It's been a rather frosty week with temperatures below freezing for several nights in a row and today Punxsutawney Phil popped his head out at Gobbler's Knob to predict six more weeks of winter after seeing his shadow!



Apparently temperatures were in the teens (!) this morning in Pennsylvania and even we were down to a frosty 26F this morning!                                                                               
                                                        
                                                                             

Of course I happen to like these kind of conditions, especially since it was a sunny day and there was no wind, so I went for a beautiful and brisk walk ..

I found some frozen little ponds ..

Crispy frozen leaves under my feet ..

      

And frozen mail!

                                              

     It's a coming and going at my bird-feeders:                              

There's a whole flock of Black-eyed Juncos hanging around, which is interesting since I didn't see any last year, but on the other hand almost no House-finches of which there were plenty last winter .. ?

  

And yes, 'the gang' is back! I'm thrilled to see the mob of Titmice have returned.
They're so much fun to watch, whenever they arrive it looks like they're sucked onto the suet-feeder as if it was a magnet!

Of course the squirrels are stuffing themselves with corn and peanuts each day!
I'm limiting how often I fill the feeder to once a day otherwise they'll eat me out of house and home!

    

To bring a little color into all the brownness I got me some cheerful daffodils and (rather fragrant?) primulas .. things like that seem to jump in my shopping cart when I'm not looking.

On a (gloomy) Saturday we spend some time with our friends (and landlords) Bret & Serena at their house in Sherwood.

Just catching up on things, our trip to Holland and their progress on work they've done at their property lately, while enjoying a delicious lunch .. good times!

On Sunday there was a cold wind blowing but at least the sun was out so we decided to go to the Champoeg State Heritage Park for a walk.
We'd been there before, when we toured the visitor center and took a short walk to the Willamette River, but didn't have time to stay much longer due to a tee-time at the golf course.
So, off to the park we went which is only about a 15 minutes drive from us.



We choose a random trail, trying to stay out of the biting wind .. some of the trees here are humongous!

We caught glimpses of the Willamette River through the trees and stopped at several viewpoints for a better look:

                                  

Champoeg was actually once a town, founded in 1850 and wiped out by the Great Willamette River Flood of 1861.
The former town site is now a large field which offered us a chance to get out of the woods and soak up the sunshine!

It took us a while, some hot chocolate and a bowl of hearty pea-soup to warm op when we got home!

As I mentioned, it stayed cold all week, a great time to catch up on my reading (The ink black Heart by Robert Galbraith which has 1462 pages!) and to finally finish the crazy difficult cats and books puzzle I started before we left for Holland!

Enough to drive you bonkers this puzzle .. but very rewarding when you finally finish!