roving before I start on the last indulgence

at the Naughty  (Knotty)  Knitter, - 

a plait of varigated mauves and greens and rose merino that I hope

someday will be a lovely lacy pair of socks.

Wallace Stegner's early book, Remember Laughter,

sits on the table beside my chair along with my knitting,

and so January will idle its way into a February thaw

and eventually Snowdrops and Lenten Roses,

and I will give up indolence and begin to poke around for first green shoots....