At night

At the bottom of our street the neighbourhood changes. The houses are bigger and more modern than immediately around our house. Their lots are larger. And the houses are set way back off the road. Walk a few steps and it's like a different town. This was the view down there a few minutes ago in the fog. A friend of mine calls this "generic weather" -- a few degrees above freezing, socked in with fog and a light drizzle falling. It's "generic" because we can have it almost any day of the year.

The tree was fully decorated tonight, after which we cracked open a bottle of some tawny port that has been sitting around unopened for a couple of years, and we toasted the tree. The short days are lengthening.

This afternoon's sunset sky and skinny sliver moon, just two and a half days after the New Moon.

Unlike much of mainland North America, we still have had no shovellable snow and few sub-freezing nights. This was a few minutes ago looking up the street from our front door. St John's, Newfoundland.

Our neighbours a few doors up the street always put on a good light show at midnight on New Year's Eve. This was an hour ago, as the entire valley filled with lights and fireworks noise. But no others were as close as these.

Not very long after sunset, a few minutes ago the clouds started blowing away out of the sky. I went out and took a nice picture of the moon, our moon, that is. Then I turned and saw Jupiter. And he had two moons swinging around like the outer-most partners in a square dance. They are Europa and Callisto. If you look really carefully you might see a little bulge in Jove's belly on the lower left. That bulge is, I think, Io and Ganymede about to swing around behind him.

Mars has been sneaking up behind the Moon from night to night. Now tonight he's ahead of her, but not very far ahead: maybe the thickness of your finger at arm's-length.

My neighbour, on the street below us and about five houses up that street, was tending, with his children, the bonfire he had in his backyard this evening. I took a picture but didn't think to switch off the auto-exposure, so I got an eight-second shutter speed. I like the picture anyway.

This evening, we visited a trail we have walked many times without electric lights. The authorities have lit about 700 metres of it for the season. Very lovely. They were planning to take down the lights on Old Christmas Day, but because we finally got snow over the weekend, they've left them up for a week longer.

By the standards of most people, including most of our neighbours, we are slow to take down our Christmas decorations. Here it is, January 21st, and we are still lighting the outdoor tree. The tree was cut over a month ago but the birds like it as much as we do. We'll leave it up until it gets blasty, probably May month, perhaps June. About 20 cm of snow fell overnight and by early evening the temperature had crept up to a half degree above freezing. That was enough for the weightier clumps to start falling. That is what you see on the right-hand side.

My aunt Shirley, on the right, left home for Boston just past her twentieth birthday in the early 1950s. I was just a couple of years old. She came home every few years on visits, and we always enjoyed each other's company. She died last week. From the 1970s until Peggy's death in 2015, she and Peggy were partners. Peggy was my aunt by common-law marriage. Here, while we were visiting them in Boston in 1995, my wife borrowed my Canonet and took a picture of the three of us. It is one of my favourite pictures of them, and only partly because I am squeezed in between them: I love the looks on their faces. Peggy and Shirley died on the same day eight years apart. They both would have liked that fact.

This was a few minutes ago, just up the street from our house. Five cm of snow are forecast for tonight.

The full moon has been up four hours or so and here it's arcing through the neighbours' tree.

I was trying to figure out whether I would go out to shovel now, before the freezing drizzle starts, or wait till morning. I still don't know. In thinking about it, I took this picture from an upstairs window. I got a reflection I didn't expect.

I went out and shovelled a half hour which was enough to make a path for the woman who will deliver the paper in the morning. And I took a picture looking up the street.

The view from our back door a few minutes ago, with a bus passing in the street.

I "saw a ghost" in this graveyard one night about 45 years ago. I was walking home from work and, as snow swirled around, I kept seeing the outline of someone ahead of me. Long story short: it was my own shadow on little dwies of snow that kept blowing up twenty or thirty metres in front of me. I live on the other side of the graveyard these days and this view is only about fifty metres from my window. We went out tonight for a short walk before a snow storm hits tomorrow.

This was three hours ago when they were all in the sky still. If they are not all set now, they are down below neighbours' houses.