Snow ... bunches of it!

My goodness, but it dumped last night! The bottom photo was taken midday yesterday (Saturday) as it was snowing in the forest above Mancos, at the starting point for the Mancos Mush dog sled race next month. The top picture is about 26 hours later, mid-afternoon Sunday. Musta been a good 10 inches of new snow overnight. (I didn't load the pictures in that order, but ... stuff happens.)

We had eight inches on the level at the house; four to six inches is a normal snowstorm dump. So, we were out of power most of the night, the Internet connection was down till this evening and the phone was out, last I checked.

Sandy and I were trying to watch "Twelve Angry Men" on DVD last night. We must have had 20power blips during the course of the movie, each one requiring us to turn on the player again and search for where we were when the power went off! I've probably seen that movie a dozen times, but never has it been so long!

Our overnight outage was brief and endurable, but I saw a headline a day or so ago saying that this same storm had left 600,000 people in California out of power. Thinking about that and the three-week long struggle to restore power after the ice storms in the Oklahoma City area last month, I have to wonder: Is our power grid fragile? Seems like a lot of people can be out of power for a long time nowadays. Does that mean a lack of backup systems and routes and/or a lack of ability to respond quickly to electrical distribution system emergencies?

In addition to catching up on things let go while we traveled in December, we're trying to get some photos ready for exhibitions. Yours truly knows from NOTHING about matting, framing, hanging and the whole display business! Talk about feeling like a fish out of water! 

Fortunately, Sandy has way more taste and a better sense of how to go about this sort of thing, so we're getting there. She's got a couple of items ready, including her adorable picture of two donkeys. I'm getting the "Green Death" picture of a mantis eating a hummingbird ready for a "Deliciously Weird" exhibit in Durango in February. Sandy says it would make a good Valentine's Day card ... for an ex-lover?