Saturday, January 31

This last day of January dawned sunny. By afternoon, we enjoyed promise-of-spring temps in the 50s...such a relief after a long week of winter-ice woes. I started the day with a treadmill session and resistance exercises.

While I was cooling down after the session, the cable guy came, bringing a new box to replace the one in the bedroom that got fried in the power outage on Tuesday.

Once I was ready for the day, we took the ceramic village off the mantel. Taking the village down is almost as much work as putting it up. So that was our major project for the morning.

After lunch, we decided to tour the town to see how much damage the ice storm left behind. We know that some individuals suffered damages, like the lady at water aerobics whose house has a hole in the roof from a tree falling on it, and the lady from Master Gardeners, who said she and her husband lost five trees in their yard. But we saw no real damage during our tour, beyond the college, where pine trees and limbs are down all over campus.

So we stopped by the other store that has a sale every weekend to check out their advertised clearance sale. This store is just one across the state that is closing. We didn't see any real deals at the store, though I did find a cute denim jacket at a reasonable price, and Hubbie found two pairs of khaki slacks. Mother didn't find anything she could use.

We went to the WDCS after that to shop for groceries for next week's menu. It was about 3;30 p.m. by the time we got back home. Mother had simmered a pan of canned pinto beans with turkey bacon, onions, banana peppers, garlic, pepper and spices during the morning. I made a batch of corn muffins to go with the beans, and we had these along with baked potatoes and turnip greens for supper. It was a delicious comfort food meal.

I'd recorded our favorite basketball team in SEC play this afternoon, and we watched the game after supper. Our team lost once again, but after falling far behind in the first half, they rallied in the second half and got within five points, proving that our young team has spunk and spirit and great potential for the coming years.