Apparently winter is to be continued here, doubtless for the next several months at least. Totally unreasonable and irrational to expect anything else, given that I’ve lived here all my life (getting on for quite a while now) and it’s always been the same. I did give some thought to a little intermission from the whole thing in this week’s blog, but have decided to continue to share the grey bleakness, snow, and cold at least for now. That’s not to say I mightn’t flee to some of the summer garden and flower shots from my archives for a future post. We’ll see how I hold up!

We did actually get a two day respite over the weekend (back to minus 20s and more snow today). Miracle that it happened at all, and more so that it hit on a weekend. Mind you, in my life one day is much like another, weekend or no, as I set my own agenda most of the time. I’m always torn between describing my lifestyle as “never working” or “working all the time”. It can be interpreted either way. But back to the weekend. We got into single digits!! Sill single digits below zero but when you’ve been suffering through minus 20s and 30s with a wind, getting up to minus 8 is a big thrill. This being the case, I was happy it was on the weekend so all those poor 9 to 5 weekday workers could enjoy it as well.

Since it snowed much of the weekend as well, I had to hie myself out to add to my ongoing “horse herd in snowfall” series. First shoot I’ve had out there (of many so far this season) where my hands actually stayed in the comfort zone the whole time. I even had to remove my head covering as I was overheating! The only negative was that the snow was so heavy at some points that the camera was getting pretty wet and the large densely falling flakes confused the focus sensor so it couldn’t focus on the horses beyond the flakes much of the time. I did get some shots I am fairly happy with, though, which I will post at some future date. I wish it could snow in that pretty fashion and still have slightly more ambient light for better exposures. I’ve figured out a few ways to get around that problem, but I think I need to spend more time working on it. Or learn to accept that when it’s snowing around here it’s generally coming out of low very dark clouds and that’s just the way it is, but it’s not my way to accept that sort of reality. I always feel I can do better if I could just figure out the right settings, and oddly enough, I often can.

First shot today is Eclipse, a little Welsh pony who is continuing his training and learning of life-skills at Ebon. He is wonderfully furry and hairy in general, and I love his little ears. I had hoped to get some full body shots of him, but he’s wearing a cozy new warm winter blanket these days (he lives outdoors in the pony pen), so not a whole lot of him was showing. He is a project pony for one of the young women who has been at Ebon a number of years. She amazed us a year or so back by selling her big jumper to purchase this pony, who came with pretty well no instruction manual. He couldn’t even be caught for the first months, never mind haltered or led, but with time and patient work much can be accomplished, and he’s now working under saddle and continuing with his learning program of how to be a well-behaved riding pony. It’s always entertaining and endlessly interesting to observe the progress of both the young untrained horses and their handlers.

Shot two shows the halters near the school horse turnout, ready for use when required. The bright colors caught my attention, countered as they are by the dim lighting of the mid-afternoon’s snowfall, and the snow itself. You can see a couple of the school horses lurking in the background. When the weather is as extreme as it has been for the past few weeks, the school horses don’t get much work as it is too hard on their systems to be brought in from the cold, worked in the relatively warm indoor ring, then turned out again, even after very careful and long cooling out. They have shelters and good heavy coats (especially this year) so are well equipped to handle the cold if left to their own devices. A good school horse is a valuable and well appreciated commodity at any training stable, and they are treated accordingly.

Shot three is a shelter of a different sort. This is the “brush pile” that we have established against our back yard fence, which serves as shelter and habitat for whatever little creatures need to make use of it. In truth, it’s mostly for the birds as the main other creatures here in the city would be mice, and nature friendly as we are, we tend to draw the line at mice and rats. We’ve been chucking branches and odd bits of debris on this for a couple of years and it is well used by the local sparrows, who are usually scattered throughout the depths of the interior. The pile faces west so it catches the sun much of the afternoon which makes it even nicer for them. We cut the branches off our Christmas tree and added them to the top to make a little roof to keep the snow out a bit better. There are no sparrows in the photo as they had all just been scattered to the winds by Mickey who roared out ahead of me when I went to get this shot. Mickey has always had a bit of an obsession with chasing birds, so he never misses an opportunity to do a bird run when he gets the chance. Once he actually did catch a slow-moving sparrow in one of these hunts, and that just reinforced his optimism about the whole process.

Shot four shows Mickey himself, having finished his brief foray and giving me the “well what are you waiting for? Good heavens, it’s cold, let me in” look. Can’t really blame him for that as it was about minus 25 and Boxers are definitely not built to handle cold. Oscar (his brother) wouldn’t even come to the door when we went out to the yard, never mind actually join us. Oscar is a dog who looks out for his own comfort and welfare above all else.

Shot five shows the “greeting” gargoyle in our front yard, as decked out for winter as he’s going to get. Once it got cold and snowy I felt he needed *something* so I gave him a scarf to get him through the season. I know, I’m odd. Seeing this shot reminds me I was going to antique him to make him a little more interesting and less gray. Maybe next summer I’ll remember to do that.

©Copyright 2008 by Judy Wood. See original post here.
To learn more about this artist, visit Judy Wood’s website.