We had fog for days, and the frost was beautiful on the trees. Yesterday we had freezing rain...it looks so beautiful on the trees....but there has been so much damage and also so many without electricity. Thank God, we have not had any problems from the ice. (knocking on wood!)

On the ship my wife was teaching an engineering course, and I was along as a plus-one, with no duties or responsibilities, so that I referred to myself as "the slacker spouse", and adopted the motto "Just because you're doing nothing, that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it well. However after each two day stop in port, I would need the next few days at sea to collate and rename the images from the two cameras, stitch together any panoramic shots, adjust the exposure, and straighten and crop the photos, and then select the best for the day, scale them down, and upload them (over a painfully slow internet connection) to the blog I was writing, and then caption the images and paste them into the text or into a gallery for the day. I was often up until 2:00 AM. As the trip progressed and the time at sea between ports lessened, I got further and further behind, and once back on land the blog photo galleries languished until I started posting here over the summer, and saw Jodi's Panama Canal photos and finally got the kick-in-the-butt to finish working on the blog photos.

I decided to leave the Christmas wreath on the gate at least until we got some snow.

I was surprised earlier in the week to see that Bewick's Wrens had nested in our birch birdhouse. They were very secretive, and I only chanced upon the two parents and the begging young once, and have yet to see or hear them there again even though the house is in plain view. They must have begun nesting around the end of last year--which is surprisingly early. They don't usually begin nesting until February-March.