Winter Wonderland

I've been having some trouble with blogger and haven't been able to upload pictures for some time. Because of this, the snow in these pictures has been melted by a rain storm we had this Monday and unfortunately, the ground has become brown and muddy. We got a soft dusting this evening and are supposed to get even more this weekend, but I already miss the tall drifts!









It reallly is amazing how beautiful it is here when there's a layer of snow on the ground.

We haven't had the opportunity to go cross country skiing yet this winter, but Joe and I were able to go ice fishing last weekend on Long Pond. We huddled around a fire on the side of the lake and kept an eye out for the flags to snap up. It was certainly more luxurious than the ice fishing we did last winter, but it was also a lot more fun with a crowd of people and a bonfire to warm my fingers and toes.

Work has been keeping me significantly busy lately. It's feeling much more like a newspaper office now, with people around every day and police station pagers going off a few times each afternoon. There's never any overly exciting news, but it's kind of nice to have your top headline for the day be one about a woman getting trapped in an elevator for all of 5 minutes. Or like Tuesday, when the big story was that a pair of thick mittens had been found in the middle of the street. Can you imagine living somewhere that is boring enough to make you call the police when you find a pair of mittens in the street? It's pretty crazy, but it's also kind of fun! The winters here are such a nice balance with the crazy summer life.

Finish off the checklist? Check!

This weekend has been both productive and eventful for us. Joe took the GRE on Saturday (and got a better score than last time! Yay!) while I stayed home to work on my web design lessons and start painting the ice shanty. I had planned to start airbrushing as well, but it was much colder than I had anticipated and by the time I was on my second can of primer paint, it began coming out like silly string instead of spray paint....Yikes! Needless to say, I called it quits for the day.

Today started with a rather large to-do list that actually was completed before 6:00 today. Our shower now has a new sealant on the floor--I can't tell you how much better it looks!--the fireplace is cleaned, as is the stove, and kitchen walls and basement steps. Plus Joe used his new jerky gun and made some beef jerky along with the pulled pork he'd been cooking since Saturday night. And that's only about half of our list! Needless to say, I feel more accomplished today than I have in a very long time.

I also just signed up for the next course in web design. I've decided to take a total of four courses, and hopefully, that should teach me all I need to know in order to build just about any website I could possibly want. I have a feeling I'm going to need to put some of my skills to use pretty soon since the gallery is getting a new website and it doesn't seem to be going well. So not only will I get to use my skills to finally clean up and fix my own website, I'll get to work on sprucing up the gallery's site as well!

Winter Wonderland

Today officially marks the second day I trekked to work through the snow. Last week I managed to convince Joe to go in a bit later than usual so he could drive me. I think I was doing him more of a favor than myself since he got an extra hour of sleep out of it, but I was definitely thankful to not have to walk through the blizzard that was beating down on us at the time.

Now that the blizzard has passed (after days of continuous snow fall), I'm actually enjoying the walk to work again. It's not too cold, but just enough so I'm thankful for the heat of the office when I walk through the door.

I must admit that it doesn't feel as though we've already started a new year. I'm not sure what event or act officially "marks" the new year for me, but somehow I've missed it this time around. It might have to do with my lack of resolutions, but in all honesty, I've never really made one in the past. Maybe it's because we lost power at midnight this year and couldn't watch the ball drop on TV or have the giant television count down, or maybe it's because we were actually doing something eventful for the night? Who knows.

Speaking of our eventful New Year's Eve, I wanted to share some photos from our night.





We were lucky enough to attend the wedding of our friends Jeni and Jeff. It was a beautiful ceremony of smiles and tears followed by a crazy night of dancing, masks, power outages, a blue moon and champagne! We unfortunately did not have power at midnight, but thanks to the iphone, we were able to count it down and toast on time just the same, and I think we'll probably remember the night even more because of it. It was such a special event even with the power, that the candle light count down made it even more memorable!

It was such a change from last year when we spent the night holed up in our house alone (eee...that makes us sound rather sad). I can't believe how comfortable we've gotten here in just over a year. It feels as though we've been here for so much longer. Oh goodness...there I go. Before I get all mushy on you, here are the rest of the wedding photos!