Winter Wonderland

At a particularly bitter point of this winter (this morning I woke up & checked the radio & radio's website to see if my kids' school was cancelled due to windchill - it wasn't. I still had to go through the excruciating process of waking them[1]), I thought I'd reflect on the beauty of this season. That is, in photos where you can look at it without having to experience the inexplicable.

People are not supposed to live here. To the pioneers that were forced to sustain themselves in this place for the first winter: "Take a frikin' hint, people!" You didn't even have a thermostatically controlled climate management system! Hot water! Flush toilets! Huggies! Tim Hortons! Magic bags! I suspect politics were involved, or someones manliness ("That Thom Selkirk thinks he's so big... says I couldn't last a winter out here... well fuck him and FUCK THEM ALL!! I'll show them" Yeah. Thanks for that bud)... But I digress.

Nenette bugged me inspired me to do this a while back when she posted her winter yard photos.

Here's my street. I love a fresh snow fall.

The front yard with enough even snow to be clean & beautiful, and enough footy prints to look like someone lives here (as opposed to just resides):

And last but not least, my last hangers-on[2]. The last vestiges of evidence that, yes, at some point in the not-too-distant future, life will spring forth from this GODDAM BARREN WASTELAND.

[ahem] I'm going to go warm up my magic bags and crawl into bed...

[1] Lest someone point it out to me, I am aware that I'm not even the one who has to bring them out in this madness to school. This morning one even asked me if I could give them a ride to school. "No" I said, I was already late for a meeting. They didn't bat an eye. Not a whimper. They got their dad's interior furnace genes, they did.

[2] In the past, I just chopped everything down in the fall to await regrowth in the spring. This year I read some crap about leaving it for "dimension and depth and to have it remind you of what's to come" (and some other load about a place for the birds). Personally, I feel like it's taunting me. Pretty impressive accomplishment for a dead plant...