It's the winter-solstice today!
I looked it up and tomorrow will be 1 whole second longer than today! Yoohoo! What to do what all that extra time ...
It's kind of interesting that we're celebrating the return of the light on the same day Winter, which is pretty much the darkest season of all, is officially starting?

Any-who, I'll be lighting my Yule-altar/wreath tonight but I'm secretly hoping that's it's the start of a long and 'real' winter with lots of frost and snow ... something like this:

                                                  

Another atmospheric-river-event last week, on top of the rain we already had, raised the Yamhill river almost 15 feet unto what they call minor flood-level.
Fortunately we are about 30 feet above river-level so it's unlikely we'll ever flood but the ponds rose to almost overflowing again.
This usual peaceful little creek at the end of our road changed into a roaring one ..

     

The combination of saturated soil and high winds on Wednesday-night brought one of the smaller trees on the other side of the pond down. 

  

It hit the dead tree in front of it, onto which I had hung my bat-house, but fortunately it stayed upright ... although it has a little bit of a lean to it now.
(the box is that small square thing there, halfway up the tree)
That dead tree probably has to come down, so one of these days, if it ever gets dry, I'll try to retrieve the bat-house.

I managed to get a few shots of the Kingfisher I've been hearing, and finally as of a few days ago, seeing:

    

 

I had to use the full zoom of my camera, which makes the pictures a little blurry when I blow them up, but they're not bad ...

 

                                                           

  

He's a busy guy, always on the lookout for food ... which in this case I'm pretty sure are the newts that live in the pond, since there are no fish in it whatsoever.        

I come across the tiniest little mushrooms lately, they're so cute!
You almost expect little fairies flying around them ...

       

I've done most of my Holiday-cookie baking this week ... and in addition to some store bought macarons, these hopefully will last us until Christmas! 

     

From top left and clockwise: snowball-cookies, peach rugelach, gingerbread-men and raspberry crumble-bars.

 

I wasn't going to bake those gingerbread-men this year ... yeah, famous last words. 

It's just not Christmas without them!

                                         

Only 4 days until Christmas! Time to listen to some Christmas music and watch a few Christmas movies.
I think it has been a few years since we've seen 'It's a wonderful life' and knowing James I presume it's on the docket!