A year ago today, I took the above photo of Little Red and Little Lady. They were playing what they’ve dubbed “long ago” or as the rest of us may be familiar with, Little House on the Prairie. It was hard to believe that they were able to be outside playing like this without a trace of snow anywhere, considering we’d had one of the worst winters that the Treasure Valley had seen since the early ’90’s and early ’80’s. In the school district that my kids attend, students of the 2016-2017 school year had six snow days. The more rural districts in the valley had a larger number of snow days, but six was still quite a bit. I think it was snow day four or five, I began to assign my girls assignments. Ha.
The photos below, are from a little over a week ago. Weather temps and “activities”, were changing like underwear! Actually, I’ve observed that any place that has four distinct seasons, can have warm sunny days where everyone is sporting shorts and then, unexpectedly, have a blowing snowstorm the day after while still sporting shorts. For reference, this happened in May of my senior year of high school. Anyway, the cattle in these photos were up by our house because we’d had a snowstorm about two and a half hours earlier in the day that blew in from the west. Most of the snow melted fairly quickly due to the sunshine and warmer temperatures that came screeching in. Whenever there are strong wind gusts or there are storms, our beefy friends end up right by our house.
Another storm blew in this past Thursday and we’re due to get another one this Thursday, dumping 1-2 feet on elevations above 4,500 feet. We’ll be good, but my parents . . . no bueno. In other words, a storm’s a comin’!
However, for now (today), we’re going to enjoy being able to walk with a relaxed gait without fear of slipping and falling while we momentarily have clear walkways and roads. Heck, maybe even skip a bit. For example, after school today, the Littles were outside riding their bikes and rollerblading on the driveway. This afternoon, we had some fairly warm temps that resulted in the melting of snow on the concrete and down most of our dirt lane.
For now, I’ll keep enjoying the beautiful sunsets that have graced our winter skies. Even if our season of winter is a confused this year.
*the adorable border collie pictured above is max, our neighbors’ dog. max enjoys running up and down his lane and getting his intense border collie on by fixating on our goats and donkeys.
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