Walking in a Winter Wonderland

It is a winter wonderland here... as in 'I wonder if we will get any real snow this winter?'
It snowed yesterday. The kids went out and rode their bikes through the two small patches of snow dust on the driveway. Today it is snowing... the kind of snowing where you can see a few flakes in the air at any given moment, but none of them survive once they hit the ground.

These are the winter days when I desperately miss being up north for the winter. I miss getting enough snow that it actually covers the ground. I miss the temperature being low enough that it demands that you don a real coat to go outside. I miss the low-humidity cold. Here, there is just enough moisture left in the air so that as soon as you walk outside, the heat is immediately sucked out of your skin. It makes me feel like a real wimp, complaining about being cold when it is 30 degrees outside. I miss near or below zero weather, feeling the snot freeze up in my nostrils, yet keeping warm under hat and coat, bursting with the hubris that comes from fending off such cold...

To stave off this grey-brown winter ennui, I found a game online called 'The Farmer'. I thought that if I couldn't dig in the dirt or play in the snow, maybe I could curb some of my discontent with some virtual farming. The player is allowed to plant five different crops and raise some chickens in an attempt to make money.

The creator of this game obviously didn't know much about farming. The chicken house was equipped with what I thought were boxes for the chickens to roost in. I bought some chicken feed and a chicken, sprinkled some feed on the ground and went back the next day to pick up my first egg. Only there wasn't an egg in any of the boxes. A few days later, I finally discovered that you put the feed in the boxes, and the virtual chickens lay their eggs on the ground. How stupid is that? I won't even go into how you are supposed grow veggies. So I have abandoned my virtual farm.

So today I ordered the rest of the seeds for our garden, and on the way home from the library, picked up two buckets of coffee grounds from Crema for the compost bin. I need to figure out how soon I can start some seedlings...