Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  Debbie and I had a lovely day yesterday.  In the morning we made a new recipe for us, a chicken casserole with biscuits on top.  It came out sort of like chicken pot pie filling (a favorite of mine!) with biscuits on top instead of a crust all around.  It was a big win!  When we figured how much we wanted to make, we took my brother Scott into consideration, as he was joining us for the day.  Scott is an eating machine, despite his lean physique; he eats roughly four times as much as any other human I know.  The recipe said it made 8 servings, so given Scott's presence we doubled it.  The result was delicious, so we all stuffed ourselves – and now we have less than half of it left :)

After gorging ourselves, we took a drive into Logan where we left some nice canned food for the feral cats we've been taking care of (near Crumb Brothers bakery).  Then we drove around on the back roads near our house, drinking in the winter scenery.  Afterwards we came back home for some wine and a rousing card game.  There was much merriment!  After the card game the sun was about to disappear, so Scott headed back north to his cabin.  Debbie and I cracked the bottle of nice champagne we'd bought for the occasion, and watched Home Alone 2.  That's a silly little movie, full of physical humor and sappy bits, but between the movie and the champagne we laughed until we hurt.  Debbie, for some reason, found it necessary to pound on me while she was laughing.  I don't think there was any permanent injury, but I do have some black-and-blue as a result :)

This morning when we awoke, the temperature was 5.7°F and everything outside was crunchy.  We watched Miracle on 34th Street (the 1947 version), another of our traditional Christmas-time movies.  I believe!

At daybreak we could see that the bird feeders were less than half full, so I went out to fill them.  Cold, it was.  Very cold!  I tried out my electrically-warmed gloves for the first time – and they worked great until the batteries died, about 30 seconds after turning them on.  That's my own fault, though – I haven't charged the batteries since last winter.

Today is just the two of us, a quiet day together is the only plan we have...