Tag: Winter
-
Sunrise Today (Minus Ten Years)
What a difference one decade makes! This photo of sunrise over Lake Champlain at 5:55 AM on February 24, 2014 captures a typical midwinter perspective from Rosslyn once upon a time. Snow. Ice. I think the last time that the broad lake froze was 2019. And at this advanced date, it looks increasingly unlikely that…
-
Midwinter Champlaining
As I see it, we’re about 2/3 of the way through winter with one month to go until we round the corner into springtime. Despite the fact that today didn’t exactly offer perfect conditions to launch the dory for a frosty February row, I do have a bit of good news. Atypically high water levels…
-
Lakeside Staircase: Demo
With a grateful nod to the weather gods and resounding applause for Glen’s and Tony’s concerted effort, I offer you another progress report on repairs to Rosslyn’s lakeside staircase. Several years into this slooow rolling maintenance project, we’ve successfully implemented the second phase: demo and cleanup. Here’s where I left off a little less than…
-
Snack Attack
Hungry? Jonesing for noshes and nibbles? What?! Back to insipid blog prompts, I’m afraid. Today’s Bloganuary challenge isn’t horrible-horrible, but it certainly isn’t very inspiring. So, please forgive my snack attack post. What snack would you eat right now? Honestly, it seems to me that coming up with a months’ worth of inspirational, open-ended, push-you-out-of-your-comfort-zone,…
-
Play Daily
From our first fanciful forays — pipe dreaming and what-iffing — Rosslyn represented for Susan and for me an opportunity to play more. Or so we imagined back in 2005 and 2006 as we slowly talked each other into a monumental life change. Although fantasy and reality haven’t overlapped exactly the way we conceived, most…
-
Old Year’s Day
Did you know that another name for New Year’s Eve Day is Old Year’s Day? Not used widely, in my experience, but logical. Retrospective. Emphasis on the year expiring rather than the year arriving. Despite a personal proclivity for forward-looking and possibility, a year-end review offers merits too. This day’s, this year’s minutes are too…
-
Carpe Amaryllis
An unfurled flame;a wind whippedpeace pendant dancing, daring;a pearly ribbonuntwisting, untwisted;a clarion calltrump-pump-pump-iting porcelain secrets…Seize winter now.
-
Driveway Tuneup
For several years, I have been planning to make improvements on Rosslyn’s driveway. Not dramatic changes, nor a huge project. With 2023 swiftly vanishing, we have initiated our long overdue driveway tuneup, completing the brunt of the work with spring 2024 “fine tuning” slotted in once the new work has weathered in during an Adirondack…
-
Christmas Eve
This evening I would like to share a memory of our first Christmas Eve at Rosslyn in 2008. It was to be our first Christmas at Rosslyn. For weeks we had been racing the calendar, coaxing the team forward, cramming days into hours to ensure that construction would finally end and Rosslyn would at last…
-
Hibernal High
I almost preempted this evening’s post with an update on the rising, rising, rising lake levels. Given the alarming uptick — Lake Champlain has risen approximately 2’ in the last couple of days with waters currently approaching spring flood stage — our attention is focused on meteorological forecasts. But angsty fretting serves no one, so…
-
Christmas Countdown
If the 12 days of Christmas refer to the interval between Christmas and Epiphany, then the same duration beforehand — the 12 days *prior* to Christmas, — are the Christmas countdown. And they’ve now begun… We’re already several days into this beautiful tree from Karen and Jim Thew, owners of the Spruce Mill Brook Christmas…
-
Gray Day
What a persistent stretch of rainy gray days. It seems to me that February or March of this year marked a transition from *typical* North Country winter to rain-dominant weather. Then a rainy spring followed by a rainy summer. When autumn arrived, everyone was in agreement that the rain was behind us. Certainly September and…