A change in the weather--

In the big scheme of things, nothing much (as usual) of great import happened this week. Since we mostly live in the "small"scheme of things in our day to day lives, I can report a couple of notable items. One is that we finally have winter here. Not just a bit of winter either. We are plunged into a classic Saskatchewan January deep freeze. We've gone from daily highs a few days ago of around 0 C / 32 F or a bit warmer, to today's high of -25 C/ -13 F, with the windchill making it feel like something in the mid minus 30s. Throw in the weekend's high winds and relatively heavy snowfall, and it's "instant" winter here. 

The other notable family news was that my daughter in Nelson BC acquired two littermate brother Boxer puppies. This wasn't a planned acquisition, but when the little guys turned up in the local SPCA Jen's husband (that would be the one that didn't want either any more dogs or a Boxer) made the arrangements to pick them up and brought them home for her as a surprise. The only thing more surprising than this was his comment that if the third brother hadn't already been spoken for, he likely would have taken all three. Thank goodness for whoever took the other brother! I love my Boxers but I've never raised two from puppies at the same time, and that will be enough of a challenge, I'm sure. 

I'll try and get some photos from Jen to share on this blog. Sadly, because of my *own* littermate brother Boxers, now in various degrees of health decline due to their age (they're 11, breed average age is 8), we can't go out to visit as our boys can't be left at a boarding kennel any more, so we stay pretty close to the home front these days. 

Shot one today shows the leading edge of the weather front that brought us winter. The ditches and fields that are relatively bare in this shot are now covered with snow.

Once the snow has fallen, it's easier to appreciate the individual shapes and forms of the roadside weeds and grasses, that up to now were just part of a gold-brown mass in the ditch.

I was surprised at how much snow came down overnight on Saturday. Jim spent a good portion of Sunday working at clearing the walks and driveway, with the snowblower and shovel. I was concerned that my perennial plants would be hit hard by the predicted cold as they were uncovered and open to the air, but now that they have a good insulating cover of snow, I'm not too concerned for their welfare. This shot shows our front yard, complete with several bird feeders which are suddenly much more popular. 

Here are the above-mentioned fields and ditches with interestingly sculpted shapes formed by the blowing wind.

In the "who knew?" department, we finally got to see some photos that were taken in the late 50s (I'm guessing 1958 or 59). I came across an old film tin in the spare room, and knowing that my grandson likes artifacts from the "old days" of film cameras, I offered it to him. He opened it to find an unexposed roll of film. We had no idea how old or what it was, so Jim thought it worthwhile to take it to a specialty camera store and get it processed and put on a disc. Imagine our surprise when old family photos appeared in the end result. This is one of the shots, showing my friend Heather on the left, me in the middle (great glasses, eh?) and my sister Jean. Location looks to be a hill on the side of the river where the cars were lined up to take a river ferry to the other side. Photographer would almost certainly have been my Dad.