Winter Wonderland

There were a few days left at the end of last week with no commitments, no appointments, and nothing fun planned either so William and I went to the cottage.  Everyone else had to work or was otherwise busy so we had a very quiet few days.

It was lovely and relaxing and just what I needed after running around and entertaining over the holidays. While I love Christmas and having family and friends over, it is nice to have some time to make some plans, organize how I'm going to organize (do you do that too?), and generally sweep the proverbial cobwebs out of my head.

We had every kind of weather during those two days.  When we first got to the cottage there was soft snow covering all the branches,

then it warmed up to above freezing and all the snow fell off the trees and the sun came out briefly,

and then, on the last day, there was a short snow squall.

I spent hours walking around outside taking pictures (I took 1144 photos in two days and yes I did sometimes take the camera off the automatic setting - yah me!).

I walked down the highway to the rock-cut and took some photos of the amazing icicles that develop there every winter. The cliff is about fifteen feet tall and the icicles tower over you in lovely thick undulating layers.

I also had my first photo challenge of 2012.  I love setting myself a photo challenge.  They aren't planned things, just something that pops into my head when I'm taking pictures and it is difficult to get the shot I want.  I persist and persist at it, sometimes for hours, hoping to get that particular photo.  This time it was trying to get a picture of the icicles dripping - and I got some!

 

There are probably a couple of hundred more photos on my computer's hard-drive of icicles with and without drips of water .  Fun, I know!  What can I say - I like to amuse myself.

I also amused myself by making a snowman when the weather warmed up just because someone had to take advantage of all that wonderful packing snow.  The snowman was only about two feet tall and was as cute as a button (although I did have to eat his nose as soon as I took this photo - see our next challenge for details).

The other challenge William and I set ourselves was to eat every last scrap of food and drink every drop of water we brought with us since we have to pull everything in on a toboggan.  We did it!  Our lunch before we left was the last of the pea soup we cooked on the wood stove the first afternoon we got there, the last slices of spice cake, a glass of milk each, and a mug of hot chocolate using the last of the drinking water.  Yum.

Although William and I went for lots of walks, some of us preferred to sit by the fire on a pile of cozy blankets.

As William and I were restocking the woodbox before we left, I spied some interesting pieces of wood and had to bring some home with me.  Details coming soon about what I'm going to do with them.  I really need to inspect my parent's wood pile more often - there were a couple of other treasures in there that I rescued.  You can see the wood lined up to be chosen in the photo below.

I also started a photo project that I'll tell you about soon.  It's all so exciting, I'm sure you can hardly contain yourself with anticipation.