Ice Garden...

On December 21st, south central Ontario was hit with a wide spread ice storm, resulting in trees, branches and hydro lines down all over the area and beautiful young trees split beyond survival. This of course left many people in the cold and dark of a blackout, some for only a short time...others who have still not had their heat restored!

We were relatively lucky in that although we lost power for 70.5 hours, we have a gas fireplace in our family room and a gas stove in our kitchen, thus giving us one warm room to camp out in, as well as the ability to make coffee and hot food.

Although the cost of such a storm is astronomical, today I want to share the beauty that is also a part of nature's fury. So, grab a hot drink, sit down and enjoy the tour of my ice garden...

The Last of the Fall Colour...

On the weekend, while out in the garden, I shot these images of the last bit of colour left in the yard.  Although most of the leaves have fallen, and those still clinging to the trees are mostly a sad brown, there is still a bit of pretty colour to be found in a couple of spots in the garden.  I took these rather quickly, with my iPhone, and unfortunately the focus is not the best.  I do love those wonderful berries on the euonymus .  The colour and shape is so interesting.  The wine/green leaves are from my fragrant snowball bush...it smells divine when it's in bloom in the spring!  And the barberry bush is rapidly loosing it's leaves, but those still on the bush are a wonderful variegated pink/burgundy colour.

I thought you might enjoy an update on Dime too.  He's doing great and he's never too far from Casey!  He is such a clever little fellow, learning so much everyday. Happily, at 12 wks he's reliably housebroken (actually was a week ago already!) and we haven't had an accident in the house since his second week with us.

"Here are some of the commands I know...okay, I'm just kidding about that last one, but a puppy can dream can't he?"

Linking up with Texture Tuesday.

Rusty Bird in the Garden

One of my neighbours has the most wonderful garden and the other day while I was walking by I noticed this delightfully charming rusty bird perched on top of one of the rocks.

"Lilly" texture compliments of Kim Klassen.

Linking up with Our World Tuesday, Texture Tuesday, and Sweet Shot Tuesday.

The Life of a Dandelion

I've been working in the garden today, adding mulch to all the beds to clean things up and hopefully deter some of the weeds that seem to flourish in our garden.  Before my husband had a chance to pull them all, I took some photos of the dandelions in their various stages of development so that I could play with the tutorial Kim gave us in Beyond Layers this week.  Now all I need to do is to figure out how to slow it down so it's not quite so dizzying to look at.

Update: still trying to learn how to slow down the gif, but I did figure out a trick that seems to help.

Update #2:  I learned another Photoshop trick from Kim so I've added this multi-image shot of the same photos used in the animation.