There's a fairly gentle but thick fall of snow accumulating outside my office window, covering the tree limbs with a soft white coating and beginning to pile up on railings and deck. And, after our spell of cold, cold mornings (the coldest was -32ºC = approx - 25ºF), it is fairly mild and windless. The birds are back at the feeders; during the cold spell we had a few spherical chickadees, but not much more. And I am contemplating a list of tasks that I should be doing but none of which seem urgent enough to cause me to stop typing and go and actually do them.

In truth, very little seems urgent to me today. Maybe it is having reached my three score and ten, or maybe it is only winter torpor, but I find that I am feeling accepting rather than caring, disengaged, distanced, from the alarums and excursions ? of this weird and wifi world. It's rather a nice feeling, as if hearing bagpipes from far away, echoing through fog. (We went to a Robbie Burns Dinner on Saturday and they piped the haggis into a hall with poor acoustics, right behind our table. Oy!)

Those two paragraphs were written earlier this week, but when I tried to go on with it from the bagpipe interjection, the post took off and went in an entirely different direction than I had wanted to send it. In fact, I have the start of several posts that have done this to me lately, ripping the reins out of my (admittedly loose) grasp and galloping off in all directions. Although I end up in intricate discussions with myself when this happens, I usually have no idea how to get back to anything coherent.

And so - today we have real fog. We also have a 'temperature inversion' that is causing the fog and melting the snow into slush that will freeze into slippery lumps when the weather inverts itself back to winter tomorrow. I keep hearing thumps as ice breaks off the roof and falls or is carried into the newly thawed down spouts. It is also windy and since this type of weather can cause a tree to fall onto the power lines, I am saving text almost as I type it, lest the power suddenly fail, and my computer noiselessly die.

I am rotating between watching the wood stove, pouring melt water from a pail under the down spout into my plant water containers and looking at the weather radar. A storm with cold green and blue arms and an orange heart is heading straight for here. I suspect that in a short time it will be pouring rain onto the slush that the warm wind has made of our snow. Am I obsessing about the weather? I'm Canadian - of course I am.

Did you know that when there's a weather inversion, it is very hard to make the wood stove draw properly? If you didn't, I think I envy you. And my feet are now wet because I was pouring ice cold water while wearing Birkenstocks and socks.

And there went my morning. Does anyone have any good advice as to how to get the most out of Kijiji?