Snow!!!

Ok Mr. God, you've had your fun.  First you try to drown us, then you shake our house about and now you dump all that white stuff on us.  What is next?  Pestilence?  Locusts?  Ronny the Milkman and 5th rider of the acopolypse.. alocopyspse...?  We've had gail force winds and snow for the last 18 hours, just as we thought winter was going to be cancelled this year!  It is to last for about 10 days!

In the absence of a camera to record the event here some archive footage of last time it snowed.  Meet some of my crazy neighbours:

Should we decide to leave here, there are some people from this village I'm really going to miss.  The following is a concert held last Christmas involving Mauro on accordeon and pipes as well as Iacobo (an Italian who teaches Irish to the Irish) and Corrado.  Unfortunately we had missed the concert ourselves as we were in the mountains over Christmas.  Thank God for You Tube!

Right, enough of all that.  I'm going to hibernate now.  Someone wake me up in March... ;)

They've been lying to us!

When we had snow during our first winter here back in 2004/5 they told us that this close to the coast it only happened every 25 years or so and dug up photos for us to see of 1979 when it last snowed.  The following 4 winters were more 'normal therefore with hardly any frost even.  Than last year we had snow shortly before Christmas and now this!

This is Eddie seeing snow for the first time:

After and initial sniff at the strange white stuff he went running around it like mad, chasing snowflakes.  This is the last photo he stayed still long enough to actually be in the photo!

 

Here a few more snowy impressions of our village:

Before the snow we had a few days of dry sunnt weather.  We were hopeful of getting a second harvest of our olives in.  But alas the clear skies also meant quite severe frosts inland where the olives are and what remained on the trees never turned black properly, but just shrivelled.  So no more olives this year.  However we did get some more firewood off the olive grove and off a large pear tree we pruned.  Very needed now we have this cold snap.

I'll leave you with a photo of the Christmas lights in our village:

and a sunrise before the snow arrived:

Today it was mostly...

...raining. Over the weekend we went on two www's (winter wonderland walks). It was just glorious and there wasn't much else we could do. This morning it started raining and the snow is slowly melting away. The rain is forcast to continue until at least Christmas Day. How miserable! Anyway, I don't really want to go out in this, but we need to get to our land to empty the compost bin, which is overflowing with wood ash and cat litter (the cats prefer to stay indoors too), to check out the damage to the plants and hopefully to still pick some veg to eat.

In the meantime wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a wonderful New Year with this Angel, which was part of a huge flower petal picture on the streets of Santo Stefano di Magra earlier thios year.

Today I was mostly...

Today I was mostly sawing olive wood into logs. Then it seemed to get a bit dark, so I looked out and what did I see? A couple of swallows who absentmindedly forgot to fly back to Africa and... snow! The first snow in about 4 years! It's thick and white out there, so I'm glad we didn't go to Popetto today, as we wouldn't have been get down the mountain without snow chains.