This is a Warming Trend?

 Yesterday (Saturday) it got up to 34 degrees at my house, so I thought I'd better get a couple more shots before all the ice blades melted. I opened my kitchen door, leaned out, and took these three pictures.

This one is off the corner of my home, where the master bath is. Now, when the remodel of last spring was done, we finished it off with an additional 7" of insulation in the attic. Why am I having ice blades? And why is this one curving out, away from the house?

 These are over my daughter's bedroom window (next to and 90degrees from the master bath, seen in background). I was getting very concerned until she mentioned that at night she closes her bedroom door, shuts the heating vent in her room, and opens the window about a half inch. Well, no wonder there's melt above her room.

Why so many? A veritable harvest awaits the picking. These are hanging from the arbor, over my big kitchen windows. Never have I seen such a harvest. Why? Well, I wondered so I wandered out into the 9 or so inches of snow, looked up at my roof, and discovered the reason. Remember that remodel last spring? And my new, beautiful red stove? And the new, beautiful red fan that came with it that has the motor on the roof? The one that sounds like a jet engine even with the attic betwixt it and me? Well, that sucker sucks! It sucks all the heat and steam from the stove right up a pipe and blows it outside. And down the roof to melt the snow and form all these ice daggers.

My Gratefuls:
* That I live where we have 4 seasons - even if one of them is Winter;-)
* That some Monk (Priest?) from years gone by smuggled coffee beans out of Arabia
* That I have friends willing to share their knowledge and expertise with me when I'm trying to learn something new.
* That there is a store within walking distance of where I live.
* That I have warm socks and boots

What I'm Working On:
* I'm still working on Jibutu. The last couple of days I was on a tear, making changes to the story left and right, then, last night, as I waited for sleep, I realized my changes were wrong, unsustainable, and I didn't like them. I'm not quite back to square one, but close enough, that's for sure. Having friends and family of choice willing to listen to me ramble, and play devils advocate, is truly a blessing!
* Why do I write? I often ask myself this, especially as I receive more and more rejections and fewer and fewer acceptances. Some days I think I'll quit all together and just quilt and read. Then I remember, I basically write because I want to, and I write stories I like, and if the publishers don't like 'em, well, that's not my problem. Is it?

What I'm Reading:
* Mostly the book on Magellan. I'll read the last essay of Writing A Woman's Life any day now, as well as more poetry by Darwish. I'm finding it interesting in how little we've learned in the last few hundred years juxtaposed to how much we have learned. How little we've learned in human relations and how much we've learned in 'book stuff'. Several years ago, I read a series of books by Louise Cooper on Chaos v. Order. I don't remember a great deal from them but do remember one of the ideas I came away with was that we will not recognize Order if we do not have Chaos to compare it to. Humans have known that, at some level, since forever I think. We want our choice of politician to win so we make the other choice look bad. Ours is better by comparison. I liked Cooper's books better than today's politicians ;-)

Quote for this Post:

But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response? -- Robert Kennedy