Although it is very crisp if you are in the light breeze that’s blowing today, it’s still a beautiful, sunny winter today. The sun is starting to feel warmer and the birds are starting to sing on sunny days. I heard a goldfinch and a cardinal singing away this morning. It’s hard to believe that tomorrow we are scheduled to get a heavy winter storm.

I am not a winter loving person. The snow could just skip us and I would be fine. But many people are very excited, especially kids, who anticipate a snow day coming.

I found it interesting that kids have these little “magic” tricks to get Mother Nature to give them a snow day. They wear their pajamas inside out and tape pennies to the window. Who starts these things?

Our propane bill has been terrible this winter. I thought maybe something was really wrong with this drafty old house but my mom’s natural gas bill was nearly the same as our propane bill. That’s one more thing to hate about winter- how much more it costs to live. I would love to have the money to have one of those “green” houses that produce their own energy. Solar panels and geo-thermal heating and cooling, maybe a wind turbine- that would be so great.

We are doing a little winter home improvement. We are painting two rooms, my office and our spare bedroom in anticipation of a granddaughter coming to stay with us for a while. I have such a hard time picking colors, I drive Steve nuts. I finally choose and purchased the spare room paint, it’s a light celery green, it will have darker green trim.

I wanted red in my office but the room is too small to paint the walls dark red, so I think I have settled on a very pale rose as the wall color with dark velvet red trim and accents. I am definitely not a pink person, but I think this will work. A female power room.

We have old wood siding on our house and it needs painting too. I brought home paint samples from the hardware and Steve rolled his eyes. I am down to two choices, a soft melon green, and a pale sunlit yellow. Our house is gray now. The paint brochure shows the yellow with a beautiful bird’s egg blue as the trim but I don’t think I could get away with that. I saw a home in a garden magazine with lovely pale lavender walls but Steve looked horrified when I suggested that. It will be a while before we get to painting the outside of the house so I will have time to think about it.