It was an easy trip home yesterday morning. I used the ferry trip to blog which always makes the time pass quickly. I did stand up once to toss a SamStone into Nantucket Sound.

which reminds me… … the SamStones website is having some major trouble.. Our hosting service ’upgraded’ their software and all the database queries that drive our website now take minutes instead of seconds. They say it will be fixed this week.. but that’s what they said last week !

Anyway… I got home yesterday after a nice drive.. it was a bit of forced mindfulness… I had lost my phone handset so I couldn’t talk much on the phone…
My ipod ran out of batteries, XM satellite public radio was doing endless pre-pre-election analysis and broadcast public radio was doing fund raising.. I just sat there and thought.. and not-thought for 5 hours. It was cool to see the climate shift from the cape to here.. it was in the 50’s and cloudy there.. but it was in the teens and full of snow back here… Some of the flowers are getting tired of it by this point. !

I got home around 2.. and we had a pretty quiet day. Gabe was at Jay with Dylan… so we just hung out and read… We’d been invited p to Deb’s for Fish Tacos… and Diane had the great idea to make sugar on snow !.. That requires donuts… so Diane started the closely guarded secret process of donut making.. Actually, I think she said that she’s only made them once before in her life.. and that was before we met 26 years ago…

It’s a pretty cool process.. it’s a yeasted dough.. a little softer than bread dough..

She roiled it out and cut the outside with a beer glass and the inside hole with a film container..

Then they got fired in shallow oil.. This is actually what I’m supposed to be eating for this ayurvedic diet.. sweet and oily food.. some diet.. eh ?

They looked perfect..

Are those for me, Mommy ?

The one catch is that one side of one batch got a little crispy when I called Diane over to see this cool video I’d found on Quantum entanglement … I think it was from ’What the Bleep do we know’ I wrote the author.. Dr. Quantum (aka. Prof Alan Wolf) asking him about how he made the animations.. I think they’re great.. there are several others out on YouTube like this one on the ’double slit experiment’ .

Anyway.. back to yesterday.. We went up to Deb’s around 7… It certainly still looks like winter up there !

We turned off (most of) the lights up there in honor of the ’Earth Hour’ which was being run yesterday to bring awareness to the need for more energy conservation in light of global climate change. After a great fish taco dinner we switched the lights back on and Diane went into sugar on snow production.. it took a good long while to cook the maple syrup down..

When it was ready, the kids brought in snow and Diane poured on the hot syrup . It’s amazingly good.. and amazingly sweet.. folks ate the donuts to cut the sweetness.. traditionally you’re also supposed to eat a pickle with it.. but none of us felt like going that far.. even though we had a jar of pickles with us just in case.

We got home around 10:30 – 11 and all went straight to sleep..

This morning was pretty sleepy, too.. we just hung around the house… Gabe and Will headed up to the mountain at around 11 with Victor. I noticed that Victor’s gloves and glasses made this cool fish-like guy on our counter.

Once Gabe was up boarding, Diane and I took the dogs up the honey hollow road for a hike.. The road is not plowed and  the snow was still deep.. but packed enough that we didn’t need snowshoes.. at least most of the time … At one point we found an old fence line with boarder markers and decided to bushwack up the hill. It was a beautiful walk.. 

It was cool following this old land line.. You could tell that this used to be some sort of pasture sometime in the late 19th or early 20th century. It was  probably for sheep.. Nearly this whole area was cleared then for grazing. It was hard to see that now except for these old fence wires embedded deeply in the trees.

The new markers were for the state forest…   We walked the boarder up several ridges.. it was clear you could get all the way up Robbins mountain this way. it would be a great hike back to our house if we had a GPS..

This area is know to have lots of bears.. Diane and I saw a big one up here a day or so before Max was born. We didn’t see any bears today.. but you could sure see signs of them.. Their scratch marks were everywhere.. and man, were they BIG !

YOu could see where a big one climbed all the way up this tree !

Satori was having a great time.. but she stayed pretty close to us.. maybe she instinctivly knew she’s still the size of an hors devours.

OK.. That’s it for today.. Diane and I are going out for some errands in prep for her birthday  this Tuesday… Talk to you all tomorrow. Nite Sam
-me