This is charming in its way, but it makes it really difficult to get anything done. I look outside, it is raining, so I scratch off the list getting my outdoor work done. Three seconds later - just as I am starting to gear up for, say, sewing - I glance outside and the sun is out. Fantastic! Run out, pull on the boots, and head to the pasture to feed the animals (oh dear Lord, more on that in a few). By the time I get halfway across the pasture, it is snowing. Big fat flakes that melt on my head and drench me in wet loveliness. And cold. So I finish the bare essential and get back to the house where I proceed to start a fire and a cuppa (hot tea) and then voila! It is bright sunshine streaming in the window making my office uninhabitably hot, never mind the fire in the woodstove just around the corner. So I throw open the window for some air, whereupon it promptly starts to hail. In the sunshine. This seems to be a peculiarly Oregon phenomenon and still just cracks me up.
So this confounding cycle has continued pretty much the whole weekend, and as a result I have given up on most of my projects because I got tired of vacillating between them, and just tended to paperwork in my office and started a new Patricia Cornwell novel, which seemed as productive as anything else I could do while watching our full-on panoply of precipitation options playing outside the windows.
So today, after church, Kate and I decided to check out the higher elevation of Silver Falls after a friend posted there was snow up there. I am a sucker for snow, sorry guys. Don't even mind shoveling it, but I never have to. It just doesn't accumulate like that here. And I don't exactly have sidewalks anyway! So we took off driving, and about 500 feet higher than us it was snowing consistently, and there was a little accumulation on the roads and fields, and it was lovely. At our house it was raining. We drove for about 45 minutes, by the time we got back to town it was bright sunshine - in fact it was bright sunshine to the west as soon as we got around the Falls, and it was breathtaking. To the east, snow, and to the west, blue sky with streets of cumulus clouds, and long strands of low misty cloud hugging the hollows between the ridges we were driving along. I love that about Oregon. It makes you almost want to cry it is so lovely. But I commented "Gee, I wish it could snow at our elevation for a change."
Well, guess what. I am sitting here looking out my office window at the rapidly accumulating whiteness on my garage roof and truck while big fat flakes are flying around everywhere.
(And, I might add, it smells wonderfully yeasty in here since Kate made rolls to take to youth group) Then it stopped as suddenly as it started, and we got a lovely sunset. You just never know what you'll get around here.
So now, about those animals. It is a good thing I am a basic pacifist, non-hunter, animal loving sort. Or they would all be shot at sunrise this morning and that would be the end of that. You may recall that in my last posting I mentioned moving them, and their feed, down to the run in shed and how Mac attacked the feed bins, so I had to move them. SILLY ME, I actually thought I had secured them. Never, never underestimate the maniacal cleverness of a big male-ish horse and three goats of any gender, and normal peace-loving llamas who are operating under the influence of bad animals. I got out there this morning, in the snow, and there were trash cans, buckets, and soggy blobs of feed everywhere. Everywhere. I was NOT PLEASED. In all honesty I wasn't surprised either, but still. So I took the empty trash cans and buckets into the run-in shed (after smacking Mac in the head with a lid for good measure)(it's plastic and lightweight people, don't go calling the ASPCA) and then the goats all got in there and so did Mac. I chased him out without too much trouble, but the goats were comically resistant. I had to resort to throwing things at them to make them move, because they just kept wanting to hide under the workbench and were not interested in being enticed. Finally one of them headed for the gate so the others followed and then I shut the gate and locked them all out. No food, no shelter, how do you like them apples. I do not feel the slightest bit guilty. They are animals, this is not a harsh climate, they can eat grass and lump it. I am DONE.
And for good measure, in my struggle to get all this done I sank up to my knees in the damn mud, I am not kidding, it was like quicksand. I had to half climb the posts of the run-in shed to pull my foot out and my boot came off - and it is knee high! SERIOUSLY???
Sigh. I shall go drink my Calming tea and watch the Oscars. Merry Christmas.