Well this is the first weekend in two months that there is not a zero reading or snow predicted. Hooray! I've been spending my time mostly watching the birds and the neighbors. The neighbors are like the fable the ants and the grasshopper. We (Timmy and me) are the grasshopper, fiddling away our days, while the ants (the neighbors] are working hard. Wayne has a big yellow shovel, a long roof rake shovel, a snowblower, and a little go-cart mobile that has a plow on it. He can use all of these almost at the same time, removing methodically the snow from his house and yard.

Last week our other neighbor Tony did something I have never seen before. He hitched his son Christopher in a harness, tied a rope to it, tied the rope around himself, and they both went up on the roof. Now this is a high roof, steep pitch, therefore the rope on Christopher who had a roof rake shovel and was clearning off the roof. Now this made me laugh, because I remembered a story from my childhood where the husband and wife trade jobs, and the husband does everything wrong, including putting the cow on the roof, so he doesn't have to take the cow to the pasture. Then he tied a rope around the cow and himself. Well, the story ended with the cow falling off the roof, and the old man going down the chimney. This didn't happen across the street, but the tension and drama lasted most of the afternoon. Better than the Superbowl.

So February is dragging on. I tried to think of some good that has come out of this winter - hard to do when the pipes froze in the garage, had to all be replaced, cabin fever doesn't even describe it - and a trip to the Post Office is all I can say happened in my journal. But then I thought of one thing - no mice. Usually, in the winter, they come in the house and Timmy is trapping almost one every night. No mice. They can't make it into the house through all the snow. I think I would rather have mice than this winter.