snow!

We got our first snow of the year last night, and boy, was it pretty!  It's been a while since we've seen a snowstorm and high winds at the same time.

Justin and I headed out around 4:30 pm yesterday to finally go get our Christmas tree.  At this point in time, it was about 25 degrees with a feel-like factor of 9 degrees due to the gusty wind.  Looking back, this may not have been the best time for Christmas tree hunting: we ended up going down to Fred Meyer and purchasing one of the first trees we laid eyes on.

It's a good thing there was only room for the tree over in the corner, because this tree only had one good side.  Also, it's center branch was chopped off about four inches below the top of the tree, so I had to MacGuyver something (using a metal bookend and some elastic hairties) to the top of the tree so I could tie the bow up there.  Oi.

It smells good, though.  And it was fun listening to Perry Como's Christmas album and badgering Justin into helping me hang some ornaments.

Around seven, I took a look outside and it was snowing like crazy!  The cool thing (no pun intended) was that the snow was super dry and the wind was blowing it all over the place in these huge gusts.  Beautiful.  We steamed some milk for some hot chocolate and watched Edward Scissorhands (interrupted at half-hour intervals when I kept jumping up to go look at the snow).

We only got a few inches, which is good because the temperature isn't supposed to rise above freezing for at least a week -- whatever we have, we're stuck with for a while.  I'll have to post pictures once Sunset Pond freezes over in a few days.

Hopefully the snow will sweep off the steps easily so I don't end up breaking my neck or various appendages:

We'll see.  In the meantime, I'm going to try to talk Justin into a walk to Starbucks in 28/13-degree weather.  I'll let you know how it goes.