Bracing for Cold; Cheers

 

We made it through yesterday with much more ease than I could imagine when I first opened the garage door to see nine inches of new snow. 

Bill took on snow-blowing duties in areas around the house and in the driveway, while I plowed around the barn and down the lane with the tractor. 

We had the place clean and opened up in plenty of time for me to get to my eye appointment. 

This appointment was my post-operative check-up after having the cataracts in both eyes removed in November. 

After having me guess a few sets of letters for distance and closeup, the tech expressed amazement at how much the prescription had changed should I want to get some glasses.   

Later, the doctor said everything looked great.  

I did have one concern about my left eye which sometimes feels a bit gunky.  The left eye is the one that has had dry eye syndrome for the past four or five years. 

He said the gunkiness was related to that and to take the Refresh drops when needed. He also pointed out that such conditions are likely to get worse for folks with a similar condition over the next few days with the predicted cold. 

My cell phone says that, starting tomorrow, we'll have six straight days with lows in the minus department.  In fact, one day this weekend could dip as low as minus 19. 

So, for the dry-eyes-syndrome crowd, wood stoves and other stuff in the air could play havoc. I guess we need to be ready with the drops and try to create some humidity in our houses. 

As far as all of us (dry eyes or not) are concerned, we and our animals are definitely headed to "bundle up" time.

🏀🏀🏀🏀🏀🏀

I'm glad the extreme cold is holding off until tomorrow because Willie has another home game tonight. 

His Bulldog girls team will take on the Bonners Ferry Badgers at Les Rogers Gym tonight. Tip-off is at 5:30 p.m. with a boys varsity team taking on the Badgers afterward. 

GO, Bulldogs!

Chris Moon, Susie "Sky" Baldwin and Marianne Love last March at our rendezvous in Idaho Falls. 

💙💚💛💜💖

A toast to a long and treasured friendship and, today, to a friend's lifetime milestone. 

Last March my friend Chris and Bill and I drove 499 miles through some dicy weather conditions to Idaho Falls.  

While we were driving south through Western Montana and Southeast Idaho, our mutual friend Susie "Sky" Baldwin and her husband Marv were driving north from their home in Colorado.

We stayed for two days at a spacious VRBO in Idaho Falls.  We also stayed inside the house most of the time because it was surrounded by ice and drifted snow. 

And, we sat around a big dining room table, munching, sipping occasionally and talking about our respective lives and everything else that came to mind. 

Chris, Susie and I have known each other and have been since the 1960s. Our initial meetings were different.  

As for Susie and me, she was the new kid on the country block when her Forest Service family moved here and lived in the red house at what is now the Bonner County Fairgrounds.

  Our friendship was sealed when we discovered that we both loved horses.

Susie, who in later years took the name "Sky," to avoid confusion with other Susan's, is 18 months younger than I and has remained shorter than I for all these years. She always wanted to catch up with my height of 5 foot, 7 inches but has never managed that feat. 

When I sent her a card for her 75th birthday, which is today, I gave her the bad news:  you're never going to catch up with me in height or age.  

I hope she can handle that fact of her life. 

Susie, Chris and I have led our individual lives---all with careers in education.  Susie was a speech therapist, which Chris spent a career as a college psychology professor and I taught English and journalism at the high school level. 

We're all lovers of the outdoors.  I know Susie could tell some great stories about the hundreds of miles she has ridden via horseback in the mountains of Montana and Colorado. 

As for Chris and me, our outdoors love was greatly enhanced by our summer job for three years of driving the mountainous back roads of Eastern Washington, Northern Idaho and Western Montana.  We worked as U.S. Forest Service engineering aides.  

Chris and Susie were junior high and high school classmates while Marianne and Susie were neighborhood, horse riding friends. 

Over the years, we've made the effort to get together and renew the friendship.  That hasn't involved too much work 'cept maybe for the driving. We've put in some miles to see each other.  

The friendship remains solid, and two of the three of us have made it to 75.  Chris will do so in the fall. Maybe that's when we need to get together again.  

For now, Happy Birthday, dear friend.  I hope you have a wonderful day. 

Once again, in my mind, good friends are the best gifts life has to offer.