A strange winter this has been. Early in the season we had acquired quite a snow accumulation, but then the temperatures began to rise, and we had a few episodes of rain, and the two; rain and rising temperatures, conspired to melt much of the snowpack. January was cold enough, but we missed our usual January thaw; it just failed to arrive this year.

February, though, has made up for a lot of things, in spades. It's been a shovel-worthy month. Plenty of snow to more than make up for what was earlier lost, and that's really nice because we don't mind snow. What irks us is unrelenting cold and the wind that accompanies it. And we've got both those elements now, usually termed a "cold snap", but it's no snap. It is a pressure system that just hangs around and refuses to budge.

Leaving us with day after day after day of enduring cold exacerbated by howling winds. Actually it doesn't take much of a wind on these extraordinarily cold days and nights to make life really miserable. We have had many visitors of the avian and small-furry variety visiting our various feeders. Just as well my husband had recently filled them up, because it's too cold even to do much of that if you don't have to.

People's water pipes have frozen because of the cold and that's a different kind of misery altogether. And I shudder to think of the homeless wandering about downtown looking for shelter. Here's hoping they've agreed to accept shelter and hot food and warm extra clothing now, because no one should be exposed to these temperatures and wind conditions without some kind of break.

Our puppies aren't too fond of this extreme cold, either. Two weeks of minus-25-degrees and colder at night, with day-time highs budging up to minus-17C at most make for misery. They think we're miserably cruel sadists to keep taking them out in the interests of puppy-training and house-hygiene.
Jack is always game to go out, Jill tries to avoid us, but to no avail; out they go, and us with them.

And having done that they're anxious to zip immediately back up the stairs to the deck to slink their way back through the sliding doors to the warmth of the house interior. Today it actually is warm in the house, since the sun whose warmth can't make a dent in the cold outside, is warming up the house very nicely through our two-story windows.