Merry After-Christmas!

What a lovely Christmas season it's been this year! We've had beautiful, white snow; we've had ice - we've had a winter here in north Texas!

Of course, I'm ready for it to be over now (that's why we live in Texas now rather than our former home state of Minnesota!).

We had a wonderful Christmas day - and my orchid chose that particular morning to send up its first bloom of the season.

I'm demo-ing a new set of plug-ins for my photo editing software (thanks OnOne!) So far, I really like them. I'll probably be trying some new things out in the photos I post here.

Yesterday the boys and I took a little tour with the camera to see what we could see in our cold and frozen yard. Humphrey tried to take a drink from their "watering dish" (yes, unfortunately, my fountain is the perfect height for a watering dish for the dogs). Too bad for him, it was frozen over.

The bench hasn't been sat in for quite a while now. Well, maybe the cats have been sitting in it.

I'm surprised at how much snow there is still. Usually the snow melts in no more than one day here. But not this time. This morning it was only 25 degrees. The pipes in our pavilion froze (okay, we don't really have pipes. We have a hose that's connected to the faucets in the pavilion and the outside of the house -- but still, it does provide running water) so we didn't have any running water out there on Christmas. Fortunately, the heating units worked wonderfully and even without water, we were toasty and roasty between the fireplace and the heaters.