It is so cold here and has been for about a week now. Today we have a wind chill of -21. I know, I know, it's a lot worse in other parts of the country, but this is unheard of for us, especially over an extended length of time. And it looks like it's going to stay like this at least until next Sunday.





I finally have my new computer set up and while there are still a few things to iron out, the basics are all up and running. The friend who gave it to me is going to see if she can tweak it the next time she visits (probably Tuesday night) and if not we'll get her son to look at it. It's nice to have friends with children who are part of the computer generation! It is soooo nice to be working with a full size keyboard again. Karen has taken her Netbook home with huge "thank you"s. I would have been lost without it.





I finished the last of my mouse pad inserts.


It's another Stoney Creek pattern. I got them all packaged up and in the mail on Friday, so hopefully they will arrive at their new homes sometime this week.

Michelle took me out for our end of the month lunch today and I had breakfast for lunch. Some days you just gotta feed that hash brown craving. LOL

The City in the Sea

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.

No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently--
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free
Up domes--up spires--up kingly halls--
Up fanes--up Babylon-like walls--
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers--
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.

Resignedly beneath the skky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrents and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down.

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol's diamond eye--
Not the gaily-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass--
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea--
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene.

But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave--there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside
In slightly sinking, the dull tide--
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow--
The hours are breathing faint and low--
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,
Shall do it reverence.

Edgar Allan Poe
1809 - 1849


"fanes" are temples