Jaci Dawn

Winter is where I part company with “true” Oregonians (specifically: those Oregonians from west of the Oregon Cascades). The puddled appearance of objects outside my window is novel for half an hour.

The muted greys, greens and blues of winter are fascinating for a couple of hours.

But it gets old after that.

It isn’t the wet and the rain so much, but the overcast. No- it is the rain. And the overcast. It just goes on and on and on. If I get depressed by it, I wonder how Noah and his family felt?

Come to think about it, my little house is probably close to how cramped that ark was (without the ammonia and animal smells: can you imagine?).

No, I am not comparing my life to Noah’s. That was just a silly thought that popped into my head, looking out at all that rain. I do not know how much rain fell today (probably some average amount for the middle of December in the lower Willamette Valley). It was just wet and dark and miserable to drive in.

Did you notice I said “lower Willamette Valley”? This always amuses me: I live in the very northern end of the Willamette Valley, but it is the lower end of the Valley because the Willamette River flows north. So the upper end of the Valley is where the headwaters are, far to the south of us, SE of Eugene. We go “up” to Eugene, not “down” because the water is flowing north. Weird bit of trivia.

In the winter, the water just flows from the clouds to the earth, from the puddles to the storm drains to the creeks and the streams and on into the rivers. All the rivers eventually flow into the Columbia River, which flows on out to the Pacific Ocean. Then the water on the surface of the Pacific Ocean condenses and rises and becomes part of a new cloud system and…

I used to imagine the whole journey of a single drop of water falling from the Heavens all the way to the ocean and back again. Does it show?

It’s just wet. Chinese water torture. This won’t pause until after the Rose Festival, half-way through the month of June next year.

Rain. That’s what it does in the Willamette Valley.

This is what rain looks like out my window if I “solarize” it.

I need a warm fireplace, a fleece blanket and a cup of hot Chai tea. And a good book. Any recommendations?

My friend, Deanna, had this on her blog, Tea With Dee, &  invited me to use it. Since tonight I am just tired and have nothing useful to say, I’m borrowing it. Just for fun. 🙂

1.) Have you started your Christmas shopping? Well, it is halfway through December… Yes, but I am by no means done.

2.) Tell me about one of your special traditions.  Christmas stockings. We don’t really have any traditions that have been passed on from generation to generation except for the filling of stockings. Funny, but my husband’s family apparently did not do this. I made his forst stocking when we got married. He loved the idea, though, and the tradition has carried on down through our children.

3.) When do you put up your tree? The day after Thanksgiving (or that weekend).

4.) Are you a Black Friday shopper? Only for a Christmas tree and we try to go toward the mountains (away from malls & stores) to do that.

5.) Do you travel at Christmas or stay home? Now that the kids are grown: we stay home. In our youth, we traveled over the mountains every Christmas for the family spread in eastern Oregon. Ice, snow, freezing rain, and black ice. Yeah. Fun. (Family was fun, the travel was NOT.)

6.) What is your funniest Christmas memory? So many. We always had a good time at Christmas. A few: the year the snow slid off the roof in a pattern that made it look just like Santa’s sleigh really had landed there (and my brother told us that Santa really did – God bless big brothers). Playing Aggravation until I laughed so hard (because I was losing) that I peed my pants. Meeting my future sister-in-law Julie for the first time and hitting it off so well that we got a tad bit too snockered together… The year Levi got “air head replacement” in his stocking (he wasn’t impressed but the rest of us thought it was funny). Just so many!!

7.) What is your favorite Christmas movie of all time? Mine? Not sure I have one. Don loves It’s a Wonderful Life and Arwen loves Elf.

8.) Do you do your own Christmas baking? Absolutely. My favorite is probably the rolled sugar cookies with frosting & decorations. I spent hours on them yesterday (is that insane??)…

9.) Fake or real tree? REAL. We had a fake tree for years when I was a kid and it was never the same. There was no hunting for the perfect tree. And you have to have a  funny, flawed Charlie Brown tree to dress up with ornaments. It’s a tradition to go find the BEST tree (and DON always gets to choose. He’s like a little kid.)

10.) What day (as a mom) does the actual panic set in to get it all done? I do not panic. HAHAHA – right after the deadline for any snail mail to actually get to its destination by 12/24 and I still haven’t mailed Christmas cards. That’s when.

11.) Are you still wrapping presents on Christmas Eve? Yes.

12.) What is your favorite family fun time at Christmas? All of it.

13.) What Christmas craft do you like the best? Making the wreath. I refuse to buy a wreath.

14.) Christmas music? Already answered this: yes. I like the old stand-bys, but my favorite has been posted already: Snoopy’s Christmas.

15.) When do you plan to finish all your shopping? 12/24

Any blogger is welcome to participate in this meme, even if you haven’t been tagged yet. Just simply copy and paste the questions into your blog, and then answer them.

When you post your blog, please spread some Christmas cheer, and leave a link back to Heather’s Top Ten Christmas Blog, and the blog that you were tagged by.

Woke up this morning to frozen rain drops. It was not a heavy rain, but just enough to coat the world in slippery ice and leave drops suspended on the tips of the camelia leaves.

I had a busy weekend running errands and baking Christmas cookies, but I still had time to look out my front window and count the different birds at our bird feeder. I even tried taking photos of them, but not with any great success. If I open the front door and try to step out onto the steps, the birds are gone. If I try to slip around the back and through the gate, the birds see me and fly. So I try to photograph them through the picture window.

Only five band-tailed pigeons came to the feeder and as soon as they saw me at the window with the camera, they were off. They’re so shy!

The bushtits were no better.

At one time, there were 27 bushtits in and around the feeders. They were not all on the suet feeder at once (only half of them), but they were flitting in and out of the rhododendrons, the seed feeder, and the suet feeder. I counted 27, but there were more: you try to count dozens of tiny little birds moving fast.

I counted as many as 14 dark-eyed juncos on the grass, too.

I tried slipping out the front door to get a photo of them and they all took off.

I snapped wildly, but…

I got the obvious birds in my lens: one dark-eyed junco on the eave and a bushtit in the rhododendron.

When I uploaded the photo, however, I discovered two more bushtits in the rhododendron:

You can see how much smaller the bushtit is than the junco. While it isn’t a quality photo, it is a good size-comparison photo. The junco (which is farther away, slightly) looks twice the size of the bushtit.

There really is a bird inside that circle. A little grey fluff of feathers.

Bushtits are such cool little birds, almost as tiny as hummingbirds, and just as busy, flitting from tree to tree. They just happen to like flying in crowds, so you never see less than ten of them at a time. 27 is not unusual (and there were probably more).

The birds I did not get photos of were:

2 northern flickers (male & female)

1 varied thrush

2 Townsend’s warbler

Those are some pretty birds and I am sad I could not capture them on film. I need one of those remote digital computer cameras set up to photograph all the wildlife in our feeders.

But, all in all, it was good weather for birdfeeding and counting the birds that have come to count on us. Pun intended.

I will miss the ice now that it is gone. There’s something so delicately beautiful about ice and frost.

I love the way crystals form and the colors are more vivid.

Frost on the windshield looks like leafy ferns and glittering silver.

The frost was still forming as I sat in my truck snapping photos. Little “pings” of new stars on the thick glass.

As pretty as it was, I still had to dig out the ice scraper and be the practical adult, destroying its fragile beauty in a few swipes at the cold glass.

Darn that we have to grow up and lose our fascination with the beauty of the cold. When we were children, all that snow and ice didn’t mean hardship or danger. We pulled on our socks, long underwear, boots and mittens, our hats and our heavy coats, and we went out to play until our toes were so cold they felt like they no longer belonged to our bodies. (I was always afraid I’d pull my boots off and find that my toes really had separated from my feet and were rolling around in my socks, frozen.)

All the contrasts: green grass, the pink flowers on the heather, the blue-white of ice and the red rocks in the water. If you stop to think about it, it is breathtakingly beautiful.

If you don’t try to think too much like an adult who has to get in a car and drive across town on roads that might have black ice on them.

Darn grown-ups anyway: always pointing out how inconvenient frost, ice and snow are.

Our clod snap is nearly over. We did not get the predicted 2-4″ of snow (no surprise: seems like the more the media hypes up a storm, the less likely it is to happen). There’s a little freezing rain out there and a chance of more of it tonight, but we’re slowly moving into a much warmer air flow.

The kid in me doesn’t want to let go of the frost and ice, but the adult in me is relieved.

The geese are back.

The people in the cars are not happy about the geese being back. The woman in the black car waited until most of the geese were across the street, then forced her way through, separating the final four from the rest of the flock.

These stopped traffic, too. my walking partner & I waited until they were safely across before we continued our walk, lest we shoo them right back out into traffic.

I was going to take a photo of the goose poop, too, but sometimes I have a hard time explaining my photos to my walking partner. She thinks I’m a bit strange.

We dodge a lot of goose poop and I just wanted to share that fact with you. Lots and lots of goose poop.

I’m sure you can picture it without a photo.

I had half a day off to go shopping today (this is an annual “gift” from my employer: all employes get one half day in December to shop). Shopping wasn’t all that wonderful, but the view of Mt Hood on my way home was.

So I stopped and snapped a photo from the West Linn side of the river.

Because the leaves are gone, you can even see Willamette Falls.

I got to studying this photo and realized I could see where I was standing in Oregon City when I took this photo.

I was standing right there, where the tip of the arrow is.

Of course, knowing I could pinpoint that vantage point, I had to look at the first photo again and see if I could pinpoint where I was standing today.

There I am. At the rest stop on I-205 Northbound.

Or was.

Anyway, it was a rare crisp, clear day. I think it got up to 30 degrees, but I wore long underwear today and it didn’t feel so bitter cold.

After I took the photo and did all that deep thinking about pin-pointing my vantage points, I did get some Christmas shopping done. But I hate the mall. Can I never have to go to the mall again?

We are under an Arctic high pressure. What this means is the days are very cold, but the sun is shining. There’s a breeze most of the time, which accelerates the wind chill. Nighttime temps are in the teens and daytime temps hover at freezing.

I’ve been in much colder weather, but that isn’t really the point. We can have a “colder than you” contest and the Portland Metro area would lose, hands down. Even when it’s cold like this, it isn’t colder than (you name your location).

What is unique is this: the sun is shining. No grey clouds, no overcast, no rain, no freezing rain (we hope). Sunshine is good. Sunshine makes me happy (thank you John Denver). I can deal with this weather simply because there is this shining white orb in the sky that is actually visible during the daytime.

The “deep freeze” also offers this:

The small pond behind the office where I work is freezing over.

Icicles cling to green grass.

The moving water merges with the frozen, creating patterns and trapping autumn leaves.

Motion is frozen. (I rather like this photo of stopped motion!)

An icy cascade fringed by blooming heather.

Shadows on the ice. (Hmmm: including me!)

An icy riffle.

Green grass, grey rocks.

So beautiful.

Everyone knows I have two grandsons who are currently living in our house. Zephan and Javan provide me with a lot of candid photos.

But I have another grandson who is every bit as adorable, smart, and kissable as those two. I just do not have the access to him that I have with the older boys. Justin lives far away, in Colorado, where his dad is a soldier.

My daughter-in-law shared some photos with me and I just have to share them with the world.

Kissable cheeks!

I’m not partial or anything. But that is an adorable little boy.

I’m liking this grandma stuff.