Warning: This blog contains the spice of life. Side effects include sudden loss of boredom, more attractive friends and unpredictable moments of Zinginess.

Do not believe everything that you read. The low this morning was -5 ºF. Enough said. Anne had gone outside to free a bird from our screened-in back porch, when I announced the temperature. She said that she was glad not to have known that before she went out there. Birds get trapped in the porch. They like to roost in a bush that stands next to this porch. Over the years, untrimmed branches from this bush have poked holes in the screens. In between flights to the neighboring backyard feeders these birds fly through the holes in the screen and get trapped inside. This means that Anne must go out and rescue them.

What is annoying about these birds is that they only use the old feeder. In cold weather like this, they can empty that feeder in a day. The new feeder sits right next to the old one and remains full. Both feeders are very similar in design, at least to my eye, but the birds seem to think otherwise.

Whereas Anne felt compelled to venture outside on her errand of avian mercy, I have no such compunction. By scouring the pantry, I have discovered another jar of spaghetti sauce and two cans of diced tomatoes. With this successful search party concluded, I no longer need to go to the store today. I will have to go tomorrow. But why worry about tomorrow today, because tomorrow is another day. What precipitated this search was a small jar of real Italian pasta sauce. I think that it came in a gift basket from Zingerman’s. At ten ounces, it was only big enough to make me mad, but fortunately, the deep, dark recesses of the pantry coughed up the necessary goods.

Knowing the forecast, on Friday morning, before all the mercury dropped out of the thermometer, I had shopped for this pasta meal. At that time, I thought that the jar of real Italian tomato sauce was actually more like tomato paste. Being super concentrated and could then be watered down but being more than enough to go around. In the store, I bumped into Mary, our would-be hostess of more than a week ago. We had been invited to her dinner party, but our exposure to Covid got us quickly uninvited. We met on Friday in the egg aisle. When I reached to hug her, she visibly recoiled, until I could convince her that we never had Covid after all. One other guest had also opted out of the party, and she did come down with Covid. She invited us for next time, probably this summer, but we will likely be out-of-town by then.