This week has seen a lot better weather than we've had for weeks.
Still some rain, almost every day, but long stretches of dry, sometimes even sunny, periods as well!
That's Mt Hood up above catching the last rays of sun on such a clear afternoon and the one below is overlooking the fields of 'our' property on a beautiful clear, early morning sunrise ...

                     

Most mornings still start foggy, as these pictures of my view from the hill behind us show, where I normally can see the high-school when it's clear:

        

        

The cows from our neighbor have been back since late November (he moves them to a property he has on the coast for the summer) and to my surprise there are already a few calves among them!
                                                
           

This is of-course the reason he brings them back to these fields around his farm, to have eyes on them when they calve, but I guess I figured they wouldn't arrive until Spring!
Oh well, shows how much I know about these things ..

In the meadow next to the cows, which belongs to our landlord, I quite often come across this Blue Heron:

                                                      

At first I wondered what a heron would look for in the middle of a meadow but it turns out that those fields are really muddy, in fact downright swampy, right now after all the rain and they are a prime environment for wintering frogs! 

         
                             
Walking along the river the other day I was thrilled to suddenly come face to face with this beautiful Bald Eagle:

I knew they've been seen around the area, there's several breeding pair in the Basket Slough area we visited last year, but I'd never seen one right here!
I immediately froze when I saw him and very slowly brought up my camera to take several shots but I shouldn't have been concerned since while he definitely saw me, he just kept a majestic, stern eye on me from his high perch in a dead tree and wasn't impressed about my presence at all.
We both knew who was King here, and it wasn't me!

The weather-forecast shows a whole week of cool days and freezing nights coming up but (so far) no snow ..
I'm still keeping my hope up to get some and in the meantime try to 'set the scene' by making my favorite snow-puzzle for this time of the year:

                        

It's the one made of foam, whose pieces are lighter than air, which means 'nobody sneeze' and 'keep the windows closed'!

Here's another picture in the category 'beautiful skies'.
It's a sunrise, which I probably should have started this blog with, but oh well .. let's be different shall we?