A glimpse of winter, courtesy of Thomas Hardy

I was just re-reading "Tess of the D'Urbervilles".  What a cheerful fellow Thomas Hardy isn't.  But he recreates the rural life so vividly.  And here is a glimpse of Winter.

"When she (Tess of the D's) lit her lamp to get up in the morning, she found that the snow had blown through a chink in the casement, forming a white cone of the finest powder against the inside, and had also come down the chimney, so that it lay sole-deep upon the floor, on which her shoes left tracks when she moved about.  Without, the storm drove so fast as to create a snow-mist in the kitchen; but as yet it was too dark out-of-doors to see anything."

Well we have had a tiny bit of rain here - which thankfully has not poured down our (non-existent) chimney - but not nearly enough.  Our green is brown already. So we are hoping for rain this weekend, as promised.

What have I been doing apart from reading?   Not a lot, owing to my arthritic state.  Shopping, cooking... a little bit of housework.  My studying of course. I  got to the meeting last night.  The teaching is so wonderful - what sort of state would I be in now without it?

Ronald asked me if I could give him a lift back home, which I did.

I talked to Anne of The Cape and have followed up with an email.   I hope to be out on the field service with June tomorrow.