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  No heat in our building forced cancellation of church services this morning, so Randy and I went for a walk in the neighborhood.  We received ten inches of snow on Friday, the most we’ve had in one day this winter, and the snow felt as good as it sounded under our feet.  We walked over to the Washingtonville boneyard, looking for critters along the way. 

  This beaver dam is in the wetland behind our house .  It will be fun to watch what happens in the next few months.  Will the mink take it over and drive the beaver out?

  This is the Brotherhood Winery, the oldest winery (in continuous production) in the United States.  Scary, huh?  It made wine for the Catholic priests through Prohibition, hence the continuous production. 

   Two deer were wandering on the other side of the beaver dam.  I’m still waiting to get a good photo of the deer that looks like a Holstein cow.  It wanders down the middle of our street at night. 

Friday afternoon while hustling downstairs to catch the downtown C train at 81st, I heard a fiddle, a live fiddle.  The AMNH subway stop isn’t known for its subway musicians, so the bluegrass coming from the depths was a welcome surprise.  The fiddlist (I know, I know, it’s fiddler, but this is my story) wore a shopka (I have no clue how to spell that in Russian.  Any help, Nick?) and a long fiddle trinket hung from the single side braid in his bushy long hair.  He fiddled backwards.  He had a right handed fiddle that he played left handed, that is, so the strings were backwards.  We talked for a minute, and I watched him accept two dollar bills from two little girls who were watching with their mother.  He got down on one knee and showed one of them how to hold the bow, how to draw it across the strings.  Together they played, the little girl’s eyes dancing.  He apologized for playing backwards.  He was self-taught.  My train came.  Dang.

So, how was that anniversary, anyway?  The 35th anniversary is the Jade anniversary (or coral, depending on which list you go by), but we bent the rules a bit and instead went with Stainless Steel.  As in a new blender.  To celebrate the big day, we drove to Middletown and found ourselves a dandy new blender.  Before you scoff too much, know that it is a Cuisinart.  We are such hopeless romantics. 

 Tomorrow is our 35th wedding anniversary.  Thirty-five years!  These are some of the places we’ve shared.  Happy Day! I’m good for another thirty-five.

After our morning thunderstorm I decided to head to the polling place and finally make that decision and vote.  It’s been Election Central around here for the past week or so.  I was going to wait for Randy to come home from work and we’d vote together, but since I had to go out in the rain to the bank, I figured I’d take advantage of the quiet midday and get the voting done.  I opened the door to the voting room and there sitting across the table were four poll workers, and no one else.  I had the singular booth to myself.  Good thing, too, because (and this is unusual) I had not yet made my mind up just which lever to flip.  In New York we use those old-fashioned voting machines with levers, the mechanical type.  Here’s how they work, for all of you chad folks out there in the west:  you step up to the machine, and pull a lever, which closes the curtain, and there you are, facing a wall covered with levers, or switches (think OLD nuclear plant, like the EBR-1) and names.  Once you figure out which switch goes with which name, you flip the switch down to vote for that person.  When you have flipped all of the switches you want to flip, you pull the lever to the other side, and your vote is recorded and the curtain opens up, revealing you to those standing outside your little voting world.  It’s like you are the Wizard of Oz.

Since there was no one waiting, I was able to stand there a good long time, deciding who got my vote.  Flipping the switches and pulling the curtain lever is almost like exercise.  I guess that’s why they call it exercising the right to vote.  If you haven’t done it yet, go for it.