I sure am glad I don’t live in the northern ‘burbs because they’ve been blasted with snow the last week or so, and we’ve remained unscathed. Whew!
Monday morning when I left for my walk, the blah-looking lawns looked sugar-coated from a heavy frost, and I heard, before I saw, my neighbor scraping her car windshield rather vigorously so she could get going on her long commute to work. I wasn’t sure which was louder, the cursing or the ice scraper as it grated across the glass. Ouch! The gray sky and blustery wind made the 25-degree temperature feel pretty brutal for the second week in March, so I wasn’t surprised to arrive at the Park and discover I was the only one there and I mean the ONLY one. The entire Creek was frozen over, so no ducks or geese were in the water, and the squirrels decided to hunker down in their cozy nests. There was not even a single cheep or tweet coming from the trees.
Thus, it was one of those days to just get the steps done and not sightsee or meander off the beaten path.
Today, at least the sun put in an appearance, though it was a pale imitation of the real deal, and it was a whopping 28 degrees. The Creek was still frozen over, so no ducks or geese, nor the elusive heron, were out and about. But, that sun apparently made all the difference in the world to the squirrels, because I had a welcoming committee and a lot of tap dancing around my feet while I struggled to get the Ziploc bag of peanuts opened without removing my gloves. The more I fumbled, the more impatient they grew. I must have a better method to dispense peanuts in the Winter time … I’ll work on that for next Winter. Meanwhile, let’s get over this Winter first. A week from today is the first day of Spring, and, I suspect it will be a calendar date only, since there is no significant warm-up slated for the near future. But … it could be Boston – oh, those poor Bostonians.
After all the hype, March Madness has finally arrived. I have a little March Madness of my own to share – another shadow picture, though I am missing my sidekick for this photo. Last week, you’ll recall, I had a blogpost featuring a delightful photo of Parker and me and our respective shadows. I often feel like I am shadowed by this cute little squirrel when I am at the Park, so to call that post “Me and my shadow” actually had a double meaning.
The long angles of the sun in the morning create some interesting shadows sometimes. While walking through the neighborhood, enroute to the Park, I hurriedly snapped this image because one glance at my shadow reminded me of my mom’s old-fashioned clothes pegs back in the day.
I am originally from Canada and there are some vocabulary words which are different from over here in the States. I can ramble off a list like “serviette” for napkin, or “toque” for knit cap, or there is “chesterfield” for couch, and on and on the list goes. In Canada, those clips you use to attach your wet laundry to the clothesline were “clothes pegs” not “clothes pins” and long after we moved to the States in 1966, my mother still called them “pegs”.
Mom was a trooper about hanging out the laundry as soon as the snow melted in April, and she did so until the first flurries flew in November. She’d hang those clothes on her pulley line, reel them out in the morning and reel them back in when they were dry, sometimes cold and stiff as a board, and yes they did smell fresh and clean, but is sure was not as easy as popping them in the dryer. And did I mention she used a wringer washer in those days too?
Anyway, I saw my shadow and just knew I had to find an image of an old-fashioned clothes peg. I really wanted a vertical peg to put side-by-side with my picture, and I scoured all my photo resources for one, to no avail. Unfortunately, there are no more “pegs” to be found in this home, so I am using this image instead.
I’ve woven a little of my own March madness into this official kickoff to college basketball’s March Madness event. It’s a time for stats and wins and losses, not only your teams, but if you have a little money in those games as well.
As for stats, while walking this morning, I was thinking of all the steps I will be taking to meet this year’s goal. Math is not my strongpoint, but I figure I must get to 150 miles walked by the end of March, and then at least another 100 miles per month thereafter, maybe even more since November and December are sometimes iffy due to snow and ice. It wore me out just thinking about it.
But, after taking a look at this picture and seeing those extra-long legs, I think I may be up to the task!
Stride on, and strive to make that goal. Just call me “Long Tall Sally”.
[Image of clothes pegs from Pixabay, Creative Commons]
Linda Schaub
WALKIN', WRITIN', WIT & WHIMSY 
Miss Linda…………………thank you for bringing back old memories for me too………………………….my mother washed and ironed clothes for a living when we were growing up………………so I used to help her hang clothes outside with those”clothes pegs”………….and we used to bring in men’s jeans and overalls stiff as a board and stand them up on the couch and chairs till they got warmed up………………I love clothes that smell like the cold outdoors……………………this morning I walked over to the exercise room and did the treadmill and bike……………….but tomorrow even those it;ll be dark yet I’m going to walk outside…………………..
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Ann Marie – I remember my mom doing that for years and first we had the pulley line to the two oak trees in the backyard, then the oak trees got carpenter ants and we had two heavy metal poles sunk into the cement in the back garden. I think that cold weather contributed to my mom’s arthritis … I don’t recall her using gloves. She used to have some sock stretchers that she used when she hung them in the basement in the Winter – they were metal, shaped like a Christmas stocking like you hang up. And, she had a similar gizmo, on a larger scale for pants. Since you enjoyed this post and it brought back some memories for you of you and your mom, I am attaching this link for you to read. I wrote about the laundry and my mom back in 2013 … those pesky kitchen curtains with the perky bows would drive me crazy. By the time I tied, and retied the bows on these curtains, they were not be as perky as when my mom ironed them. Enjoy!
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I did a rough estimate and figure I have walked over 70 miles so far this year. It’s not impressive compared to your total, but it’s good for me.
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My like button is not working but consider this reply “liked” 🙂 70 miles is a lot, only 30 miles less than me and you said you walked two miles a day, so that is great. You, like me, would have had more miles, except for the snow and icy conditions. I will get more miles once the sun is up earlier again. In the Summer, I try to walk 5 miles a day, unless it is horribly humid. And sometimes more on the weekends, or when we have long holidays, but you can’t count on the weather half the time anyway. It seems to me that whenever my boss is out for the day, or on vacation, the weather doesn’t cooperate and we have an all-day rain.
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I’m sure the weather can see you and knows when to pour rain on your parade. You will out-walk me in the summer. When it’s hot, I have to force myself to walk to the creek.
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(No “like” button again.) I hit the 100 mile mark Sunday and have walked 16 miles since then. In the Summer, I will walk when it is cool in the morning, but once it gets sticky, I will go to the store. The problem, during the week, is having to unplug the car and then replug everything back in again. There are extension cords and it is only about 8-10 minutes each time (unplug, then replug again after the car is in the garage) but it still knocks time off the walk in the workweek. Sometimes I’ll go to the mall, but I prefer the Park. I’m like you, no fan of the humidity and extreme heat. I only really like Summer for the ease of driving and walking and not worrying about snow/ice. My boss likes to ride his mountain bike every day – he goes mid-afternoon daily. He leaves the office, and goes to Belle Isle which is an island with a big cement circular path around the entire island. He is gone for about 90 minutes and rides 26 miles. He purposely goes in the heat of the day, thinking he’ll lose weight from sweating and pedaling. When it is raining, he has an exercise bike in the office in the file room. I’m not a fan of sweating – twice I’ve been doing yard work and got too hot and once ran over the electric mower cord and the second time I ran the hedge trimmers into the chain-link fence. Both times I got overly hot and should have gone into the house.
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That’s amazing that your boss cycles 26 miles. I prefer not to sweat. I often spend up to an hour in the garden before showering, and then I’m fresh for the rest of the day.
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(Still no “like” button.) I did do all the gardening up to 2011, then began the walking that Fall and went to artificial flowers around the house. I am trying to have them hold out one more year. I bought very realistic-looking silk flowers and “planted” them in the planters I used to have … unless you’re up close you can’t tell.
I will send you a picture of how it looks. No deadheading, weeding or watering. I still have roses on one side and the other side they don’t look as good as before – had black spot. The perennials used to surround the yard, but Polar Vortex #1 took most of them, even though they had been planted years before.
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Hmmm. I’m going to have to think about artificial flowers. That should would beat all the pulling and pruning I do!
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Oh yes – you would love it – now I don’t give the roses the TLC they deserve as I’m not messing with flowers. But they are “Home Run” roses – that is their name and they are quite hardy. After Polar Vortex No. 1, in the Springtime they were all brown, no new growth. Figured I’d have to take them all out over Memorial Day weekend. Marge suggested I prune them to the ground – what could I lose as I was going to have to yank them out anyway. I had at least a dozen yard waste bags, maybe more of dead rose branches. I could not believe that by Memorial Day, they had new growth. They are now as tall as they ever were – they are as tall as the chain link fence. I will send you pictures of the fake flowers over the weekend, and you’ll see how realistic they look. They are getting faded a bit, but I did the flowers in May 2012. I secured the flowers by wrapping pipe cleaners around their stems, then attaching the pipe cleaners onto old orange or grapefruit bags (just wired it to the netting) and went to the store and got rocks and filled the netting with rocks, so they would not blow away. Just haul them out every Spring and put them away every Fall. I used to have those bags you hang on the wall or fence with impatiens in them – constant deadheading and they looked sickly after a heat spell. No more. I put up some wreaths that I had bought for the front door and they were much too large – it overwhelmed the door. House is small. I had to throw the wreaths away last Fall – they had lost alot of the flowers that blew away after repeated rain, sun must’ve loosened the stems from the wreath.
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Kudos to your walking 🙂 may you reach your target 🙂
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Thank you – I hope so and will try my best. Last year I was astounded – I only was shooting for 755 and ended up with 1,050! So, I’m aiming high again. I have my fingers crossed that we have good weather going forward. This morning was quite cold but no ice or snow, so I went out – felt like a popsicle though. 🙂
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