Aftermath of Ice Storm

Can't wait for the shortest day
Lori. We get sunset around 4pm. Time to hole up till spring....

Another good reason to be south, our sunsets are around 6PM,
Lovely wintery scene there, Lori.

Poor old Sol... his light doesn't even reach the floor of our valley. We are on the upswing ..or will be very soon. The serious cold starts now and may be with us until April...hanging on with my fingernails!

I'd imagine that seeing it at a distance is more comfortable than being in it!

Looks beautiful Lori.....on your photo that is! Keep warm and busy. xX

Yes, Fran, there are times when I just wish winter cold be cancelled. In the 90's a couple of winters were so mild that we got a lesson on why cold winters strengthen plants and mild ones weaken them! Sounds strange but it's the truth with most of my perennials.
Thanks Janey... lots of work to do indoors. It'll be spring before we know it. :-)

not only plants - need cold winters to kill of this year's crop of insects before next year's eggs hatch; one generation at a time is enough!

That's quite true, Fran. We do appreciate the cold when it reduces the generations of mosquito hatchlings.

we're feeling the effects of several mild winters already in terms of insect numbers: let's hope for a short, sharp cold spell, hard enough to kill the insects but not hard enough to endanger the elderly!

Sunset in the bay area is around 5:00? Something like that. Of course it would be 6:00pm or so if we were not on that useless "daylight savings time".
Great photo Lorie...conveys peace and yet shows the cold to those of us not in the far north.

Do you get the pistol shot effects when the branches break under the accumulated weight of the ice?
Snow on the moors here but not in the valleys yet!

Being one of those "elderly"...I hope so too, Fran. LOL...Daylight Savings time, what a boondoggle...I would love to be able to post pics like those of yours at Christmas time, Stan. Then, again, I like the cold most of the time. We are far enough from our neighbours that it's usually a silent night.
Do you like snow, Marianne? Thankfully the temperatures here moderated over Christmas and the ice melted away. no damage of that kind. It's now become quite cold again and the trees do crack like lightening when it gets extremely cold (minus 30 or 40). In Muskoka, in my childhood, I remember painfully cold nights when the trees would crack and the ice on Muskoka Lake would booom... the ice sheets move with wind and collide and buckle at weak spots. My Dad called them Blowouts.
I hope the snow stays on the heather and your garden is spared.

I love the snow Lori, as a youngster i used to play ice hockey with other kids in my village on the frozen canals and fields, i still have my Noren, they are ice hockey skates and a best sinterklaas (xmas) present ever for a child, well i thought so anyway. Closest to skating now is going to the artificial skating ring with my 3yr old granddaughter, lovely but not quite the same! Our temps reached -20 C , but not much lower. Yes i loved the proper winters (sign of getting older eh...everything was better in those rosy days), thick frost flowers on the inside of our bedroom windows and all..

All this talk about winter reminds me of a documentary on BBC last night, Gordon Buchanan -Snow Wolf Family and Me- him and a wolf pack on Ellesmere Island. A breathtakingly beautiful haunting piece of filming. I found it on uTube, it is in 2 parts. You might like to see it..
Hope you dont get another 404 error msg lol

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gNq0V7KVxYo

Thanks for the link Marianne. The Gordon Buchanan story sounds much like the Farley Mowat book and later a movie about the wolves in the high arctic, titled "Never Cry Wolf". He debunked the "savage man-eating wolf"... and proved that as predators they eat mostly rodents. This was proved to me by our dogs from the north. Both of them, one a husky/wolf/malamute mix and the other Basset/beagle mix would pounce on rodents in the long grass or most often in the snowbanks! Foxes and coyotes do this as well. (I'm sure this is instinctual in canines) It is amusing to watch and makes eminent sense as it is easier to find and swallow mice than to take down a deer or cariboo. They have an amusing dance like sequence... stop and listen (with a tilt of the head), spring into the air, pounce with front feet and jaws, nip the rodent with the short front teeth, whip the head up and toss the rodent into the air...then snap with the jaws...and swallow...Gone!
In the Mowat story the researcher decides to eat the rodents to see if they could sustain a large animal! The scene portrayed in the movie was hilarious.

I saw one of my cats last year do that..and down went the mouse in one gulp.

Yes my dog does that, in my old garden in france this was how she went about killing snakes, she preferred those to mice...adrenalin junkie! Terrier genes eh. Same as bees, her preferred prey was hornet over ordinary bees or wasps. I dont know how she managed this precision lightening speed operation but the heads of these insects were always cleanly taken off. Thank goodness she lost those very fast reflexes now, she is roughly 12-14 years old but still manages the old rabbit.