Moon rising over ice

Early this morning. The circle is a raised garden bed to keep out rabbits. Haven't seen a deer or their tracks since moving here

Steve took this last night as the moon rose. The ice looks like a lake

The house has all this spot lighting that goes on automatically at night. Who knows where the controls are but the reflections looked especially nice last night. Fuzzy due to long exposure. You can see full moon in background

The moon finally rising above the tree line

sunset. Ice chunks are from my walkway clearance

Tuesday's ice storm has provided lots of entertainment here watching the changing light on the vast sheets of ice. Yep we are easily amused Above it looks like our front house is a lake. We haven't yet captured the silver Glimmerglass (name of lake in Last of the Mohicans) of it all but it is pretty and temporary as The Days of Forty start tomorrow though we are being treated right now with One Last Arctic Blast. Presumably it is 9 below in Ann Arbor. They had an article on how difficult it is to get the official temperature of Ann Arbor. The thermometer is in a depression at the airport which reads about 5 degrees lower than just 100 feet away on the road. But the runway conditions matter more than anything else. UM has its own weather station near my old house but it's not clear how to access it. Thus we have our own weather station. It is 1 degree here.

Yesterday was spent taking advantage of IKEA's faulty pricing. One price on the display: one price, considerably lower in the warehouse part. I don't know if the warehouse had last year's prices . In the computer at the check-out, the higher price shows. We show them a phone picture of the warehouse sticker. They send someone to check (like I doctored those photos) and we get the lower price. And we notice they didn't change the price when we alerted them the other day to the discrepancy.

I felt like my cheap father who spent hours trolling the stores for such discrepancies. Michigan law used to say (and maybe it still does though we didn't hold IKEA to this) that if the sticker price says one thing and it rings up higher, you are entitled to three times the difference. So my father would triumphantly come home with an extra dollar after lots of time haggling and pointing out the law. In our case, we saved over $100. We ate at the Italian place. Here the price rung up a dollar more for my salad than listed. I did say that wasn't what the sign says but the barely speaking English clerk says she goes by the computer. I let it go...the IKEA coup certainly outshone this.

Today would have been my mother's 88th birthday. She was the 5th baby of 7 and her oldest sibling was less than 6 years older so lots of babies in a short time with my grandmother not taking time to register their births until she had to when they entered school. By then the exact date was forgotten so my mom's birthday and a brother's was 6 months apart. Below she is pictured before she married my father. She looks so hopeful.