December Storm

Well, it's not exactly the sort of storm one thinks of when the winds of December blow through your mind, just a lot of rain and strong wind gusts. There's no snow--nothing to blow a magic hat onto. In fact the temp's been rising throughout the day, topping off just now at 62. That may be the source of some envy for folks in the many places where this storm did come through with snow and ice! It was minus two in Colorado, I hear!



Lots of rain, that's what its been here...and all day long. Even the ducks seemed to be mostly under cover somewhere, though a few still managed to fly off--greatly inconvenienced and quacking this message to me--as I appeared along the pond shore.

As I've mentioned before, the wonderful warm temps have done nothing to suggest to our many frogs that they ought to be thinking about hibernation sometime soon!


As I was driving to work this morning, this pale pink rose on the windmill green caught my eye.

It's still early, but I'm sure we will soon see the multi-colored lights of Christmas dressing up the paddles of the Eastham Windmill.


"The Polar Express" movie was on television tonight. I hadn't seen it before, though I've read the book hundreds of times. I remember hearing unkind reviews about the animation style of the film, but I found it to be pretty wonderful...a great translation of the terrific original illustrations by Chris Van Allsburg. I'm a fan of anything with a train in it, especially a wonderful steam loco like this beauty...and I'm also a great fan of Santa himself, so I thought this was all-around great! If you're unfamiliar with the story, you should check out the movie...or at least read the book sometime this season. Does the bell ring for you?

We've had a few blips of power outage this evening, but nothing lasting more than a second or two (which was good since I didn't want to miss any of the Express!). The winds are still gusting pretty strongly, so we'll see what the morning brings.