Ice on the Umpqua - 9 degrees this morning

It was cold again today. Yesterday it was 14 degrees when we woke up, and this morning it was 9 degrees. There is ice on the Umpqua once again. This global warming is really getting cold.

Al Gore was a genius.....I wish I had been smart enough to invest in Mr. Gore. His quest to sell us a way to stop the menace of global warming was sheer genius...maybe he should have been president. I went outside looking for my carbon footprint so I could reduce it by paying Mr. Gore for some carbon offsets.....turns out I can't find my carbon footprint because the trees around me used it up and turned it into oxygen.....OH NO......Now there will be too much oxygen......Woah is us......

Moving to the woods has been a dream for a long time....since high school. Somehow I lost sight of it, and many years of life happened. Life is in general a series of connected events, which overlap in unimagined ways, and it is a rare occurrence when a clean break can or must happen. Sometimes it is catastrophe, and sometimes it is just the cards you are dealt....a convergence of events which allow a major move. Get laid off, sell the house, and move to another state where you know nobody, and the unemployment is one of the highest in the country. It's a fine pickle we've gotten ourselves into this time......a very fine pickle indeed. The full moon rising over the mountain ridge was knee-buckling beautiful. I still haven't mastered taking a digital photo directly into the full moon yet. The silhouette of the trees against the full moon is a 'must get' picture. I'll keep trying.

Winter is closing in. The Xmas stuff is up, and every year Pam and I remember the early years with the kids when we had to make our Christmas ornaments, because we were so broke. Pam goes through all of the ornanaments as she unwraps them, and we remember. She has a great memory for these things. As time passed we would go to an ornament store each Christmas and the kids would pick out an ornament for the tree. I really miss the kids.