We got a hole bunch of snow yesterday and Rob and I discovered that our front hall is crazy slippery when your shoes are full of snow. I had gotten some felting yarn a while ago with the idea of making a rug for our house but now I'm going to make a door mat. My idea is to knit strips, felt them and then sew them together. I'll need to put something grippy on the back so it doesn't slip around when we step on it. I think a felted rug will be washable (in cool water) and should be able to suck up a lot of icy water before it runs all over the floor.

 

As you can see in my last entry, we got a bit of sunshine last Sunday. What you can't tell is that it was also warm outside. It must have been the first day since September when it has been both warm (i.e. above -20) and sunny at the same time - we've been having a very grey winter. I decided that this called for a walk so as soon as I was finished photographing my mittens I put them on and headed outside with my camera.

We are getting to the part of the year where seeing the sun is rarer and more exciting. I took this photo outside the museum last week when we had a particularly good example of just how fantastic the atmosphere up here can be. No matter how much I dislike the cold and the bugs, the sky up here always amazes me. We get perfect fluffy sheep clouds in the summer and hours of golden orange sunset over pink rocks and dark pine trees. We get the startlingly blue sky which only happens when the temperature drops bellow -30. There are days in the winter when everything seems touched with gold because the sun can’t get high enough above the horizon to give clear light.
 
Here are a couple more pictures I took the same day.
 
This one shows both sides of the sun dog though by the time I got outside they were not as bright as they had been fifteen minutes earlier.


This was taken using the zoom on my camera.  I hadn’t really expected much (the sun being so incredibly far away) but it looks kind of cool.