Spring is here?

So we’ve passed the first day of spring….and guess what we are doing…..here are some photos of what it looks like outside my front window.Can you see what this is?  It’s my son, making a snow angel….in our front yard.  Right beside him on the left side is the walk to the front steps and right above him is the sidewalk.Someone wasn’t too happy about shoveling the walkway….what walkway?There’s one under there somewhere….it’s no wonder we didn’t get any mail delivered that day….Still snowing….This is a photo of an elderly gentleman walking down the sidewalk to pick up his newspaper from the machine by the bus stop.

And so that is what our first days of spring look like here in Alberta, Canada.  How are yours??  Hope they are a bit brighter!!  🙂

A Prairie Winter Wonderland

Before I get into all the other ‘January’ posting stuff, I just wanted to show you a few photos from our holiday.  I guess that you could say this is one of my hobbies, it’s something that I’m driven to do, just can’t stop doing: it’s taking photos through the windshield of a moving vehicle.  Seriously, I can’t help myself.  It’s a super-frustrating hobby, the windows are dirty, I have no zoom, and all the cool scenery is flashing past, and I usually see something fabulous then notice the camera is off and in 2 seconds it’s gone!!  But I always do it.  Over and Over again.  (this is starting to sound more like an addiction and less like a hobby).

I’ve decided to post these photos as a slideshow.  I was going through them and narrowed down the ones to post here on the blog, and when I was uploading them was surprised to notice that there were 45!!  Forty-five photos of scenery from our minivan window!!  (I’m feeling slightly insane as I type this).  And those are only the ‘bestest’ ones. (I shouldn’t have told you that, now you won’t want to see them all!  It only takes 2 minutes to watch them though, really!)

Just a few more comments, then on to the slideshow!!   These were taken on Christmas Eve morning, as we left Edmonton, Alberta and started on the 8 hour drive to Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.  (We actually made it in seven and a half hours this time with only 2 potty breaks! ha!)  It was an amazingly beautiful drive as we watched the sun come up over the prairies.  I just love love love the prairies.  Maybe because I was born there, or maybe just the huge sense of openess and freedom.  You can see the whole sky at once!  And watching a sunrise is a very very rare event for me.  I also want to mention that Christmas Eve morning the temperature was -25 degrees Celsius, plus windchill made it 30 degrees below zero!  (that’s minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit).  It was a frosty morning.  We were well prepared with our emergency kit (candles, matches, radio, stuff like that) snow pants, sleeping bags and food.  My window was so frosted up that I scratched some hearts in it and just had to take a few photos (even my fingerprints crystallized)…. All of a sudden we could see a rainbow!!!  (and it wasn’t snowing or raining!)  It was such a gorgeous morning, watching the prairie winter wonderland flash by as we listened to glorious Christmas music.  I don’t even feel bad anymore about the crazy amount of photos I took….I’m happy to look at them and remember that special morning!

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Outside my Window…

It’s a snowy day outside my window…I guess I could say that I’ve been all frozen up and that’s why you haven’t heard from me for awhile…and maybe that’s partly true.  The beginning of winter can be a crazy time, but this year seemed to be a bit crazier than usual….snowise: early in November we had a BIG blanket of snow fall on us…and then it never really left.  Which is fine with me, I love looking out my window at the beautiful snow.  But other things were going on, too….I went in for a little surgery, our main computer/tv died a sad death, a few kids’ struggles at school, tons of work and homework for Henry, health stuff, and even some plain old winter blahs!!  So with all of that, somehow I just didn’t blog.  I would write posts in my head, but somehow they never got posted.

Now Christmas time is here and I keep making up blog posts in my head…so I thought I should try and get at least a few posted!!  I thought I’d start off with a few photos of what I see outside my window….I just can’t help taking photos out the window, of sunsets, snow and trees.  I try not to include uglyish things like roads and signs and cars parked everywhere, or the bus-stop.  I am so very happy that I can see trees!!!  The tree right in our front yard died a few years ago and we were all sad about it 😦 but there are still plenty that we can see. 🙂  Here are some of the shots I’ve been taking since the first big snowfall in early November.

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I love it when the ugly grey streets are covered in white (turns to beige) snow!  Yes, I know, I am not the main snow shoveller!!  This year our walkways were done for us for awhile….and then they stopped.  Today is a really white day…you can’t tell where the snow on the rooftops end and the sky begins…..

Well, thanks for being patient with me (and also now that I don’t have spell check anymore)…. I really do want to try harder and get some more posts done before Christmas!!  🙂