Cold comfort

I caught a cold this week, which has somewhat curtailed my blogging experience.

And of course, it has been snowing on and off - but the bulbs don't seem to mind.  

The weather has been blustery with a cold snap having drifted our way from Greenland of all places.  Everyone bundling up against the cold:

This squirrel lives with a group of others, in the trees outside our apartment.  He (or she) sat huddled up on this tree branch stump for about an hour, bowed down against the wintery blast!

However all is not doom and gloom because we now have two new neighbours!  

A little Blue Tit and his mate have moved in to the bird house that sits on our apartment wall.  We are being very careful not to disturb them as this is the first time that a bird has moved in on a more permanent basis.  We did have a wren in there some time back but it was only a passing visit.

Meanwhile the pot of winter aconite we bought during the week, is in flower: 

And I made bread this morning:

 

 . . . from which we cut large doorstop slices to be buttered and eaten with bowls of homemade pumpkin soup:

 The results?

As for me, I am at that stage of a cold where the worst has passed but one still feels sniffy and in need of constant pampering.
So I am sitting ensconced in silken luxury on the sofa, reading books and taking tea in between naps.  It is a hard life...

The two books are: Howitt's 'Visits to Remarkable Places' (which I purchased on our last holiday) and 'Crusader Castles' by T. E. Lawrence - yes, that T. E. Lawrence -  and a really good read too!

An old fashioned weekend

We have had an old fashioned weekend - old fashioned in the sense that we have no internet access...

It looks like we are going to have an 'old fashioned' week too - until we get the problem sorted out.

This has severely curtailed my ability to 'blog' and so, in the interim, we will have a series of wintery scenes for your amusement:

My walk home on Friday:



The view from our front door:

Our balcony:

What I needed after a sub-zero degrees visit to the shop just around the corner:

After a day of 'snow chaos' the clouds blew away:

The sun came out and the sky turned a brilliant blue:

 White bread - Yorkshire style.  I make two loaves every weekend:

It is 'a la Yorkshire' because it is made with milk.  Probably there are other names but having a largish Yorkshire component in my family I rather like that name. I made a lot of mince meat this weekend too and finished the Christmas Cake so all is sorted, or as they say in Germany: 'in ordnung'.

And finally this photo, taken from the sitting room window on Sunday morning:

I can still occasionally get online to view other people's blogs during my breaks at work.  Hopefully I will be back online very soon!