beating the bounds

this morning when i looked outside i noticed the first frost had settled overnight. the temperature outside - 1 itty-bitty degree celsius. i added one more layer to my biking gear and put a few more carbs back before heading out. a cold bike ride was compounded by the first near hit i've had in a few years and this was a real doozy. i was travelling down a hill at a very good clip when i noticed an suv pulling out of a road to the left. cars often do this and then tuck in behind me after i've blown past. this one didn't . . . because as i later ascertained, the driver never saw me. when she did pull out our speeds matched for a while - she was hunkered over into the one lane and i was travelling in the gutter (try that at speed sometime - it really makes every fibre of your body become suddenly extremely valuable and very present to you!) and reefing on my brakes while she motored onwards.

i managed to catch up to her a few minutes later and still feeling the shaky jelly leg feeling brought on by a near death encounter with all the adrenalin smashing and roaring through my system i tapped on her window. she rolled it down at which point i asked her if she realized that i had been centimetres from the side of her car and she replied with real concern in her eyes that she hadn't even seen me. but you know what was different about this situation as opposed to countless others? she apologized right then and there and i knew from her eyes and her tone that she meant it. so i thanked her on behalf of my children.

what's truly worrisome is that if i had been a car, she, myself, and the little child in her backseat would almost certainly have been dead or badly messed up. but i live. so i blog onwards!!!

hey snow fell today for the first time since the wintertime whch ended just a handful of months ago! the snow didn't stay on the ground, in fact if you didn't see it falling, you'd never know it happened. but my class knew - right in the middle of a lesson - so we booked it over to the astonishingly huge and wondrous windows in my class and listened to each other gasp and laugh at something we've seen a bazilion times before but which still amazes and excites this fifty-one year old man who can still recall the very first time he saw (or remembers he saw) snow falling. i was in mrs. perry's second form at st. george's school in altrincham. i looked out the window just as some hardy and extremely brave classmate called out the very sight i had just registered with my own peepers. snow!!!! i was seven. i am sure that i saw snow before that but that's the time i register as having really really seen it and been excited.

i thought it might be timely to walk around the outside of my house - "beating the bounds" is what it's called in england -

to the eastern sky -
the sky to the north -
looking across my neighbour's homes towards the west -
the sky southwards . . .