The other day when I went down to check the mail, I decided to bring my camera with me. It's a half block to my mailbox. Click on the images for larger versions.
If you look to the east, you see the Chugach mountains. I've lived in Anchorage all my life, and they still make me breathless sometimes. The sharp edges, the weather changing there first. They aren't particularly high mountains, but they seem very high because they don't have the long slow slope other mountains have. They come up sharply and suddenly.
We call the snow on them "Termination Dust", the phrase comes from the days when people got their termination notices for seasonal jobs, and seems to be a very Alaskan phrase. When the termination dust comes halfway down the mountains, it's going to snow in Anchorage soon.
You've seen lots of photos I've taken around this wooded lot that's across from my mailbox. Well, if you had a wooded vacant lot that pretty and close, wouldn't you take lots of photos?
The lot has a path through it. From there it looks gorgeous. Unfortunately, just as you hit that clearing you can kind of see in there, you find that people dump things in there. Big appliances and the like. However, it's still nice to walk through there during the summer because it's a habitat for lots of birds. You can hear wrens sounding lovely (and hardly ever spotted), get scolded by ravens and get the gossip from the magpies. My husband and I will walk through there hand in hand, and I'll stop every so often to snap a photo of a magpie or a wild flower. Looks gorgeous all snowy doesn't it?
About a half hour later, at just about 4:45 pm, it was sunset. Check out those colors! Aren't they beautiful?
I also put the snowy path photo through Paint It just for fun. I love using Paint It on snowy photos.
Corel Paint It! Photo
is only 9.99 from Amazon.com (affiliate link) and it only makes painterly effects from photos. I think it's a fun little graphics application.
Since we decided to give Black Friday a skip, I told my daughter we would go to the thrift store today. I scored very nicely on the 70s craft books and magazines I love, she was thrilled to find a fantastic holiday dress and a bag of fabric scraps. We also picked up shirts for William and Michael. Michael liked his shirt. It's the same basic style as his favorite black and red shirt in black and gray. William's shirt is another genuine Hawaiian shirt for his collection. Thrift stores are so full of awesome.
