Freezing snow, cold birds: Bend, Oregon

It snowed again last night - not a lot, but it was more than last night, and it was really cold, about 9 degrees or so when we left the house.

While Lee ordered coffee at Starbucks, I walked carefully across the parking lot to get a photo of the long icicle on top of the Safeway building.

Here's the front of Safeway in morning shadow.

This is the tree outside the kitchen window - just beautiful with snow clinging to it. It's too cold to melt.

We had house finches at the bird feeder. This is the male, with red on it. There was a female with him, but my pictures of the pair didn't turn out. Maybe tomorrow.

Here's the male again peering down from the metal bar of the feeder. Cold feet??? You can click on it. He's in focus, and I'm very pleased about that.

We drove around Pilot Butte en route to the shopping center to look for a desk chair that will be kind to my back. The chairs we have now came from a garage sale several years ago, and they are killers when you spend as much time online as I do. Believe it or not, most of what I do online is for business.

We had errands at Costco before going over to Office Max to look at chairs. On the way across the parking lot from Costco to Office Max, I saw this tree with ice still on it at about 1:00 in the afternoon. It was only about 25 degrees out and the ice wasn't melted despite the brightness of the day.

Near the pine tree above was this lovely sight. Actually, it was this tree that drew me across the snowy parking lot in the first place.

Three faces of morning in Bend

Sunrise in Bend.

Cold windshield with pine trees.

Weedy brush outside of Starbucks. I was ensconsed warmly inside with a grande decaf extra wet capuccino, and the brush was outside in the cold morning. The snow in Bend is almost gone now after a hard rain and wind, but there was a thin layer of ice on the ground, so I had to find the gravel in the parking lot to walk on, as my old boots had slick soles. One thing I like about this photo is the out-of-focus brush in the background flowing first one direction, then the next, like paint on a canvas. It looks even better when you enlarge the photo.