~:: White Christmas? ::~

Can you tell the snow is still falling hard?

While inside it was cozy.

Neighbors, digging each other out—

Sad tomato cages and hanging baskets, dreaming of spring.

Then I jumped into this vehicle, the one with four wheel drive (POWER), and went down to the barn.

Hibernating tractor

This is what an irked horse looks like.

Then back home.  From my window upstairs:

Stings of Christmas lights, heavy and drooping and some of them simply buried.  About five minutes after I shot this, half a tree—heavily snow laden—broke and crashed down right here, taking the rest of the lights with it.  We lost about ten branches.

See that big branch just over the corner of the roof there?  That’s the one.

And dogs, playing arctic fox, searching for – what? – under the snow.

By three o’clock, we’d amassed about a foot and a half of snow.  But it was almost forty degrees outside.  Even as the snow still fell, thaw was running off the roofs.  By three in the afternoon, snow had turned to rain, and by dark, all the snow we’d been digging out from under was pretty much gone.  And rain all day today.  Flooding in the south of the state.  Not sure I get all this, and I’m afraid it will be a mucky Christmas day.  But it was beautiful that morning.  And I got to use the 4 wheel drive.  Pretty good Christmas cheer – –