More snow, birds, opera and a concert

Last Sunday Meaghan did her Half Marathon in -16 Celsius and while her time was longer than expected, she wasn't last. Personally, I wouldn't fancy running 21km in clement weather, never mind in the depth of winter. Little monster had a lovely time running around with Daddy and Granpa wearing a cute, but weird hat.

Roy managed to get one of the locals to cut some more wood for us, help with the clearing of snow and generally be handy with bringing down cut wood, which I don't think Roy should do any more. He also started bringing bits of pottery for sale, some of which were actually quite nice. Poverty in the village is widespread, so I try to buy most things offered for sale, although I will haggle because they treat you with contempt if you don't. The lovely birdies keep coming and the stock of seed is getting quite low. The food offered is now threefold: 1. sunflower seeds; 2. balls of suet with seeds in; 3. big chunk of speck fat. There are days when both bowls plus balls plus fat are virtually mobbed by dozens of birds all at once. The goldfinches are still very argumentative and chase the other birds, but on the whole they are well fed.

As we were going down to the village by bus again, we couldn't do a big shopping and just carried a small amount of food we got in town. As we usually have much more food around than we realise, we decided to test this theory and it worked. We actually managed to feed ourselves with the small amount of food carried in, plus shopping at the mobile greengrocers and mobile bakers plus the freezer. Latter had endless amounts of meat and other stuff that was getting too old and needed eating anyway. One day, Roy realised that he still had some Cheddar, plus the last half jar of home made pickled onions, a bit of Branston pickle and the last dregs of my salad with the recently bought white bread, so he had a Plowman's Lunch which he gobbled up like he hadn't eaten for days. I had a Greek salad without olives as we have run out of those, but I am sure the lack of olives does not qualify me for shouting about deprivation!

The big pottery stove worked like magic this time. Never before was it so easy to light and got to maximum heat so quickly as it did this week. It may have had something to do with the wind or the temperature or whatever, but it got very warm very quickly. Me being the resident pyromaniac, I never find dealing with the fire a chore, no matter how much I have to work with it. This week, unfortunately, I burnt myself a few times, which I don't normally do. Still, it is still a lovely item of furniture, good to look at and lovely to cuddle up to.

As we were preparing to leave I was getting a bit worried about our birdies. There was a lot of snow forecast again, so I asked one of my neighbours to feed them while we were away. I hope they will not forget. I also put out another 6 suet balls, so I hope they will not starve. Thursday was a bit busy: after the bus trip in to town we went to the Record Office to watch the presentation of awards to representatives of the two winners of "Best Research Place" as voted on by members of the Family History Research Society. It was that very Record Office we like so much that won the internal category and the familysearch.org website won the foreign category. We met a delightful Dane, who is regional director for the Mormons who made a very good speech.

In the evening I went to see a performance of Il Trovatore which I must admit I think I last saw in my childhood. It was an extremely good, full blooded bit of Verdi with love, hate, revenge, murder and gypsies in abundance. The best performances were from the women, Leonora and Azucena, but the guys weren't bad either. On Friday the sun has come out, so we went shopping. We did a lot of walking and managed to buy something nice for Sheila for her birthday and a lot of presents for the little Brighton monster who is now more than 7 months old. We do have a lovely toy shop, full of wooden toys, just round the corner so the tally after we spent some time (and money) in there was a rocking horse, several puzzles and a choo choo train. At night I went to a really lovely concert in the Italian Institute, listening to Mendessohn, Franck, Haydn and Schumann. It was absolutely glorious. Not only the orchestra was first class, but the conductor's lovely, enthusiastic persona filled you with the same enjoyment that he seemed to have on the podium. Today I stayed in expecting a call from Toronto, but obviously they were busy. Perhaps tomorrow!