Weather

For those of you who live in more temperate climes, here's what we woke up to this morning:

Thank goodness we're going to be down south for Easter, well New Jersey, which is south of us I believe, and probably won't have a White Easter like Lenox seems to be headed for. Ah, the joys of New England weather. But in truth, I wouldn't live anywhere else. I've experienced the utter boredom, the ennui, of Southern California weather, which ranges from sunny to hazy, where there are two seasons, green and brown, and where a neighbor used to rake the few turning leaves off his trees in the fall. A writer in the L.A. Times once summarized the Southern California experience perfectly for me in the line "another s**t day in paradise". It truly resonated at the time, shortly before we finally moved back east. And I've lived down south, in Florida and Texas, courtesy of the Navy. Thankfully both experiences were relatively short. I haven't lived in the heartland, but have driven through it many times on our cross-country jaunts. I can only say that until you've driven through Kansas in 104 degree heat with a car full of kids and the air-conditioner on the blink, you haven't lived. Or may wish you hadn't. We always breathed a sigh of relief when we finally saw the Rockies on the horizon.

My sister Joan is flying back today from a week's vacation in Taos and Santa Fe, NM. Even though we've visited there many times, I'm still jealous. I love the southwest, the desert and the Native American and Hispanic culture, but it's another place I wouldn't want to live.

I hope I haven't insulted anyone's ancestral home; if so, I apologize. It's all a matter of taste. I just like the Northeast, and New England in particular.

It has been a very productive visit home. We made a lot of progress in getting the place cleaned up. We were going to finish cleaning the yards today but nature intervened, so we'll work inside instead. I'm feeling my usual last-week-of-cycle good, eating non-stop but still not gaining any weight (but not losing any either). It should be interesting when  the treatments end and I keep eating like this.

I mentioned in a recent post that my son-in-law Normunds is an artist. I forgot to note that he has a website devoted to his art. It can be found at http://normundsbruveris.com/ and is worth a look.