It doesn’t seem too long ago that we were complaining about +35C temperatures! It is by no means as cold as it can get here – I’ve even known the temperature reach -50C. But the cold has been persistent. Every morning for the last week it has reached between -25C and -27C, and even before the first real snow, we had several days in the -20s. It warmed up for the first snow, got cold again, warmed and snowed again, then we had the full moon and the temperature really dropped.
The trade-off for this was: SUN SUN SUN!
The garden, needless to say, was toast. Not because of the snow, but because it was cold before it snowed.
I am reduced to eating dried kale and radish sprouts, and harvesting my windowsill gardens.
This is kale. Below is a tray of beet greens grown from my own beet tops planted in soil. To see how to do this, check out my e-book: Windowsill Salads: Growing Sprouts and Microgreens”.
The dogs, especially Badger, like to be inside. He is sitting in my almost finished greenhouse looking pitiful. I need to get to Williams Lake to find the right hinges to hang the door. 
Despite two falls of snow, the road is still drivable without having to have it ploughed.
The block heater on my van doesn’t work, so I have had to wait until the afternoon, when the shade temperature was a balmy -10C, to go anywhere. My first trip was to the church to using the washing machine. There, I had a flat tire: fortunately the knitting club was meeting at the same time, and between us we got the wheel changed.
Getting the tire fixed was a much bigger problem. The church is near Tatla, and the store there does a bit of mechanicing, but their compressor had broken so they had no air. The man at Nimpo in the opposite direction was away for the whole winter; the nearest place to get the tire fixed was an hour and a half west of Tatla, at Anahim Lake. Even then, the guy is out doing other work a lot of the time so I had to phone first to make sure he was there. We REALLY need a decent mechanic around here.
The birds of course, were hungry.
And puffed out with cold.
Here are a black-capped chickadee and a mountain chickadee together ; the mountain chickadee has the white eyebrow.
Life does not always go smoothly at the feeder.
The sun is setting further north every day. On this afternoon (about 4.15:pm) it did not clear Finger Peak.
It did manage to peek out on the far side….
And although there had been virtually no wind down below, it must have been blowing like crazy up top, for when the sun finally went behind the mountains it lit the snow plumes in a rim of fire.
Last weekend was the Tatla Lake Christmas Bazaar, held in the school gym, where I had a table of books.
Not the most elegant of venues, but a great social event – everyone knows everyone else, and it’s great to see how people express their creativity. (I even sold quite a few books!)
Courteney has been making and selling cupcakes since she was about 10 years old.
A family with three young boys had made kombucha.
Dorothy had concocted her usual baking and home-made sausages.
And Nestor, a long-term perennial, brought his woodwork.. His wife does the painting.
After the second snow, I started tramping around on snowshoes. They were hardly necessary, but they will make it easier to break trail when the next fall comes.
I had to include this picture of Harry as he looks so beautiful against the snow.
The river has a lot of ice on it, but it is not yet fully frozen.
Puffballs of ice crystals cover most of the surface.
I don’t think there has ever been such a sunny November.
I could leave the house to go to Williams Lake in these cold conditions, but it would be quite a bit of work to put the plants in the basement, make sure the water in the living area was drained, empty all the kettles (if they froze, it would damage them, or at least buckle the bottoms) and so on, and it takes a while to heat the place if the stove is out after the sun goes down. So I have been watching the forecasts for warmer weather that co-oincides with a better shopping day (Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays don’t work for one reason or another – mainly the availability of decent vegetables), and that also dodges the snow that will likely happen when the temperature does rise. Yesterday afternoon, there was a cloud….
Thursday they are promising RAIN! So it looks as though I will try and sneak in tomorrow. Unless things change, this will likely be my last shopping trip until February or March.