Christmas, Fire and More

It's close enough to the holiday to say Merry Christmas, everyone!  Not a white Christmas here this year as today was relatively warm, dark, foggy and damp all day and I expect more of the same tomorrow.  It's a quiet evening in tonight and my wife and I will exchange some small presents.  We were planning on visiting my Mom tomorrow along with my brother and sister and their families, but with the Omicron variant being so prevalent and the hospitals bursting at the seams plus some family members' questionable decisions (I'd love to write more - maybe later) we will be staying home for Christmas Day.  There may be a Zoom call with all of us like last year, we'll see.  Here at home, my wife will cook a ham and bring her Dad over for a time and the Packers will play, but that's about it for us.

I did not get to have a firepit on the solstice like I have the last two years, it was cold and just way too windy to consider a fire, and that day the city picked up the stick pile before I could burn it.  Yesterday, however, the temperatures were above freezing and the winds were mild.  I started the fire about quarter to four in the afternoon and was out there until about six.  Long enough, and with sunset before 4:30 it was getting pretty chilly by then.  Last year my last fire was December 28, so we'll see what the weather does, if there's any more.  The fire picture was taken right about sunset, and I had to remind myself to take a picture.  I'm sure I have thousands of pictures of the firepit by now so I don't always anymore, but every one is unique.

About a half hour after sunset it occurred to me to also get a picture of the tree that was cut down as a follow up to the last post.  There was no more activity over there since and the trunk still stands, and stands tall.  It's twice as high as their garage and about as tall as their house, it was a very big tree to begin with.  You can kind of see the fences that would require the use of a crane parked in front of their garage to get the branches out.  But the biggest surprise is how this picture turned out.  Again, this was about a half hour after sunset, the first pictures I took were pretty dark so I tried using the 'night sight' feature on my phone camera.  Quite the difference, I thought, this fully looks like daytime!  But it was not quite completely dark out yet so turned out quite a bit brighter than actual.

Another takeaway is though I lament the loss of the tree, the dozen or more in this same picture, both near and in the distance, shows that we are not in any danger of being treeless in the area anytime soon.

Have a great holiday and stay safe, everyone.  Go Packers!