Got a match?

 This morning, in our cold house (waiting for chimney repair), I walked by one of our bookshelves and spotted my son's art piece, 300 matches linked without the use of any adhesive.  My first impulse was to chuckle at remembered "got a match?" jokes.  Then I got a more serious feeling about things we take for granted.  I read a couple of online histories of the development of matches.  Now I think discovering how to make matches ranks right up there with the paper clip as one of the great, under-appreciated inventions of Homo sapiens.  I was on my way outside with these thoughts when I

 slipped on our icy front steps.  I took my sense of balance for granted, then had a painful fall.  Just in case it never snows again, at least during the Trump administration, I went back inside to get my camera to take a picture of our first snow that might last a day or two.

 Looks like our young lab doesn't take the snow for granted.  When let outside, he went nuts, jumping and spinning and rolling.  Like any kid, he soon wanted to come back inside where it was warm - at least warm to him.  It'll be about a week before our stove chimney gets fixed, so it seems rather cold to me.  Solution?  Put on warm clothing.  Duh!

 I wandered around outside for a while, hoping to find some amazing, aesthetically exciting frost crystals, but these two photos of shrub branches were the best I could do.  Even the frost on my truck's windshield was uninteresting.

 Before giving up on photography for the morning, I circled the house once and found this attractive, frosted brach of White Fir off the back deck, and then decided to post one more photo of the Camel Cricket that will hopefully spend the winter in my woodpile. (See previous two blog entries.)