Snow instead of boating

Not that there was much snow. We might have gotten 8 inches but there was a lot of wind and it wasn't much fun to be outside.

Frances did what she often does during the cold weather, she cooks. Not wanting to deter her in any way, Bill stayed clear of the kitchen and spent some time learning how to operate his new video camera. Then, as the house really began to smell great, it seemed like it would be fun to use that new camera to shoot some video of Chef Frances and that's what we did.

Disclaimer: this camera is professional grade and complicated and we we haven't quite mastered it yet. We can see that we definitely need extra lighting in the kitchen and Frances needs her own microphone but, we had fun making the video and learned a lot at the same time.

As we think we mentioned in a previous post, we've become very interested in in the twice-weekly email messages from the New York Times' blog called simply Cooking. We've attempted a couple of the recipes with some success and now have a couple more that we'll try next week. It can be found here, it's free and if you like to cook, it well worth reading.

A couple of weeks ago (remember when it was 50 degrees?) we did some needed maintenance on our old Ariens snowblower. Thanks to that, she started right up and we cleared the driveway. Magically, our long stretch of sidewalk was already cleared, thanks to our young neighbor who really wants to run his parents' snowblower. That young guy cleared all the sidewalks for blocks and you could tell that he was very happy to be in charge of that machine.

The winner of this weeks "Best Boat Idea" contest

You won't be surprised to learn that the winner is Frances! Yep, while Bill is sitting around making sketches and lists, Frances had carefully checked out every photo we have taken of the berth area in preparation for painting and rewiring. This week, Bill got an email from Frances while she was at home with this photo and a simple one-line question: 

 "Just a suggestion, we might want to consider painting the underside of the upper bunk"

Yeah, well, with all the wall covering painted and the trim refinished, I guess it would be nice to also refinish the underside of that bunk, since that's what a guest would be looking up at while in bed.

Lesson learned: don't turn Bill loose with a can of paint unless he is under strict supervision.

Here's the video we shot on Saturday evening.