I won this!

Back in September, Gill at That British woman  was giving the Blu-ray disc of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and I won!!!!  When I saw that it had Judi Dench in it, I immediately wanted to see it, but didn't get the chance to set down and watch it till the past two days.  It is not anything I will watch again, but yet I don't regret watching it at all.  Its setting was India and I loved  seeing it..even if it was just the market and city streets, etc.  That is all interesting to me.

The characters all came to India for one reason or another, to stay at this hotel advertised as luxurious...but luxurious it was not.  The characters were all retirees...Maggie Smith (Muriel) came to have an operation, Judi Dench's(Evelyn) husband and just died and everything had to be sold to pay off the debts, and the others came for various reasons.

It sure made me wonder how I would react to be set down in some country where all was foreign to me.  I wonder if I would be as adaptable as some.  And if I had not already been thinking about the aging process, this would have made me think about it.  I don't know if that is good or bad.

If I were rating this on a scale of 1 to 5, I would probably give it a 3.8....mot quite a 4 but almost.

B&W with a twist of yellow....

I take this shot several times a year...never really managing to capture the feeling I want.  So I was trying to do something with it and this is what I came up with.  I must say I like this a bit better than the full-color version.  Something about the way the B&W part feels.  Just look at the power lines...they seem to go on forever.
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There is definitely a chill in the air today...not even 45ºF yet...and high is predicted to be 53ºF. It is quite the change from a couple or three months ago.  We have had to turn on the heat.  In all the years of picking apples, I do not remember it being this cool this early.  This type of coolness came at the end of October.  Oh, the mornings might have been cool...and I think I remember there being a skim of snow one year for Covered Bridge Festival, but I think that was before I started working at the orchard.

Granny Smith apples were the last thing we picked every year....we waited as long as we could....in all the years we worked there, I think we waited too long one time.  What is too long you might ask...that is when it comes a hard freeze.  Well, one year we did wait...it came a skim of snow...this was around November 2 or 3...well, the boss still wanted them picked.  I don't remember why...he couldn't sell them.  But maybe it was to use in cider.  Not even sure about that.

So I picked them...had gloves on...but my hands still froze.  Every so often I got down off my picker and went and held my hands in front of the muffler of my picker to get warm!  I think that was the one and only time my hands got numb with cold while picking apples.

Call the Midwife

(This image is from Amazon--I will probably be buying the actual book)
Have you seen it yet...the show on PBS called Call the Midwife? It aired on our PBS this past weekend but I didn't get to watch it...I recorded it later and got to sit down and watch it last night.

It is one more show worth watching for us. It is based on these memoirs of Jennifer Worth who left a comfortable home to become a nurse and midwife right after WWII...she moved into a convent to work with nuns and other nurses who were already doing the work. There is a housing shortage at that time and people live in ways UN-imagineable to us today. Just so crowded...and such squalor.
 
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In my opinion, PBS has some of the best shows on television...we have been hooked on it forever.  One that was a favorite with both of us is Foyle's War.  We are now re=watching the episodes through Netflix.

I was going to try to list more of what we have watched and/or rewatch...and the list is endless.  We almost always watch Masterpiece Theater or Masterpiece Mystery....we are very seldom disappointed with those shows.  Let alone shows like Red Green...for fun, or The Joy of Painting, Quilting Arts, or Fons and Porter for instruction.

I just wondered, are there shows you always watch...and what are they?