February in New England

OK - I am seriously peeved. I just wrote an entire post here, and lost it when I tried to publish. Aack! Here we go again....

New England has a wonderful tradition of closing schools for a "winter break" in February. Many schools have the whole week of Presidents' Day off, but Lewis had a four-day weekend (no complaints - he gets 2 full weeks for spring break!). Lewis was able to have his friend Greg over, and we had time to run errands and relax. We spent one day driving down to Little Compton to go to Sakonnet Vineyards to buy wine (we've decided that we really like their Cock of the Walk red - "Wine with Attitude"). While we were there, we thought we'd take advantage of the sunshine and blue skies to take a couple of hikes. We stopped at Wilbur Woods and Emilie Ruecker Wildlife Refuge, both of which were quite lovely. You can see photos here. We finished the weekend off by seeing "Slumdog Millionaire", so we'd at least have seen one of the movies nominated for Oscars. If you haven't seen it, you should - it was wonderful.

Of course, that night, Lewis came down with the stomach virus that has been making the rounds at his school. So he spent the next two days recovering (thankfully, the stomach upset subsided pretty quickly, but the fever hung on a little longer). He was actually glad to go back to school on Thursday! Friday evening he spent the night at his friend Max's house, so Terry and I went to a Providence Bruins game. The Dunkin Donuts Center ("the Dunk") is right downtown, and it is much smaller than the arenas we are accustomed to (like MCI Center). We bought tickets at the box office right before the game, and we sat about 10 rows off the ice on one end, a little to the side of the goalie. They were great seats! The fans were pretty rabid - it was great people-watching - and the P-Bruins won 5 - 2! In case you were wondering (as we were) what a player in the AHL makes, the RI Monthly (like Baltimore magazine or Washingtonian) says that defenseman Andrew Bodnaychuk makes $525,000 a year! Who knew?

The rest of this past weekend was spent doing things around the house and relaxing. I made Terry stay up to watch the Academy Awards last night - I thought it was one of the best Oscar shows in years! It still feels like winter here (32 degrees with a 20-mph wind today), but at least the snow is (mostly) gone, so we can fool ourselves into thinking that spring is coming. After all, it's almost March....