DOUGHNUT DAY AND ASH WEDNESDAY

Does this look cold enough for you?  I wish it were just a picture.  But it's cold here.  And getting colder as we go along.  Today the high is supposed to be 29*F (-2*C) and the low tonight is 18*F (-8*C).  Cold huh?  That's nothing.  On Saturday it will be a high of 20*F (-7*C) and a low of 2*F (-17*C).  So Valentine's Day is going to be COLD on Sunday.  It's always colder where my sister lives in Northern New Jersey so I can't imagine how cold she will be.  I put the celsius temperature in for my Canadian and European readers but the temperature looks so much worse in that.

Tuesday was Doughnut Day or Fastnacht Day.  I grabbed this explanation of the day from Wikipedia:

Fastnacht Day is an annual Pennsylvania Dutch celebration that falls on Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday. The word translates to "Fast Night" in English. The tradition is to eat the very best foods, which are part of the German tradition, and lots of it, before the Lenten fast. Fastnachts (pronounced fost-nokts in German) are doughnuts. There are three types of Fastnachts, one made with yeast, one made with baking powder, and one made with potatoes and yeast. All are slightly crispy on the outside and not as sweet as standard doughnuts.

It is hard to find fastnachts around here and I just wasn't up to making them.  So we got regular doughnuts.  Birthday cake for me, old fashioned for Joe.  They were not our first choice, but by the time we got to the store there wasn't much of a choice left.

 
I knew when I saw the sky in the morning that it wasn't going to be a nice day weatherwise.

And of course Snowy had to get her picture taken too.  She is such a sweet cat.

By evening this is what was happening.

Fortunately it was just a little bit and by yesterday morning most of it was gone.

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday.  It is not really celebrated in my denomination.  But I do make it a meatless day.  Why?  I have no idea.  It just was always done in my family.  I think after eating the desserts and fat the day before this is a day to sort of get away from that.

I made the Pioneer Woman's macaroni and cheese for dinner.  It was so good.  I absolutely love that recipe.  Since I started making it I have never done mac and cheese any other way.  It is the best I have ever had.  At first I thought it was so hard to make, but now it's just second nature.

I finally went to the post office and mailed off my pension papers.  I am weeks late getting it to them.  The only problem is they wanted a copy of my Social Security card and I CAN'T FIND IT!  I have torn apart the one place in the living room that I always keep it (the drawer in my end table) and it's not there.  I decided to mail things off anyway to get things started and keep looking.  BUT now there are things thrown all over the living room floor.  So that is my project today -- to clean up and hopefully find my card in the process.  At least I know what the envelope it is in looks like.  Nothing is ever easy for me.  The good thing is I am getting bags of trash out of the room.  Catalogs and papers just build up so fast.

I have finally gotten myself back into reading.  It has taken a good month of not going to work to get myself where I need to be.  I didn't read for weeks and now I am finding time to get an hour in here and there.  The book I am reading now is "And the Shofar Blew" by Francine Rivers.  I had borrowed it from my friend Donna at church.  After a month of not reading all that much I hadn't gotten very far and decided to give it back to her.  But what I had read I really liked so I bought it for my kindle.  I'm over halfway done now and loving it.  It's hard to put down.  I seem to read so much faster on the kindle too.  As soon as I'm done it's back to my library books.  I really have to get them back.

Well I know what I'm going to be doing today:  laundry, dishes, cleaning, cooking and trying to keep warm.  The fire is going, the sun is rising and a new day is beginning.

Hope you all have a good day.

Kathy