Solstice snow

Weekend snow total at the cabin: About a foot.
Electricity: Remained on except for several flickers. The little town 4 miles from the mountain was out for about an hour on Saturday afternoon.
Chickens: Doing fine, thanks, though I couldn’t lure them outside the pen and into the snow.
Dogs: Crazy. What is it about snow and dogs? Mine act as though they’ve run wild all their lives and have never had a moment’s training when they see snow. They don’t heel. They don’t sit. All they want to do is run and run and run.
Walk to the car: A quarter mile
Plowed out: Not yet (but promises for today)

The nor’easter that buried the eastern cities didn’t hit quite as hard here as it did a bit further east. I ended up with about a foot of snow. On Saturday, the snow fell at about an inch or perhaps even two inches in an hour. Add in the wind, and it wasn’t quite a whiteout but it was close enough.

The snow was light and fluffy. I’m not sure I could have made a snowman even if I’d tried. I could almost broom it off the front deck, it was that light. This is the kind of snow I’m more likely to get in mid-winter than the last day of fall. Usually, the early-season snows are what I call "concrete" snows that have enough water in them to make a really wicked snowball.

The snow ended late Saturday evening, and on Sunday morning I was out shoveling and then playing in the snow a bit. It was tough to do much snowshoeing—too fluffy. I sank down to the bare ground, I think.

The feeder birds arrived at my feeders in droves. The back deck was littered with juncos and chickadees. For the first time ever, I actually saw two Carolina wrens at the same time. I’d always known there had to be two, but they always took turns at the feeder, and I’d never seen the pair together before. I didn’t have anything unusual show up at the feeders, but I certainly fed the masses. I filled the feeders three times on Saturday.

My photo today was taken yesterday evening at sunset. As today is the solstice, I wanted a photo showing the sun at its southernmost setting. The sunset is firmly in the southwest and not too far from south-southwest. By June the sunset will be in the northwest. By my opinion, which I know counts for nothing, the day after solstice should be the first day of the new year. What better time to start a new year than the day the light begins, however weakly, to add minutes to the day’s length again?