Over the weekend we had fog. Pea soup. The trees loomed eerily out of the gray mist like lost soldiers that forgot where they were marching to or from.

The air oozed wetness. Drip. Drip. Drip.

Best to stay inside and finish our Christmas puzzle we started over New Year’s next to the cozy wood fire in the sun room. Not that it was that cold outside, because it really wasn’t. Just very damp.

Last night we were sitting there watching TV and heard it raining hard. Not predicted by our local weatherman either. This morning there was a tiny tiny spritz of snowflakes on the deck.

Tonight we’re supposed to get a predicted 1-3 inches of snow.

So, there you have it. New Jersey weather in a nutshell.

(photo: Out the Window)

Please join me in waving good-bye to the old, tired look of my membership-only blog! Bye-Bye, old ‘new’ Jersey Girl!

Welcome to the NEW ‘new’ Jersey Girl! I am now public again instead of by membership only. I hope you like the new & updated look to go along with my new chapter of blogging in 2013.

The content will remain the same as will the photography. I will be adding a weekly shot taken with my Lytro camera and I have not as yet determined what day of the week that will be.

You might notice the addition of a couple of different tab links at the top of the main blog photo. You can now click on “Weather” and be directed to our in-house weather station which will give you a view out our side window and also tell you the weather statistics as they are at that moment of your visit.

You can also click on the “Recipe” link and be taken directly to our cache of recipes that you can browse at your leisure.

Give them a try!

The “Archives” link will take you back to all the blog posts since the blog began in 2006. Some of these archival posts also show up in the right margin under “On This Day” and will show you any post I wrote on the same day of any given year. I always think it’s fun to look back and see what the weather was or what I was doing years ago. As always, the last years’ archives are also listed in the right margin, month by month.

Comment moderation is in place right now. I will turn on your comments on as quickly as I can. Old members of the private blog should be able to comment without comment moderation if they are logged in; otherwise you will need to go through the comment moderation process. It is not necessary to log in, but if you do your comment will show up immediately as the site will recognize you.

I hope you enjoy the new look and bear with me as we work out any kinks that might occur on your visit. Please let me know if you have any difficulties by clicking on “Contact Me” at the top of the blog.

Welcome aboard on my new journey!

(photo: Lost Glove: taken at Skylands)

I shot this photo of our pool cover after a heavy frost about a month or so ago before the snows came (and stayed). It looked like a smiley face to me. Or maybe the pool was taunting me (neh neh neh neh neh neh you can’t swim in me!) Either way, it caught my eye.

Hopefully this will be my last post before the new look for the blog will be revealed. We are getting so close! I’m so excited to have a new, fresh look. I can’t promise that the content will be new and fresh—just the daily life of a ‘new’ Jersey Girl as it unfolds day by day.

I did manage to go over to Skylands on Friday, but it was a rather disappointing trip. The constant freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw of our snowpack has left a solid sheet of ice in spots as I found out when I tried to go cross-country instead of keeping to the paved areas. I slipped my way to the slimy bullfrog pond only to find it with barely a covering of ice and looking very un-photographable. My next slippery stop was the koi and lily pad trench which I found out they drain completely in winter. Even the Duck Pond was boring as it was totally frozen over with a heavy sheet of ice and no reflections to be seen. I would have walked the loop but I didn’t have a hat on my head and a nasty little wind was blowing. I went home. This was the only shot I took the whole time.

With the warmer temperatures this weekend we hope to get down the Christmas decorations outside. I think the lights on the trees have unfrozen by now and the snow has shrunk enough to gather up the extension cords that are on the ground. I am tired of looking at them.

One of my amaryllis has a bud coming! I think it’s the oldest one of the three, and if so it will be its sixth year or so of blooming. It’s going to be a small one, but still—six years of consecutive blooms! The other two are still not showing any signs of a bud issuing forth but they still have nice green leaves. I was contemplating cutting them off with the thinking behind it of them putting all their energy into the leaves and not in producing a bud, but my master gardner neighbor Aileen nipped that idea in the bud (so to speak). She told me not to cut them. So, I guess I’ll wait and see what happens. I’ve treated them the same way I have every year so there should be no difference.

Next up: the big reveal!

Sorry. I couldn’t come up with a better title! The new blog site is coming along albeit slowly. It’s harder to work on it with Rick and I trading chats throughout the day while he’s at work about the formatting, font style, etc. I can only hope that when we’re through I like it and most people reading like it as well. Hopefully the new look will be revealed next week. At least that is what we are aiming for. I don’t want to drag this out too long!

The little common redpolls have moved on as predicted. I still see one or two on the finch sock, but it’s been taken over by goldfinches and I’ve even seen a few sparrows on it pecking away. I am wishing now I had participated in Project Feeder Watch run by Cornell. I would have except for the fact that right now our main bird feeder hangs in such a way that I can’t actually see the birds when they are on it. Our hanger makes it too low and it’s hard to remedy that easily since the hanger attaches to the deck railing. I figured I couldn’t get a good enough bird count without actually seeing them on the feeder. I would love to do this, so maybe I should be thinking ahead for next year and plan out a feeder strategy.

Our weather is warming up and our frozen snowpack is slowly melting. Fifty degrees is the predicted temperature for this upcoming weekend! It’s not my preference as I like winter to be winter. Plus, I really like looking out the window and seeing the ground covered in white instead of all those brown fallen leaves. It makes it so easy to see things in the woods, like the deer roaming around. But, it seems there is always a January warm-up each year around the same time. Even in Colorado this was true.

But I’m a Winter Girl. Born in winter; raised in winter. See?

There is supposedly an arctic blast coming next week. Not sure if there is any moisture around for snow though.

We’ve been having issues for a couple of months now with itchy and scratchy dogs. Alex developed big oozing hot spots from chewing and Bella woke us up from sound sleeps scratching. We had multiple vet visits. First one said flea allergies but we had not seen any fleas on anyone. So, they put them on a steroidal allergy medication which seemed to do not much. Back again and they said well, they probably have a skin infection now since the skin was breached, so antibiotics. Again, not much happened to relieve the itchy and scratchy show.

I could never seem to get in to the vet I like best at the clinic because I wanted an appointment pronto and he is harder to get in to see. I wanted the vets to see the areas of concern on the dogs while they were looking fresh. The first vet had said well, it could be scabies but I doubt it since she said we would be scratching and presenting with a rash too.

Long story short: the dogs have now been diagnosed with canine scabies, more commonly known as mange. Ewwww. Mangy dogs! Mange is caused by mites that get underneath the skin. On our last visit to the vet (and the vet I wanted) he took a scraping from Alex’s skin and found a mite under the microscope. Hurrah! Finally. Why didn’t the other vets take a scraping??

The vet said mange is more common than you’d think since we live around so much wildlife here. He said they could have picked it up in the driveway or the yard. I suspect these two “mangy” foxes that come around. Ugly, eh? We also have some suspicious looking squirrels who are always scratching. Or it could have been at the last groomer’s since it started right after their last grooming.

It’s easy enough to treat with a product called Revolution which is like Frontline except that it treats different things (like mites and heart worm). Revolution is right. Let’s lead a revolt against those terrible mites! Be gone! After only one application the dogs are already showing improvement. Hallelujah!

So, that about catches you up on what’s been going around here. I hope to get away from the usual household routine today and spend a little time at Skylands. We’ll see if that works out.

Taken in the realm of the Thorn Queen last week on our walk.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to my blog lately. It seems like the new year is just screaming out for something different. It’s time to change things up a bit.

The blog has looked the same way for years now and I’m getting tired of looking at all that white and that dark green. So, first up is a revamp of how the blog looks. Rick and I diligently worked on bits and pieces of that this past weekend to varying degrees of success. Right now you might notice a slight difference in the gray background.

My blog is on our own domain, not a blogging site, so everything has to be programmed in by code instead of just going in and picking what I want as a background, font style, colors, etc. It’s not easy trying to pick colors from a color picker on line. I must have tried a zillion and none were what I wanted. I have this vision in my head that’s having trouble getting out. I want a nice café au lait color: the exact color of our downstairs bathroom! Easier said than done. Some have too much yellow; others too much red that turns the brown rosy. No! Still working on that.

The header will change completely too. In fact, the whole look of the blog will change so don’t be surprised one day to visit and it’s completely different! Just wanted to warn you that it’s in the works.

Maybe the biggest change of all is that I have decided to try going public again and open the blog up. No more membership! I will still have comment moderation on since we get so many spam comments (again, because we don’t have the same filters as the blog sites) and one of the reasons why I went private in the first place. I just got tired of deleting all those crap comments. But I think it’s time to get over that, don’t you? I will try and email all the current members to let them know in case they don’t read the blog much and might miss this post. After all, blogs are for sharing, not hoarding.

Another thing I’ve been mulling around in my head is an additional blog, one dedicated only to photography with no words. Years ago I followed a blog where two people thousands of miles apart each posted a photograph of something in their day, or they had the same subject (say a landscape, a bird, a personal object) but each from their own point of view depending on where they lived. Maybe only one photo per week instead of one per day which would be pretty challenging! Trouble is, I don’t have a partner! It’s just a thought and it might be fun. I know I loved following that blog. I don’t remember the name of it now but I think they stopped after a year anyway. Contact me personally if you might be interested.

My blog will also have a new feature where once a week I highlight a photo taken with my Lytro camera. Lytro Shot of the Week or something like that. I’m having way too much fun with it and I want those shots to stand alone and not be included in a normal blog post. I can see lots of opportunities for macro shots once winter is over.

So, there you have it! I hope to unveil the new look soon. There’s still some work to be done and it might take a few trys to get it right, so I hope you’ll bear with me through it all.