Mountain Musings

I’m in my house in Yarnell, Arizona for the first time in three years. The house is 4,800 feet up in the mountains, so I haven’t totally escaped the cold. The first two days I could sit on the deck with a heavy sweatshirt, hood, and lap rug for about an hour in the afternoon. I love sitting out there in the crisp air reading a book and looking up to see the mountain peaks around me.

Then it got cold. We had snow for two days, but it didn’t amount to much by Michigan standards. Yesterday we had the weirdest precipitation. It seemed a little like snow and a little like hail. One lady at the library called it Styrofoam, and the description fit. The weather lady on TV said it was not rain or hail, it was graupel, which she described as rain freezing onto snowflakes. Today is sunny, but hasn’t yet reached thirty degrees. We expect it to be between fifty and sixty in the next few days. Back to the deck for me!

I went to the Love is Murder conference in Chicago before driving on to Yarnell with one of my sisters. Another sister stays in the Arizona house, so we three are having a sisters’ reunion, which means lots of scrabble and reading. In addition to doing my own writing, I have finished two of the books I picked up at the conference: A Merry Little Murder by Mary Welk and Deadly Choices by Jenny Spallone. I’m about to start Desperate Housedogs by Sparkle Abbey. Lots of fun to read books by people I have met.

Now it’s time to go to the library. We don’t have internet at the house, so I spend a bit of time there every day. More later, I hope.