Monday Monday

That "Monday Monday" song keeps flitting around in my head, but I can't remember the rest of the words. Maybe later I'll Google it and find them.

Today is Jonathan's 18th birthday. Seems like just the other day when he was born....our first grandson - what a thrill ! Each grandchild's birth was a thrill for us! Now they're all growing up (or grown already) and they're just as much a 'thrill' when they come to visit. Such precious young people.

Yesterday was a Quiet, blessedly quiet, day after the week of activities - something to do and somewhere to go Every day. It was nice to relax after Sunday School and do almost nothing. I finished the novel I was reading and enjoying so much. Now I'll be looking for another of Elizabeth Lowell's books to lose myself in. I don't usually enjoy the spy/foreign intrigue/money laundering type mysteries, but "Innocent as Sin" was excellent. Lowell writes a lot of page-turners, and this was definitely one of that genre.

The cold spell that blustered in to our area Saturday on a ferocious wind that went straight through my bones, has apparently settled in for a lingering visit. Sunshine yesterday was welcome after a week's worth of cloudy and somewhat dismal days. Even the cold was better than those foggy wet days that preceeded it. Time to put the electric blanket back on the bed and turn it on before climbing in.

In the 'old days', Mother just added another home-sewn quilt to the pile of bedcovers when the temperatures dropped. Houses weren't insulated in those 'old days', and fireplaces warmed you - one side at the time.

When I was very small, we lived in a old house - really old. The water pipes had to be left dripping on cold winter nights to keep them from freezing. I remember seeing a solid chunk of ice in the old claw-foot bathtub one morning, where the dripping water had frozen before it could drain out.

Another time in more recent years, our little above-ground swimming pool had a four-inch thick layer of ice on the surface after an unusually cold night. This was one of those "Wal-Mart special" pools, 12-foot diameter, 4 feet deep, that the then-young grandkids enjoyed as much as I did. There way no way to keep the water from freezing, and freeze it did. We chipped great chunks of ice out of the pool, and it didn't even melt on the ground for a long time. THAT was a cold spell, for sure.