Snow's a flyin'

First snowball fight of the season.

Yep, it snowed the day after TG, now it's almost all gone.

Rusty's having none of it.
This is where he and I like to hang out.
Foggy, 38 degrees, air stagnation alert in effect! at 3:45 pm.

Happy Thanksgiving

Hi y'all, happy turkey day, or as I prefer to think of it, pie day.

Mmm, apple pie, I may just have to break the caveman diet for this.
Hope everyone has a good feast!



The weather:
12 degrees this morning.

The days are getting colder, but still no snow. In the mornings frost covers everything and when the sun comes out the trees and plants sparkle. The camera doesn't capture it well but if you look hard you can see the little sparkles on this tree. Is that why we decorate trees with lights?

The frozen yarrow and grass is still pretty.

Isn't this an eerie scene? It looks like the road to nowhere.

The fog was so pretty one morning I tried to take pictures of it. I think it's time to read the manual on the camera.

It's 30 degrees, cloudy and dark at 5 pm.

It's not that bad

It's that time of year again.

The wood has been cut and stacked (thank you dear), the pool has been drained, the trampoline taken down, the lawn chairs put away. Now we wait for the snow, which usually starts around Thanksgiving.

This is what we're burning now, pine and fir. It's pretty light and burns fast, which is good because the real cold hasn't hit yet. Now we have the fire turned down most of the time, so the wood burns more slowly. The pine and fir were generously donated to us by S and J, who still have a lot of downed trees on their property. We used to harvest our own, but our supply has dwindled. We have about 2 cords of this.

We also bought and had delivered 2 cords of a birch/tamarack (larch) mix, which is in the back row there. It's much heavier and denser so it burns longer. It's good to get this going with the lighter stuff and then throw on a birch yule log before bed to last through the night.We had more insulation put into the house this year, and J put in a bathroom heater. This morning it was 14 degrees on the thermometer, but I didn't know it till I went downstairs and looked.

Before the arctic air mass arrived, we had a few days of rain via the pineapple express. It was nice and mild and misty and moist. I imagine it's what Seattle feels like.

It was good to get all that moisture, but I can see how it would get old fast.

After the deluge, it was dry and windy, with the occasional bit of sun.

Rusty was pondering the universe here in the hot spot. Not 15 minutes later the clouds returned and it started to hail.

There isn't much color around anymore, everything is brown brown brown and grey and dark green, except for these bright spots:

Arctostaphylos uva-ursi - Bearberry

Willow?

Oregon grape with Bearberry

Gaillardia trying to bloom, better late than never.
It's cloudy and 41 degrees at 1:50 pm.

First Snow

The snow is here, for a bit. Rain is in the forecast later on.

J is putting lots of leaves on the garden and will till them in before the ground freezes. I hope.
It's 32 degrees at 3:30 pm, light snow falling. It's already too dark outside to take pictures.

Oh Happy Day

Spring has come in November!

The Color Kittens' experiments have come to life, the paint has spilled and it's mixing and turning red and blue into purple. Yahoo! And what's next?

But they had no green. "No green
paint!" said Brush and Hush.
And they wanted green paint, of course, because
nearly every place they liked to go was green.

There it is, everything I ever needed to learn about life in one Little Golden Book.

Here's to a bright and beautiful future.

It's 41 degrees, mostly cloudy at 1:00 pm.