These are very cold nights with the temperature dipping well below the freezing mark.  When we wake in the morning, the roofs are covered with hoar frost.  And though the day warms up as the hours progress, it does not become significantly warmer; ice crystals remain intact wherever there is standing water.  Despite which, our toy poodle Riley is still anxious to be allowed outside to loll about soaking up the sun.  As long as he wears a coat and can lie on a dry surface he will remain there, enjoying the sun for hours at a stretch. 

He is a little dog that has always felt the cold.  As soon as September turns the corner following summer, he begins to shiver, and as a result a succession of little coats of varying degrees of warmth begin to comfort him from fall into winter and finally spring.  Our backyard enjoys quite a bit of sun, and the micro-climate there is amazingly different from the surrounding area, say at the front of the house.  If there's no wind and it's a sunny day it's a comfortable place in the cold months, but a sizzling hot-box in the warm months.

Yesterday, because it was both sunny and lacking wind I took the opportunity to finally cap off the closing up of the garden in expectation of snow and ice soon covering everything.  There wasn't much left to be done; taking down and discarding the vines, clematis and more exotic ones that will or will not renew themselves in the spring.  And finally cutting back the roses (not the climbing roses or the winter-resilient Explorer series roses) and capping them with snow cones.  Tidying up a bit more, and sheltering some garden ornaments in the garden shed.

And the work is finally done.  When we went out soon afterward for our daily ravine ramble we found the trails exceedingly muddy; the freeze-and-thaw of temperature changes always results in those conditions, we've found, over the years.  Although we could feel underfoot in many places that the incremental issue of the ground freezing has begun, and is quite obviously irreversible, until its release in spring.