These photos are from yesterday. Earlier in the week we got a huge dumping of snow, some 10 inches or so. Dan and I have a little skating rink cleared out on the ice of our lake; now that there’s snow on the lake, we don’t have the freedom to skate wherever we’d like. On Monday Dan cleared the ice of about 4 inches of snow. Overnight it snowed some more, and Tuesday morning we cleared off another 4 inches. It started snowing while we were out there, and by the time we’d finished the first pass there was another inch already in the parts where we’d started. We cleared that off quickly, and then came in. I think at least another inch fell after we left it. I’m hoping we have a stretch with not much snow for a little while.
However, when you don’t have to clear it, snow makes the landscape look lovely. I took Raven for a walk yesterday afternoon, after the sun had come out. We’d had freezing rain overnight which had frozen on the branches of the trees. Everything was sparkling with the setting sun shining low through their ice-covered limbs. It’s something you just can’t capture in a photo very well.
Raven was having a blast. She’d bury her head in the loose snow, then flop her shoulders over and push herself along with her back legs, then flip over and roll around. She’d bound over and about, snuffling and snorting, romping and rolling. Then she’d jump up, pin her ears back and take off with a big grin on her face. Find a new spot, and repeat. Her puppyish energy is very cute, when it’s relieved outdoors.
Today we got high speed internet! Finally, the days of dial-up are over! Being out of town, cable and DSL aren’t available, and we’re outside of the range for the nearest wireless tower, so satellite internet was our only option. It’s a little slower than any of the other three high-speed services, but it’s still considerably faster than dial-up. Unless you exceed your download limit, which for our package is 250 MB a day. In an ordinary day’s activities this would not be an issue. But naturally, since the other computer hasn’t been online in a dog’s age, it had to download a whole bunch of updates and backlogged podcasts (which it did without prompting, or we may have caught and stopped it), as did the Xbox when we hooked it up (eager as we were to get everything set up and going), and within a very short window we’d already gone over our download limit. So we enjoyed high speed for perhaps all of two hours, and now we’re back to dial-up speed, part of their “Fair Access Policy” arrangement so that no one user starts downloading huge reams of content and eating up everyone else’s bandwidth. Ah well. Lesson learned. We’ll be back up and running again in a short bit.
As an aside, I and the Bird #90 is now up at Jeffrey A Gordon’s blog – head over and check it out!
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wow lots of snow….good you get out and enjoy it…Looking at your black lab makes me smile…
today a black lab mix puppy found its way from who knows where to my sisters home in NC…neither of us could take it in..but as luck would have it when I brought it to the human society..someone fell in love with it and will take it home…
did you know that black dogs are the least adopted dogs? Just found that out today…
Congratulations on getting high-speed! That should make your online life a lot pleasanter.
Glad to see Raven on a lead. I love to watch Cai and Fergus rolling in the snow too.
I’m glad the puppy found a good home, Dawn! It’s funny how these animals can just sometimes show up at one’s door. My mom has occasionally had animals do that (she’s got lots of room and feels there’s never such a thing as too many animals, so she always takes them in). I had no idea that black dogs are the least adopted – they’re my favourite colour!
Well, Lavenderbay, we’d still love to get real high speed, like cable, but this is definitely an upgrade over dial-up. Yes, Raven’s always on a lead whenever she’s along the road or someplace else dangerous or with lots of people. When we’re out in the middle of the woods, or out on the lake (now that it’s frozen solid) we let her gallop. This might change come spring once wildlife starts returning, but we’ll see.