I haven’t had to work at home for quite awhile, but today I had to add a second monitor to my Macbook in order to get some serious work done. The monitor really added to the clutter on the counter. Puck was doing his imitation of a hood ornament on top of the catio this afternoon. I got the moon rising behind the trees last night.

The cold persists, and so does the snow. Today’s photos were taken at dusk, therefore, between the fast lens and the snow reflecting the twilight, the effect is a light gray tone with remnants of soft color.

 

A junco fluttered and swayed trying to balance on a rather flimsy stalk of grass, giving it something of an angelic appearance. I finally put together a panorama of the Sandias after the storm on Monday. I like how the layers build up to the clouds, which mimic the mountains, becoming extensions of the peaks.  The last photo is the sunset from the top of our road tonight. As you can see, we still have a lot of snow after two days of full sun. I’m not sure the temperature has made it above freezing this week in our micro-climate. We’ve had two nights below zero and I expect the temperature will fall below zero again tonight.

 

 

 

“The guy on a buffalo”  is taking a break to be “the guy on a house”, caught on one of my drive by’s on the way home yesterday afternoon. Chance photos are always fun, and this set gives you a pretty good idea of what the snow in Corrales looked like. As we drove into a calm, snow covered Corrales from a dry, windy Albuquerque yesterday afternoon, Laurie noted it was like driving into Siberia. She was expecting to see a troika at any moment.

 

 

We got 4 to 6 inches of snow last night. We were not surprised to hear UNM was on a two hour delay and APS was closed, since we had lots of snow. When we left the house a little after 8:00 this morning, the snow was falling lightly, and there was no wind. Corrales Road was ice packed and treacherous, and Alameda was snow packed to 2nd Street — then the snow started disappearing. By the time we got south of Paseo Del Norte on I-25, there was little evidence of snow, and the wind was blowing. I guessed the wind had blown all the snow away. I dropped Laurie off at UNM at 9:05, then drove down to the office to learned they had cancelled all classes at UNM.

I ventured out to the river just before sunset. It was 15 degrees F when I left the house at 4:15 pm and 8 degrees F when I got back at 5:10 pm. I noticed my cameras and lenses had frost on them after a few minutes of standing on the river bank, and they had hard frost on the lens hoods when I got back to the house. Both lenses are sealed and weatherproof with zoom movement within their barrels, so condensation should not be a problem.

Geese , cranes and ducks were in the water and on the snowy banks on the other side of the river. Just as the sun was setting, I moved a little south and spied the Great Blue Heron. It didn’t fly, and after it noticed me, it did a little stretch and dance for me as it walked away.

The temperature was 5 degrees F at 7:45 pm. My weather widget is now forecasting 2 degrees F for the low tonight. I believe it may fall below zero.

I went for a walk in the bosque at 7:00 this morning. The sky was grey, the light was flat, and not much was happening other than a duck mooned me, a coyote kept his distance, and mallard took flight. Cranes and geese were flying to and fro, but it’s getting where all my crane and geese photos look the same. This is the first time I’ve gotten close enough to photograph a coyote, it was still a long shot, and it’s not everyday I get mooned by a duck.

We are going to have a cold night tonight. The temperature is down to 20 degrees F, already below the forecasted low for tonight, and  it’s only 6:00 pm. My weather widget is predicting snow and a high of only 33 degrees F for tomorrow.

BTW, several people have inquired about the time on my posts. WordPress’ server is set to GMT, which is 7 hours ahead of MST. I like it because I can get tomorrow’s post done early in the evening.

The half inch or so of snow we got last night melted quickly, leaving a wet sheen on the plants and mulch that covers most of the yard by mid-morning. Birds where hopping around on the fence, and scavenging the trumpet vine pods soon after the snow melted giving me the opportunity to photograph them through the windows, some in serious need of cleaning. I’m not much of an ornithologist, but I believe the birds in order are a thoughtful Dark-eyed Junco, a melancholy Lesser Goldfinch and a rather intense looking Spotted Towhee.

 

Today has been cool, cloudy and kind of depressing. At least this photo of the clouds has a bright spot in it.

My weather widget shows rain and snow tonight through Saturday, sunny on Sunday, and snow again on Monday. My new outdoor thermometer  on the fence showed 10 degrees F with frost this morning. We’ll see how the forecast holds. According to Erik P. DeBenedictis of Sandia National Laboratories it will probably take supercomputers running in the range of zettaFLOPS to accurately model weather for a two week peariod. Since the most powerful supercomputers running today are barely scratching the petaFLOPS range, it’s no wonder my weather widget is never very accurate. FLOPS stands for floating point operations per second. One zettaFLOPS is 10 to the power of 21 or a whole lotta FLOPS. You can read all about them on the FLOPS Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS.

I repaired the canopies on our car ports on Sunday, but the fierce winds we had today ripped out all the repairs I made, and left the canopies hanging sadly from the  few places where they are still attached to the frames.

The reflection of the Bank of America on the New Mexico Bank & Trust building seemed a good representation of the general state of banks these days.

Puck was working on his flight training this morning. His goal is to fly from the roof into the house, making a 90 degree turn in the process.

This is the first year anniversary of this blog. I published my first blog on photoofthedayetc.blogspot.com on 12-01-10, then switched to WordPress in May of this year. Today will by my 366th post for Photo of the Day, Etc.