A Practice Post

I'm calling this a practice post because it's the first post I've ever created using my Toshiba Netbook. This coming Friday morning, my best blogging friend Lynne and I are heading north.....no, not to Alaska, but to Duluth, Minnesota for the 3rd Annual Sax-Zim Bog Winter Birding Festival. I'm taking my netbook along with the hope that I'll have some time to do posts of all the great birds I'm anticipating seeing over the weekend (and also because I can't bear the thought of being "off-line" for 3 whole days!) I'm taking a shuttle bus from Rochester to the Minneapolis airport where Lynne will pick me up. Amazingly enough, the shuttle service offers free Wi-fi, so if I don't feel like pulling some knitting needles and yarn out of my backpack, I can always pull out my netbook and check out what my friends are doing on Facebook or get caught up on some of my blog reading. Should be an interesting trip.....

So anyway back to this practice post.....I was able to plug the USB cable of my little SanDisk CF Card Reader and use the Windows Live Photo Gallery software to edit the photos I took this afternoon. I think they turned out just as good as photos I normally edit in PhotoShop and the software is pretty similar.

If you haven't heard, we had a little snow the past couple days. Of course our almost 8 inches certainly can't compare with what the East Coast has had dumped on them, but it's still enough to close area schools and make our morning commute a bit more thrilling than usual.

Here's another view from the deck. There's still an awful lot of snow around here. We had a couple above freezing days a few weeks ago, but they really didn't do anything towards melting the snow at all. And as I'm writing this, I can hear Mr. Johnson firing up the snowblower and preparing to go out and open my paths to the backyard birdfeeders again.

If you click on this picture to enlarge it, there in the center you can see only the tiniest remainder of the backyard dog statue above the snow. I'm guessing there's probably at least 18" on snow piled up there in the backyard now.

And here's a pretty decent drift that always grows on the garage roof when the wind blows from the northwest. It was a really light and fluffy snow, so it didn't take much wind to create a snow sculpture like this. (It also didn't take much effort with the shovel to remove it either!)

So, it looks like I'm all set to do some blog posts from the northwoods. I've already checked the Duluth forecast for the weekend and it sounds like we should have some pretty decent weather with daytime highs in the 20's and mostly sunny skies. Sounds like perfect birding weather to me! Maybe I'll even get a chance to see that Varied Thrush that Lynne's seen near Hasty Brook. Be sure to check back here this weekend for photos and stories of another excellent birding adventure......