Breathing Time — Fit2Sail

It snowed about ten inches yesterday.

Watching Wunderground over the past week has been pretty amusing. 5-8 inches! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! 1-3 inches! Nothing! 3-5! 5-8! 3-5!

My favorite weather guy on Facebook, wxrisk.com (DT is his name, and he might be the most irreverent, call-the-bs-out weather person I’ve ever encountered), has been saying we were in for something big for about 10 days. He stuck to his guns even when the National Weather Service was predicting a miss.

As of Saturday evening, even the NWS was calling for not much. The last forecast from them, on Saturday evening, was for 80% chance of 3-5 inches.

We got a little bit more than that, don’t you think?

The snow started at about 10 am and just kept coming. At one point it was falling in clumps from the sky, like small snowballs or lint from the dryer. (Bee was talking on the phone to Julian, who’s just finished his first semester of college classes and prepping for his first college finals - he wanted to know if we were sure we didn’t have the dryer running.)

What do you do when it snows like crazy?

You work on wood strips for the interior of the hull, planning the cozy beautiful cabin as you’re tucked in to the cozy beautiful winter.

You bake. 2 loaves of sourdough bread and 3 chicken pot pies (the crusts were leftover Pillsbury ones from Thanksgiving). Our freezer is stuffed.

You curl up on the couch and watch The Princess Bride for the umpteenth time.

“As you wish” is vastly underused as a way to say “I love you.”

And you perfect the Bloody Mary recipe.

*Bloody Mary ingredients. What’s your recipe?*

My friend Laureen (check her blog here), who just moved with her family to Annapolis, Maryland from Clear Lake, Texas, on their 47’ catamaran, talks about looking forward to hibernating during the winter. There’s something about the quiet and the dark that’s appealing to her. It’s been so long for her since there’s been this forced shut down of busy and noise.

It’s hard to imagine that winter can be restful, especially this one, with all the projects we’ve got going on. Between the senior in high school (with all the college applications!) and the college freshman (first semester done!), the get-the-house-on-the-market (will contractors ever call back?) and the work-on-the-boat-to-make-it-liveable (too much for one set of parentheses) - life feels pretty crazy. Add to this the regular work, the side hustle work, and the general aspects of life that still need to happen . . .

Taking a day to breathe felt great. Watching the snow, puttering in the kitchen, reading a few snatches of books I found in a clean up moment.

It’s not quite hibernation.

But I’ll take it.