Yesterday's Sunrise

 Gretchen Farnsworth was looking at the same sunrise yesterday morning and sent this photo to me today. She remarked that scenes like this are a great reason not to "sleep the day away." I totally agree. These moments are fleeting and it is too bad to miss them! 

I think Gretchen caught this a few minutes earlier than I did - the colors are much deeper and it is truly beautiful.

No such inspiring scene this morning - we have a totally bleak sky out there with no indication of direct sunlight at all. The temperature is hovering around 30 degrees, and that is tolerable. There is snow in the forecast, but only 2-3 inches, and then a stretch of pretty cold weather. Actually, I think what Alaska is having now, which is temperatures zero and below, is heading this way to catch us around Monday or Tuesday. By then, they will be enjoying temperatures around the freezing mark. 

This is a fairly typical pattern we have experienced for a few years. A while back I went back through some of my old blog posts to see what our trends had been, and we were getting the same undulating pattern of severe cold, then unseasonable warm temperatures, back to cold, etc., most years. A winter with long stretches of severe cold seem to be fewer, and a winter that is consistently warm with no snow doesn't happen often, so while temperature swings are not unusual, there is definitely a warming trend. Our world will adapt - or not. Life as we've known it may be substantially altered by the loss of certain species and rising tides, and that is sad to contemplate, even though some of us won't be here to realize more than the beginnings of it. It is scary. But unfortunately, too many of us brush it aside while we deal with other, more immediate problems. To paraphrase Scarlet O'Hara in Gone With the Wind, "We'll think about that tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day."