A Foehn is a lovesome thing

On Monday and Tuesday this week we had the the normal weather (-25) of this winter

At night snow and a coldly bluish moon

During the day snow enough to bend and break branches and even trees

As you can see the power lines are pretty much submerged in the snowy forest – and prone to break

Yesterday evening a westerly Foehn came straight from the Norwegian Sea, over the Scandes. At midnight I opened the terrace door; the wind was already strong and thaw-scented. In the small hours of today we had +4, so the temperature rose 29 grades between Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday night.

And today was a proper Foehn day – high winds and clear skies. The birches had practically no snow on them and the yellowhammers were sunning themselves on the bare branches.

We decided to have an excursion. First to the rapids to look for dippers – and yes: where we have so far seen just one miserable bird we now saw at least half a dozen. They were swimming and diving and far from miserable (far from the camera, too); the first one was located by its song… And an otter had run on the ice next to the open water.

Fine. We made a detour on a small forest road; there is a narrow rivulet with a couple of dippers from time to time. Now it was almost totally frozen so we didn’t stop at the bridge – till something moved on the ice near the bank. An otter! No, two otters! What – a third one! We did stop.

For a long time we stood on the bridge. The otters didn’t mind us – they were frolicking, chasing each other, diving to the small holes the water had made on the ice… When at last they vanished round a river bend we noticed that the sun was already pretty low down. With the high banks there was no direct sunlight so the photos are rather soft.

We drove home in the peachy-pink afternoon light and admired the moon – it looked much less cold on the soft blue sky.

Frost

According to my considered opinion, a good memory should never be TOO good. So, I have at times moaned about the non-winters we have lately had; now we have a proper winter…

Let’s take a day, any day (i.e. the time of so-called daylight):

At 9 o’clock

At 12 o’clock (if clear – otherwise see above)

At 15 o’clock

At 16 o’clock

And that was that – as far as the daylight is concerned.

Of course, there have been bright moments:

The Christmas tree found!

The flower arrangements created

He came again!

And some of the Christmas flowers just keep on flowering…

But it must be admitted one yearns for more colour… So I decided to knit a scarf for myself, a colourful lovely scarf. I delved into my stash (a pretty deep delving, that!), considered rainbowfuls of colours, hesitated between different hues – then had an inspiration, chose the exactly right colours and got going. The result was

Shadows on the snow

Simply pathetic…