Just a Couple of Days!

Some of you know that "Just a Couple of Days" is the title of Tony Vigorito's first book, but today I'm thinking of it in a different way.  Here's what a difference a couple of days can make to the view from our living room! 

This first picture was taken on Wednesday of this week.  We had a heavy, wet snowfall overnight and this is what we woke up to.  The bamboo is doing an octopus imitation.  This in turn exposes the dark woods on our southern bank.  It really shows you how dark it is under the beastly laurels.

Now here's the view today.  It's taken from almost the same spot.  As you can see, the bamboo recovered - helped by me bashing the snow off with my walking stick.  It has been raining on and off for two days and it's very grey and foggy.

I worked down at Scrappies yesterday.  It's the first time anyone has opened the store since before Christmas.  Irene is finding it difficult to get in from Clun in the van because of all the snow and ice. We had a few customers and it was very cold.  I lost the will to live about 3:30 and was home by 4:30.  It took most of the night for my body to warm up, in spite of going up the drive to Pam and Dave's for a lovely duck dinner.

Today, I saw our first heron in the garden.  It's a Great Grey Heron, very similar to the Great Blue of the US.  We saw its footprints in the snow at the weekend and people have been seeing it further up the valley along the stream, but it's a bit odd for it to be at our house where access to the stream is more difficult for such a bird.  I'm quite sure it's not after anything in our pond - there's still a lot of ice in it, no fish and probably no frogs or newts.  Unfortunately, it saw me as I came to the window and took off, so John didn't see it.  He's been lurking by the windows all day in the hopes that it will come back again!

On Monday we had a cock pheasant on that table on the patio.  When it saw John coming it didn't fly away - it calmly jumped off the table and walked towards the door as if it knew he had food.  Mr. Pheasant seemed to like the peanuts we threw out for him, but we haven't seen him since.