Solstice

Three days of steady snow, and now we see the sun again. 14 degrees out when I walked the dog her daily mile.
Yesterday was the winter solstice. This morning I took my annual sunrise at solstice shot -- that's the middle one and you may have to click on it to find the gleam of sunshine. I tried to line up the window edge with a tree because one of these years I'm going to map everything and figure the exact point on the compass where the sun rises on that day, and maybe that will help. Then I took the shot of the chimney, which faces North -- how often does it have a big patch of sun on it right at sunrise? Oh, and yes, that little patch of green at the bottom is my "green marble hearth" -- 5 marble tiles to extend the hearth. I'm very fond of them. They get all warm when the insert is going full blast.

Winter water

The pond does interesting things this time of year. It was barely hard enough to walk on around Thanksgiving, but I didn't go far as it seemed dicey. Then it thawed all of a sudden night, then froze, thawed, etc. Thursday night we had the heavy rainstorm that was an ice storm elsewhere (the top of the hills around us, for example) and then it was in the teens last night and now there's a perfect sheet of black ice.

My newly acquired overbite is bothersome. An orthodontist tells me if I let him knock a few molars out there would be room to re-align the upper teeth with the lower teeth -- the lower jaw is evidently shorter than it used to be. I'm going to get a second opinion before embarking on what he projects to be a 2 year project. Until we get a good treatment plan in place my broken teeth remain as is, so I can only chew in one small area. Every new appointment requires a 2 week wait. Things proceed slowly. The rehabilitation on my wrist is coming along, I'm probably at about 50-70% of where I used to be in terms of strength and flexibility.