Baby, it's cold outside!!

The thermometer has plunged and we seem to be in the depths of a cold snap - it was -31 last night with wind chill, and that wind was bitter! It howled around the house, blowing snow into drifts in the driveway.... so we huddled down and enjoyed a good game of Rummoli!
Ian and Tiffany have been here since Monday afternoon. Her grandfather was brought down to the Chalmers Hospital overnight on Monday by ambulance, with a suspected heart attack. I was not happy, having to wake her early Tuesday morning to give her that news... But it has turned out better than they expected; it was not a heart attack but rather a buildup of fluid in his only lung. He is feeling somewhat better today, and they may transfer him back upriver to the new Regional hospital in Waterville later this afternoon or this evening, depending on test results. So Ian and Tiff have just left, to return home to Nova Scotia. I expect we will take our tree down today or tomorrow... Christmas is over for another year.... Things are returning to "normal".. whatever that is!
For me, one of the very best gifts I could get would be a good book. I just love to settle down after Christmas with a new "good read". This year my Christmas book was "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett, a New York Times Bestseller. (Thanks Barb!!) It is her first novel, and I sure hope she keeps writing! It was just the kind of book I love- the kind that you find hard to put down. It is the story of three women in early 1960's Mississippi.
Here's the synopsis from the front cover flap: "Twenty-two year old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone.
Aibileen is a black maid, a wise, regal woman raising her seventeenth white child. Something has shifted inside her after the loss of her own son, who died while his bosses looked the other way. She is devoted to the little girl she looks after, though she knows both their hearts may be broken.
Minny, Aibileen's best friend, is short, fat, and perhaps the sassiest woman in Mississippi. She can cook like nobody's business, but she can't mind her tongue, so she's lost yet another job. Minny finally finds a position working for someone too new to town to know her reputation. But her new boss has secrets of her own.
Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed"....
I highly recommend this book; it is well written and it pulls you in, right from the first page. Both the characters and the story are so very real, you cannot help but be swept away... Add it to your "Must Read" List - you won't be sorry...

Peace,
Linda

"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body." ~ Joseph Addison