I’m not sure why but there is something about this time of year that turns the sky pink at dawn. We have quite a few of these blushy sunrises.

I will be going through separation anxiety today as Rick returns to work after being home for the entire holiday. He probably won’t work all day, but still. Then one more day of holiday time and normal life returns. Our garbage pickup day will go back to normal having been interrupted twice by holidays falling on our usual day, the Christmas decorations will come down and be packed away for another year.  (At least the inside ones will. The outside decorations are frozen in place right now.)

We don’t have any plans for New Year’s Eve. Most years we are in bed asleep when the clock strikes midnight. I expect to raise a glass or two of champagne before that though.

Whatever your plans are tonight, stay safe! Happy New Year everyone!

Mom! Let us in!

Yesterday was a snow day around our house. It started snowing around 10:30 and didn’t stop until after the sun went down. I would have thought we’d have more than we do since at times it was really coming down hard, but we ended up with about 4.5 inches out of a prediction of 3-6 inches.

I love to capture the birds at our feeder while it’s snowing so I tempted them with some extra seed sprinkled on the deck railings and on top of the old dry sink where we grow our kitchen herbs.

Tufted titmouse.

A tuxedo wearing junco.

Mr. & Mrs. C.

Mr. Purple Finch sporting the newest in bird fashion: snowflake nose!

A dry sink icicle.

We stayed around the wood stove in the sun room and finished our jigsaw puzzle (I’m ready to start another one!). We split some firewood and restocked our diminished supply in the basement so we don’t have to constantly go outside to get wood. We cooked.

The bubbles of olive oil as we started the polenta caught my eye.

Our Osso Bucco. Yum!

The railing on our front steps with its fresh coating of snow. No flash: just turned up my ISO speed.

Now this morning we have the chore of clearing the deck, driveway and front steps of all that lovely new snow! At least it was just snow this time and no freezing rain or “wintry mix.”

Alex waiting patiently Christmas morning to open packages.

We had a good Christmas. How about you?

It snowed about an inch on Christmas Eve. It was so pretty coming down. We turned on the outside light around 8:00 p.m. and just sat in the sun room with a cup of homemade egg nog (yes, I used raw eggs) and watched it snow. Perfection! When we got up Christmas morning and opened the curtains to that covering of white it was picture perfect. The snow mostly melted during the day when it warmed up to the high 30’s.

We had a small Christmas (meaning not many gifts) but the gifts we did get and receive were not as small. I thought it was pretty funny that both Rick and I gave each other a kind of camera! I gave him a time-lapse camera because he spends his days around cameras that do the opposite (high-speed slow motion) and I thought he needed to slow down a bit.

He gave me a Lytro camera, which I had never heard of before. It’s just a tiny little thing that can be easily popped into a pocket and taken along. It takes “living” pictures. I’ll be featuring them in my blog from now on in combination with normal photos. For the Lytro pics you can click on various spots of the photo and it will come in to focus as other parts go out of focus. I have added a perspective feature to most of them which makes the photo look 3D (depending on how deep my depth of field was in that particular photo) and you can click and drag to explore the photo a bit more. Try it with this photo I took of Hailey in the foreground and Bella in the distance.

See how her head pops out of the photo? Cool, eh?

So, how does the magic happen? I’m not too up on the technical bits but here is a brief explanation from Rick.
“Called a “light field” camera or “plenoptic camera”. A digital camera that acquires images in a whole new way, then uses complex computations to render the photos. Each pixel you see in the photo is actually imaged by many different pixels with different focal distances. All this data is later used to computationally render the photo.” Hmm … clear as mud, right? All you really need to focus on (Hah, pun, get it?) it that it takes cool photos.

Here are a couple more.

We spent the day playing with our new toys, taking the dogs for a walk and cooking our Christmas meal of Duck in orange sauce, two-potato gratin and roasted brussels sprouts with homemade profiteroles for dessert.

Yesterday we ventured out of the house and into town for a few things, then took the dogs down the road to Green Turtle Pond for an off-leash run. Brrr it was cold—below freezing! Just like littlel kids, the dogs had to step on every frozen puddle and break the ice. It was a game to them.

Then yesterday afternoon it snowed again, as predicted, while we watched the movie “Inception.” I may never think the same way about my dreams again! We got about four to four and a half inches of nice snow before it turned to freezing rain, then rain. I took these two shots just as it was turning to freezing rain. The trees were coated in what looked like white cotton candy and looked very strange. I hope you appreciate these photos because I went out in my slippers and bathrobe to take them! You can see my footprints in the snow on the steps for depth.

They say we are getting more snow on Saturday. I guess winter has arrived in New Jersey!

And the pretty much sums up the weekend, folks!

We went to see the Sound of Music on Saturday at the Paper Mill Playhouse. That stanza of the song “My Favorite Things” keeps running through my mind ..

Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes …

That and “How do you solve a problem like Maria?”

The performance was wonderful, the staging so well done! What lucky raffle winners we were!

And, speaking of snowflakes on my nose and eyelashes, I guess our expected snow amount has dwindled to “a coating to an inch” which is not ideal but certainly better than no snow at all. We shall see. Of course, places like Oklahoma are due to have a blizzard. Can you please tell me why it’s cold enough to snow in Oklahoma but not in New Jersey? Weather mystifies me. It truly does.

Yesterday found us up bright and early doing our Christmas grocery shopping. We needed to go to Franklin Lakes (stomping grounds of the Real Housewives of New Jersey) to the Market Basket to get our duck breasts and a few good cheeses. We had breakfast at the Oakland Diner, better known to its patrons as just the O.D. (I know Bigsis, I know!)

After groceries it was off to neighbor Kim’s annual Christmas open house across the street for a few hours of holiday cheer and chatter.

We hadn’t been home for very long when Rick yelled “SANTA, Lynne, get your camera!!” I had already changed into my around-the-house-sweats and slippers but I grabbed the camera and headed out the door. I didn’t have time to change lenses and had my biggest zoom lens on because the last time I used the camera I was aiming it at a woodpecker at the feeder. It worked out okay though. It was a little challenging since our normally empty street was lined with cars at the open house.

A slipped a twenty dollar bill in Santa’s helper’s hands and got a candy cane thumbs up from Santa!

I love living here. I just wish the expected snow counts were reversed and we were getting the blizzard and Oklahoma would get the coating-to-an-inch.