Icy!

First off, a reject concept for this year's Christmas card (I design our card every year!)...

So, a whopping great big storm passed through southern and eastern Ontario over the weekend. Toronto and the surrounding area are a big mess of power outages and fallen trees, as those of you living there know!

We were really worried we'd lost power, as we still don't have a generator. Without power, we have no water. We can run the furnace on wood but without the blower, it won't get the house comfortably warm. But we were lucky. We got some snow and a lot of ice pellets, and just a bit of freezing rain, so the power lines stayed up!

And it's very pretty...

Needless to say, the chickens and ducks and guinea fowl were decidedly uninterested in being outside.

I took the dogs snowshoeing and it was damn hard work. Deep snow with a thick crust of ice that I kept breaking through. But  we made it out to the beehives and back.

The trees are thinly coated in ice. That big tree on the right seems to have lost a large branch but otherwise our trees seem fine.

The ice-encrusted sumac was so pretty!

Sophie was waiting for me up ahead. Tristan lagged behind the whole way, wisely following in my snowshoe tracks. Every so often, Sophie would break through the crust and have to struggle out.

This big old tree was particularly pretty.

Iced prickly cucumber!

And a dog on a mission. She loves her walkies.

Cedar with prickly cucumber vines, all encrusted in ice. It was like a big messy spider's web.

Looks like some poor songbird got nailed from above. I've seen a Coopers or Sharp-shinned hawk hanging around our feeders (I can never tell them apart!)

And there are my poor beehives in the field!

But the bees are okay. I put my ear next to the top entrances and I could hear buzzing in all of my hives.

My little wooden bench is about to disappear!

Sophie helped out with bee inspection!

All the bees behind the garage were buzzing too.

Ya think it's gonna be a white Christmas?