Ice Storm 2026

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I was hoping to upload a pic from our recent ice storm but some glitch is preventing me. In the meantime, enjoy this excerpt from one of my favorite short stories “The Snow covered up the grass with her great white cloak, and the Frost painted all the trees silver. Then they invited the North Wind to stay with them, and he came. He was wrapped in furs, and he roared all day about the garden, and blew the chimney-pots down. “This is a delightful spot,” he said, “we must ask the Hail on a visit.” So the Hail came. Every day for three hours he rattled on the roof of the castle till he broke most of the slates, and then he ran round and round the garden as fast as he could go. He was dressed in grey, and his breath was like ice.” (The Selfish Giant, by Oscar Wilde)

For Daily Reading, Next Year

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Leo Tolstoy had an idea: collect wisdom from “the best and wisest people” such as Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal, Socrates, Matthew Arnold, The New Testament, and others, and compile into a single book for short, daily “devotional” reading. Peter Sekirin writes, “This was Leo Tolstoy’s last major work. . . . preparing three revised editions between 1904 and 1910. It was his own favorite everyday reading, a book he would turn to regularly for the rest of his life.” Tolstoy arranged the collected wisdom of the ages with some of his own writing by topic.  His book was banned by Russia from 1912 until 1995, when it was republished . . . In Russian. The first English translation was made in 1996. I’ll be supplementing my daily reading this next year with Tolstoy’s “Daily Calendar of Wisdom.”

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