I want some of it, Suzy! Sounds just like what I need!
I have more snow for longer than I remember, and I have lived in this neck of the woods for 25 Years come next April, and the summers have been hotter and drier - climate change or, as some say, too much logging.
It is raining now, maybe it will be more like it's supposed to be and the creeks will run and the salmon will be able to come upstream and spawn...
Thinking spring...

Yes it is finally here, I feel better already. And my snowdrops are poking their noses out. And I still do not have the peren. beds all cleared out. Oh well, it all gets done eventually.

Sol Invictus Lux !!!color>size>

Happy Solstice!!

Ummm...global warming, where the lleh are you??? I just hiked out to the chicken house on this bracing -1 F (-26 F with the 30 MPH wind)day, lugging my own 200 lbs, a three gallon pail of water and a bucket of feed...and didn't break through the ice crust on top of the snow!

Someday I'm gonna make time to find out why the daily change in daylight is sooo slow around the solstices....

But hope springs eternal, surely such a cold December means a blissful January thaw...right???

This could be an explanation of why, even though the earth's temperature is inching upward, winters in some places are becoming more severe. Just an hypothesis at this point, but it's being taken rather seriously by some people in G.B. whom would be very affected by shifting location of the gulf stream. Northern U.S. could also be affected by the paradoxical effects too.

Here is a link that might be useful: Changes in ocean currents

Cold, cold, cold here too. Yesterday we went from a high of about 75 in the afternoon to 30 at 11:00 PM & the wind is blowing!

I'm looking forward to the days getting longer too. Suzy, pass around some of that chocolate!

The only thing I do for the solstice and it's the same every year is take a long walk in the woods,regardless of the weather. I just want to be out with nature all around me. Today it is just gorgeous out there. Ice is on everything that exists and now is slowly melting so the world is covered in sparkling diamonds. I've never seen it quite like this before.

{{gwi:203687}}

Way out west, about 40 miles from Sedona, is a petrified forest that you can drive through... As far as the eye can see, huge trees laying tumbled as if they were toothpicks, turned to stone...

From, they say, a time when that part of our Continent was forested, with streams and water sufficient to nurture a canopy of huge trees..... you stand there on bare sand, without a tree or a blade of grass for miles and miles, and
you wonder about climate changes.

A few hours westward, Yellowstone National Park sits in a huge volcanic crator... on top of a mountain. I read that when that volcano blew, silt and ash landed in Texas. Quaint boardwalks all around... to keep you from walking
accidently into a steaming hot mud bath... and you stare for a bit looking at grown trees dead now from boiling
mud and chemicals.. and you know it was not there when those trees grew...

In Arkansas, folks dig up huge petrified seashells.

Oh - if this old earth could talk!