A Long Day

It snowed last night, a soft and gentle dusting, light and dry, just deep enough to muffle the sounds of cars rolling by on the street out front my apartment. I cannot hear the traffic, the sound softened by this thin, white blanket. There are small flakes drifting yet by my window, settling on the fir tree, giving it a frosted edge. The sky on the horizon is a dull white, filled with the promise of more of this light winter precipitation.

I am sitting quietly in my living room, thinking, resting. Yesterday was a long and busy day with an early start and a late finish. I started the day in the kitchen, after, of course, my normal wakening routine. I was making a lasagna on behalf of the ALS Society of Alberta, to serve to a crew of volunteers working to help a fellow ALS patient in clearing a house and preparing it for renovations. I cannot do this work, but I can sure cook up a storm, so I made the lasagna along with a jumbo-sized spinach salad. Then, at 11:00 I got a call that the work was done already and my mealtime ministrations were unneeded.

This was not a problem; in reality it was a good thing for me. I was planning a wine bottling party that night; instead of my plan for making chili in the slow cooker, my guests would have lasagna. So I finished the cooking, the salad making, the general preparations and set them aside for the evening, whereupon I went out with a friend to get wine bottles and to have a coffee.

The day wore on, I returned to my apartment and began to tidy so that my friends would arrive in a clean home, to eat a great meal and to help me bottle my wine. All was at the ready. There was food. There was wine, there were guests, all bringing their own contributions. The guests began to arrive and we all enjoyed a terrific dinner with lasagna, pasta salad from Brad, spinach dip from Dan, and desserts all from Elizabeth, Andrea, Melissa and Anisa. Myra brought chips and, very generously, a great bottle of Grey Goose Vodka from which a chocolate martini almost immediately emerged.

After we ate a great dinner we started to get ready for wine bottling; dessert was to come later. Brad asked for filters for the wine filtering system. Oops, I had forgot them. No worries, bottling wine without filtering it is more the norm than the exception. I am fussy that way, but I am also in the minority, so no filtering would happen. We sanitized the bottles and at that very moment I realized I had also forgotten to buy corks!

There would be no wine bottling. So we sat, ate dessert, talked, watched hockey and enjoyed the company of one another. As the evening wore on, exhaustion set in. My feet and legs began to hurt, becoming uncomfortable from a day of activity and yet from a day of being constantly seated. The gang did an amazing job of cleaning up; I rested. When everyone went home, around 11:00 PM, I immediately went to bed and slept until 9:00 AM this morning.

I think I was tired. It was a long day.