The rest of the shots from yesterday.

Today everything was shut down. We had a foot of snow in our yard plus long icicles hanging from the eaves. A couple of tree branches have broken from the weight, nothing major. People in Portland are already getting tired of the snow and asking if it will ever end. I love it. Snug in the house, Christian off of work, soft powdery snow to play in, it’s all fine with me.

A few photos from around the neighborhood:

We got outside today to play in the snow. It’s several inches deep with a thick layer of ice over it. Lots of fun crunching through to the powdery snow underneath, tossing pieces of ice to see them shatter, using them for “kung fu” and generally fooling around. I took a bunch of photos and will post them in installments as I get them edited.

Here’s Aidan outside our back gate:

Looking through the front gate into our backyard:

The yard and deck:

A neighbor got out his skis to take his toddler for a ride:

I know many parts of the country get more snow than this on a regular basis, but for us, it’s an unusual event. This will be my seventeenth Christmas in Portland and it’s the first time it might actually be white.

There’s a meme going around the photo communities with instructions to post the 6th photo from the 6th page of your Flickr photostream. Here’s mine:

It wasn’t that long ago that I first posted it. I was glad to find that the 6th/6th was a picture I actually liked.

I just hit 100 sales on Etsy. I figured that would happen this holiday season but it’s earlier than I expected. I’d gotten up to 97 and was watching the number and someone just bought three cat toys and pushed me to 100 in one fell swoop!

During a Google search for something I can’t remember, I ran across the cigarettes and purity blog, which seems to be about art and photography. She had a short entry about Richard Box’s installation Field where he set up flourescent tubes under powerlines and they glowed from the energy emanated.

So beautiful and such a fascinating idea. I knew that people were worried about living close to power lines and transformers but I had no idea they gave off this much power.

There are more gorgeous photos of his work at his website.

I’m slowly working my way through my photo backlog. This is one from September. It’s one of my favorite views, the pond/wetlands near my house.

After coming in from a foggy morning walk, cocoa in my favorite cup.

Sunday’s Oregonian had an article about two artists who decided to have some fun when the Google Street View van came around. They set up “scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more…”

There have been some interesting moments accidentally captured by the van’s cameras but I guess this was the first time anyone deliberately planted images for it. There’s more info on their website. What a cool idea.

Sometime around the end of September I lost track of Project 365. I have six weeks’ worth of backlogged photos. My rate of taking pictures has slowed down, too. I’m a little burned out on daily challenges. Maybe I’ll change it to getting the rest of those photos edited and posted by the time my 365 days are over!

Here’s one from September 13.

Aidan’s toy cars where he left them when he and Christian flew off to Germany that morning.