Well, today is the Wilnter Solstice, meaning that those of us who are weary of the long nights and short days can start looking forward to longer days again. One of our local papers had an interesting article about the Solstice. The Solstice is also known as Midwinter, the Solar New Year, the Longest Night, Yule, DongZhi, Soyal and many more names referring to the event. The word "solstice" comes from a Latin phrase that means "the sun stands still". After months of crossing lower and lower in the sky, the sun appears to stop before starting to get higher and higher in the sky as we march toward summer. Not that any of us stand there and watch it. But I'm sure we all have certain places around our homes, campgrounds etc. where we notice the sun rising and setting in a little different spot as time goes on. For me here, it is now setting over toward a neighbors garage and later on it will be out of sight to the side of mine as it crosses the sky. When I lived on the lake, you could watch it set in the southwest sky and gradually move till it set in the northwest sky. One of the festivals celebrated by the Germans was the Yule festival in which one burns a Yule log for good luck, hence the name Yule in some of our Christmas songs. Course now that we hit the shortest day of the year, the other side of the earth has hit their longest as they start their descent into winter. But no matter how it's celebrated or where you live, I'll take it.
So on my end, the house is cleaned, took the dogs for a walk over to the park yesterday and watched them work their way downhilll to the lake at the north end of the campground. Don't know what they found interesting, but they managed to get themselves down there and jumped off the seawall (about 3ft high) and were sniffing all over on the beach. Actually Sassy went out on the ice a ways despite my calling her back in off it. But I guess it's thick enough by now anyway as I heard that ice fishermen are staring to test it out.
They eventually decided it was time to rejoin me though and had to get themselves back as there were no stairs in this particular area. I was going to just walk along the path at the top till we got to the one a bit father down, but they somehow managed to get themselves back up over the seawall and came back uphill
Now mind you, this is no gentle little hill. It's a bit steep and covered in brush, trees, limbs etc. But dogs will be dogs.After we got home from our walk, a trip to the local PO to mail a card and a stop at the store down the road here, I cut and sanded the board down that I am going to use to make my sign on. Just gave it a light sanding to smooth it off but not enough to destroy the weathered wood look. Might work on it later today.
But for now, I am getting ready to head into town soon. Have some business with the bank and want to make one more round of the stores to pick up some stuff that's on sale and then stay away from them tomorrow and Saturday as I am sure that there will be a lot of people picking up last minute Christmas gifts and also shopping for last minute things for parties, dinners and what not this weekend.
We are also getting a bit of light snow, wet stuff but just enough to slick up the roads. Will be a White Christmas here although it will be a sparse white Christmas at best. Not enough snow to play in or ski in or run snowmobiles in etc. Oh well.
So time to be off and getting organized here. Have a wonderful day all.
It's colder than a well diggers XXX here. Or at least it feels that way to me. I've had some wicked bad cold chills this morning. Wunderground says it's 29.5f and gonna go down to 13f tonight GADS!!! It's 51.5f in Biddeford ME where I use to live. Something really wrong with that if you ask me!! 
Don't know why I couldn't have been born rich and beautiful? ~sigh~ Such is life.
