Winter in Paradise...

Winter in Paradise...  I walked outside this morning into sunshine, most welcome after a week or so of being socked in (that's a shot to our southwest taken this morning; as usual click on it to embiggen).  The temperature is hovering around 20°F, though it's supposed to get above freezing today.  We'll see – the weatherman's track record is pretty dismal recently.  I wheeled our garbage can to the highway, as today is pickup day.  I'm surprised every week by just how much garbage we generate; on average that garbage can weighs about 50 pounds.  We're just trashy folks, I guess!  :)  After that I did my morning rounds of the bird feeders.  It's cold, so they're very active.  The whole time I was doing these chores I was looking around at the mountains that surround us – so beautiful this time of year!

I spotted a couple of strange things on our driveway that I cannot as yet explain (see the two photos below).  Those two photos were taken a few feet and a few seconds apart.  They're both on a stretch of driveway with identical exposure to sunshine.  Last night it looks like some meteorological phenomenon sprinkled ice crystals all over the driveway, which then partially melted together to form a rough, thin sheet of ice over the entire thing.  But in these two places (and only these two places), these two blobs appeared.  The one on the left seems to have thicker ice there; my theory is that there was water (from the day's melt) on the driveway that froze solid before whatever it was dropped the ice crystals.  The one on the right seems to have no ice crystals – it's as if they all melted.  One might suspect salt, but I haven't used salt even 100' from there.  I have no other theory at the moment.

As I walked toward our barn, there was a commotion in our back yard.  It seems there were three spaniels who badly wanted my attention.  That handsome fellow staring me down and demanding a scritch is Mako.  Bored with the proceedings is Ipo, the furthest one in the photo.  And curious Cabo is carefully smelling all the vegetation at the bottom of the fence.  Sure doesn't take much to make them happy.  If you need to be loved, and needed, get a dog...

Turning around after taking that photo, I was standing under the flag that my mom made a few years ago.  It's hanging about 12' high, above my barn's big garage door on its east side.  I especially cherish the sight of that flag on mornings like this, lit by the low sun in the east.  Of course it always brings my mom to mind.  Often, as it did this morning, it also gets me to pondering just how much our country's government has changed since that flag was last the official American flag.  And that got me to thinking, once again, how fortunate we are to live in a part of the country where the general feeling is that our freedoms are being eroded and that they must be defended.  So, so different than California...

Just before I went in to start working on cleaning up my office, I took this photo to our northeast.  I stood on our property when I took this, but the field in the photo belongs to our friend and neighbor Tim D.  You can see part of our backyard fence at right.  On the left side are some deer tracks, and on the right a small dog or a fox (the latter is quite likely).  I love these winter scenes, and I especially enjoy trying to figure out what wildlife have visited us by identifying their tracks.  This morning as I took out the trash and fed the birds I was able to spot quite a few: deer (lots!), a large dog, that fox/small dog, several house cats, a muskrat and a weasel (in our irrigation canal), some small rodent (most likely a vole), and I think a raccoon.  There are also, as you might expect, about ten bazillion bird tracks in the snow, especially around our feeders.  I can't identify any of them. :)