It is 7:55 a.m. Mist and I are in the living room staring out the window. I stand before the picture window, hands behind my back, feet apart, staring upward towards the tree tops. She sits perched on the back of Attila's easy chair, staring down, into the garden.

I watch the snow where it first meets the skyward tips of the leaves. She watches the flakes as they settle on the porch, and gently land on the pink morning glory blooms.

After watching the snow for ten minutes I ran to my office to fetch Pearl, the laptop. It was still snowing hard as I set her up on the dining room table. After a few false starts, her power cord is getting increasingly pernickety, she fired up, and I began to type on the attached external keyboard.

As I type, Mist has become animated. Tired of passively watching the snowflakes, she now paws at the window as they pass, attempting to capture the movement.

She is wide-awake now. When the snow began I lifted her from my easy chair, where she had been curled asleep. Setting her on Attila's chair back, I drew up the blind so that she could see our first snow fall of the season. A moment shared.

Attila is working out there somewhere, in his parka no doubt.

"Hey Attila," I think, "what do you think of this!"

Thirty minutes later it is still snowing, but not as hard. Already the green leaves are bending earthward under the accumulated white burthen. The lines that bring our electricity, telephone and cable services into the house are sagging under the weight of branches, that now lean heavily on them for support. It would not surprise me if we are soon without power. Mist has tired of her game with the elusive flakes and has retired to my easy chair for a nap.

I have been writing less this last few weeks. My time has been occupied with the autumn harvest. Also, this is Attila's busy season, and he has little time to cook. The kitchen has been all mine since the beginning of September.

When we realized that this year the frost would come early, we harvested our garden basil. The harvest was much larger than expected, and extra years worth of Pesto found its way into our freezer.

Then our neighbor Magarac brought over two eleven-quart baskets of white grapes. Grapes are very perishable and must be processed immediately if their original quality is to be preserved. Three quarts of grape jelly and jam now sit on the pantry shelf waiting to delight the palate. There were so many grapes, however, that I dialed a quick call to Auntie Mame, my friend, and chef. She arrived to pick up the grapes, along with some large zucchini and a bag of apples. It is so nice to share the harvest bounty with someone who truly appreciates fresh picked produce.

I have been indulging myself, with Belgian Waffles. Recently I expressed a desire to own a waffle iron. Attila soon found one on sale for less than $15.00, and bought it for me. I have been eating waffles for lunch ever since. Not wanting to eat more than three whole eggs per week, as recommended by the health experts, the waffles are made with egg whites only. I purchase the egg whites in a carton, already separated. I had been topping my waffles with fresh sliced peaches, no sugar needed; but peaches are now out of season. Homemade applesauce has replaced the peaches, and I will begin to experiment with cinnamon in the waffle batter.

While busy in my kitchen, I have been spending my breaks with programming books and working on a web site redesign. This has been slow, but not painful. I am having fun.

I start the day's lesson by copying the site directory. I then play off and on throughout the day, trying out new ideas and discovering how little I know. For the first week, at the end of every day, the redesign results were so unsatisfactory that I would delete the entire day's effort.

The next morning I would return to the original site directory, make a copy of it and start over again. Eventually the point came when the day's changes were good enough to keep. Now I continue to revise those changes, working on accessibility and legacy browser issues. As I said, I am having fun.