Holy single digits, batman!

Holy single digits, batman!  It's cold outside (3.2°F, -16°C on our thermometer)!  I just got back inside after raising the bird feeder that the deer discovered, and filling all of them.  It took 25 minutes, and I was quite thoroughly chilled even though I was wearing electrically-heated gloves, my best winter hat, and my wonderfully insulated muck boots.  My jeans were useless in this cold; I should have worn my insulated winter coveralls.  My face was nearly frozen; I was inside for 15 minutes before I could feel anything in my cheeks.  I guess I need a balaclava!

Pleasure centers...

Pleasure centers...  So far as I can tell, humans have just four sources of pleasure: food, sex, beauty, and showers.  I got to pondering about that this morning, and realized that nearly all of them can be paired with positive effect.  There are six possibilities, and the only one I can't immediately conjure up a good pairing for is a shower plus food.  That's a bit of a logistics challenge.  The rest of the pairings?  Oh, yeah, definitely pleasurable!

Well, then, what about the four possible triples?  Two of them include both food and showers, and for those two I really can't conjure up any viable examples.

Maybe my imagination just isn't up to the task :)

Paradise ponders...

Paradise ponders...  The photo at right is from Christmas Day; I'd forgotten to post it.  That's Debbie in the apron that Michelle H. (the lady who comes each week to clean our house) made for her as a Christmas present.  She obviously knows Debbie well :)  Debbie is in the middle of chopping the chicken for the casserole we had for Christmas dinner.  Right after I took that photo I started chopping the veggies...

Yesterday was clear, with a full moon in the morning.  The views to our mountains were beautiful, as you can see at left.  That's the view from our front yard, looking west to Logan Peak (9,711') in the Wellsville Mountains (also sometimes called the Bear River Mountains).  While there was a lot of beautiful scenery yesterday, it was darned cold – as low as 3°F in the early morning.  Some other local thermometers were reporting a few degrees below zero.

We watched a couple of movies (The Bishop's Wife, in addition to The Miracle on 34th Street that I mentioned yesterday), and really didn't do much of anything else yesterday (other than continue gorging on good food!).  Toward evening I started to feel a little off, and I went to bed quite early.  This morning I feel fine, and rested after nearly 12 hours of sleep (that's a near-miracle for me all by itself!). 

One odd thing Debbie noticed last night: we have deer feeding on one of our bird feeders!  We watched them doing it for a while, and it's interesting how they're doing it.  The feeder they are eating from is mounted low (which I'm going to fix at first light this morning), and it contains mixed seed (probably about half millet by volume).  There are openings about 1" in diameter that let the birds peck at the seeds on the bottom of the indentation (similar to the photo at right).  The deer stick their tongues in that hole, and some of the seeds stick to it.  That's attractive enough to them that they'll stand there for quite a while, working a few seeds at a time out of there.  Bird seed is way too expensive to be feeding to deer, so I'm definitely going to have to put a stop to that!  Fortunately I think (I hope!) it will be easy – I just have to raise the feeder a couple of feet higher off the ground...