Wordless Wednesday: sad anniversary coming up

 

Wordless Wednesday: wash those windows!

 

Ice consequences

Every street I drove down in Austin last week had piles like this, although not all were as massive...

This was the aftermath of the big ice storm that hit A-town, cracking tree limbs all over town and keeping some folks in the dark and cold for as long as days. Sally's family only lost power for four hours, one of the lucky ones, but she said the house got pretty cold.

Fortunately for us, the temperatures where we live never quite got below freezing (plus we didn't have as much rain to freeze). But some folks in Austin got hit hard.

Here's what's left of a really big tree that just came up out of the ground in the Rosedale neighborhood, and had to be dismembered:

Playgrounds weren't spared either; so glad school was cancelled so that no kiddos were standing in the wrong place at the wrong time!

And I expect I'll still see effects of this nasty weather when I go back next week. But I hope they will have taken care of the huge limb hanging by a thread that you can see in the red box here:

You don't want to be anywhere near when that big boy comes down!

Finally, some white stuff!

 

When you go to spend a late Christmas just after new year's in Maine, of all places, you assume there will be snow everywhere. And you just hope the roads won't be icy when you go to the sledding hill or the skating rink. Right?

Well, because of climate change, or just the luck of the draw, we only saw the white stuff a couple of days before we left. And the poor Austin family didn't get to see any at all!

There wasn't too much for us, either, as you can see above, where an Adorable Granddaughter is waiting on the deck for everyone else to get suited up to come out and play.

Now they do have snow-making equipment up there, and everyone got to enjoy the man-made stuff at a tubing hill. Although some of the party just found the tubes to be comfy places to nap...

But the natural stuff waited until we were almost ready to go home to make an appearance. 

Even the little bit we got was enough to make for lovely coatings of bare tree limbs, one of my favorite winter photo subjects...

That last photo was actually taken from the car window as we headed mountain-ward. Yes, the two oldest Maine grandkids are taking skiing lessons at Lost Valley [and in the few weeks since we saw the first lesson they're already up on the big kid slopes and probably skiing faster than Gramma could keep up]...

Of course they have snow-making capability there, but they've been getting a lot of natural stuff since we left as well. Maybe our next winter visit will be with a more typical New England ambience.  

Wordless Wednesday: a colorful wall

 

A bit of downtown Portland

I have often blogged about my fondness for Portland, Maine—not only special as home of more than half of my grandchildren, but also because it's just such a cool little city.

Our recent late Christmas trip was mostly spent indoors with family stuff, but we did get out and about in Portland's Oldtown a few times.

Much as we were looking forward to snowy adventures, the weather didn't cooperate with the white stuff until just before we left. So I don't have winter-wonderland photos for you, just a few randomly interesting structures and objects we happened to see.

Like the handsome building you see above, across the street from a park where the kids enjoyed climbing on rocks and generally running off the sugar from their Standard Baking pastries. I was quite taken with this edifice; here's a closeup of some of its cute decorative elements:

A rather cool thing about the park where we played, in addition to the rocks, were a couple of these at first mysterious post-boxes (it is Post Office Park):

I was immediately reminded of the post-boxes in London, and how you can tell under whose reign they were erected (see one at the bottom of this post). But the Asian characters were a puzzle...

...for a few minutes, anyway, until we saw this plaque (and you'll notice I was able to sneak a pic of Oldest Granddaughter into the story).

I saw another informational plaque down by the harbor when we went to one of our favorite eateries. 

Portland has been welcoming to folks escaping from bad situations for a long, long, time, and the tradition continues with their embrace of refugees from many recent conflicts. Like I said, a really nice city!

Wordless Wednesday: Indeed!