Snow

The front yard this morning.

Last night it snowed here in Eugene. By morning we had about four inches on the ground, and it’s so cold it’s even stuck. And it looks like it’s going to be here all week too, as it’s going to stay cold. This much snow is no big deal for many places, but when a town has no plows and won’t salt the roads, well, things get messy. I drove to campus today, to go to the post office and the gym, and it’s not real nice on the roads. The cars pack the snow into ice, which then freezes hard, and voila, you’ve got a skating rink.

The current hummingbird rig. The lamps sit about eight inches from the glass bottle of the feeder. The hummingbirds don't seem to be bothered by the lights at all, they've been out there fighting over the feeder all day as usual.

I was up all night writing my OHSU essays; I peeked out the window at four-something to check the hummingbird feeder, and it was frozen solid–and there was a poor hummingbird just sitting there, trying to have some breakfast. I don’t know what he was doing up hours before dawn, but I took the feeder in and thawed it in the microwave.

When Brian got up we found the worklights and rigged up a more permanent solution, since it’ll be so cold all week, and hummingbird juice freezes at around 27 or 28 degrees. Now that I know they’re up so early, I’ll probably just leave the lights on tonight so they can snack when they need to in the morning. They go into such a deep torpor in this kind of weather, I bet breakfast really is the most important meal of the day when you’re trying to wake up from that.

Sumi keeping an eye on the hummingbird battles.