Maybe the Last of the Snow

A bit after midnight last night, Lisa said we should open Christmas presents. She presented me with a wrapped package that she said was from Kuma Bear -- warm socks. It's a sign of my age (and of the weather here) that I'm perfectly happy with packages of socks. I gave Lisa a box of assorted videotapes with which she was very happy.

The weather forecast says that starting tomorrow, it's going to warm up slightly and start raining instead of mixing with snow. It's snowing right now, however. I continue to spend my holiday mostly resting, although I also continue to fight with the hard drive that I'm trying to clone. I tried running CHKDSK on it -- as a non-boot drive -- and even in Safe Mode, it still says that it can't complete the job. Darn it, I really don't want to have to go through yet another bare-metal Windows installation.

I left Lisa this morning trying to sleep. Her tinnitus is starting to flare up again, which makes trying to sleep even when exhausted a chore, and makes what sleep she does get quite literally restless as her ear keeps waking her up. With not a whole lot left to do here on the computer, I think I'll simply shut down and go see if she wants to get out in the snow before it turns back into rain and leaves us with a week of cold slush.

I wish everyone a safe and restful holiday of choice today.

White Christmas

This may be the last hurrah of this series of snowstorms, as the forecast is for warmer weather (vaguely) and rain, which will turn it all to slush, but snowstorms of this size are enough of a novelty that Lisa shot this brief snippet of what it looked like out our front door this afternoon:

Ready for His Christmas Close-Up

Lisa's present (and mine because I bought the fabric) to Kuma Bear was a new coat. It's not quite finished -- Lisa hasn't sewn the fasteners onto it yet -- but we decided that, today being the last day of pretty snow before the slush storm begins, we should get some pictures of Kuma Bear in action, so to speak.
( Photos of bears in the snow )

Lisa said Kuma looked cold even with his jacket and cap, so we took him back inside before setting to work cutting fallen tree branches.

Working in the Snow

Yes, it's Christmas Day, but as the snow started falling again, Lisa and I decided that it was likely to be the only time it was going to be dry enough, relatively speaking, to get the fallen tree branches out of the path. Working in the falling snow is a little easier than in cold rain and slush.

( Photo essay of the snow's effect on the property )

The detailed work of reducing the fallen branches to either firewood or landfill (depending on size) will have to wait for better weather.

After all that work (and after I spend another half hour or so scraping another 2 cm accumulated snow from the paths and cutting a new path to Lisa's father's wood pile (something we should have done three days ago), we had a late lunch. The snow had stopped after that -- we even briefly saw blue sky -- so Lisa suggested we take a walk. We slogged over the Santiam River bridge to Lyons and looped around on one of what I think of as our "usual" walks. Most of the roads look like they've had a snowplow run over them at least once recently, and highway 226 is well-sanded now. The snow accumulation on the sidewalks is almost hard enough for walking without breaking through, although what won't last as the temperature rises later this week.

Lisa then sent me back over to her father's house with the photos she took this afternoon and to see if the latest attempt to clone a hard drive for her worked. This time it did, presumably because this time I didn't try upsizing the original 20 GB drive to fit into an 80 GB drive, but retained the original partition size and simply formatted the remaining portion of the new drive as a second partition. Maybe tomorrow we'll try installing it into one of the T30 machines and seeing if it will actually work.