This and that

C.Z. sitting on our warm living room radiator, her favorite spot, watching it snow yesterday

It has been a busy week, which makes it hard to sit down and write an organized post, but here are a few odds and ends.

First of all, it's that cold time of year. There's always about a month-and-a-half where the weather can get so cold that it's unpleasant to be outside for long.  The high temperature might not get above freezing for two weeks at a time.  The high today should be 19. Of course, I do realize that discomfort in weather is a relative matter, and that Jody, for one, would probably find this weather a breeze. (Jody, I've added your town to my collection of dashboard weather widgets, just for inspiration!) And Bob likes this weather.  Just to toughen his girls up, he announced from the living room earlier this week, "There is no bad weather, only wrong clothing!"

A couple of seconds later, I heard a voice mutter from the study, "When it's this cold, I prefer my outer layer to be a building."

That said, she's really quite tough.

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And even if you're like me and don't always check up on the news, you probably know by now that a commercial plane landed in the Hudson yesterday. I remember thinking yesterday afternoon, "That's an odd low plane sound," but I'm so used to monitoring odd sounds since 2001 that when I didn't hear a crash, I forgot about it until Bob called me to let me know. Anyway, I'm extremely thankful that the pilot's skill saved all aboard, and I'm also thankful that he avoided Harlem and the Upper West Side, which it appears that he purposely did from the graphics on the NY Times website.

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And speaking of crashes, I'm trying to learn to ski. We're going with a group of homeschoolers to the Poconos about every other week during January and February. I'm still in that stage where every time I try to turn to slow myself down, I fall, and then spend much longer than I ever spent skiing trying to get up without sliding rapidly down the hill. My goal for the year is to get out of this stage. 

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C.Z. has started physical therapy for a shoulder injury she developed over the summer while playing violin.  The doctors didn't seem to be concerned at first, and we spent all fall making various adjustments to her playing, thinking they would do the trick, but the pain persisted. So now we're biting the bullet and making the trip to the therapist's twice a week. Things probably won't improve in time for her concerto competition this weekend, but she's managed to hold her own fairly well, considering.  We're hoping have her completely pain free by spring.  

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Other than that, we're just trying to get into a good winter routine.   I'm enjoying my mornings reading Proverbs and writing in my journal, and we're trying to get schoolwork done as happily as we can despite a lot of interruptions.  Right now things are just a bit bumpy with our routine, but we'll settle in eventually.