It’s been very quiet here lately. Since my blog posts are almost always related to pictures I’ve been taking, then you can guess that no blog posts means no pictures. The reason for the downtime can be described in one word – weather. December 2015 is the warmest in record in many places, I don’t know if we had any high temperature records here but it’s gotta be close anyway. But in between those warm spells, it’s been cold enough to freeze the snow which means that even all the raining hasn’t completely destroyed the snow. All the local trails are frozen solid so it’s not possible to go skiing. Ice skates would be more appropriate. And all the roads are lethal, during the warm spells they are covered by wet ice and during the colder spells, they are just icy. Which means that I don’t even want to out walking because every time you step out the door, you do it with reckless disregard to the well-being of your bones.

Take this Christmas weekend for example. On Christmas Eve we had a little bit of new snow to cover the icy trails, so I went skiing and it was really nice, actually. But it was getting warmer by the minute, and the wind was picking up, so when I was on my way home, all the snow had dropped off the trees. By the evening, it was raining. Christmas Day was really bad, with the heavy wind and warm temperatures, so all the roads and trails were once again covered in wet ice. Yesterday it was below freezing again, some light snow in the air, although it was hard to say if the snow was falling from the sky or if it just was the wind picking up the loose snow which had already fallen. The roads and trails were frozen solid again, but without a decent cover of snow on them, they are almost as lethal as yesterday. And today… it’s currently -18°C and I can see the driveway reflect the dawn light and the old snowmobile tracks across the field are also gleaming. Ice is the word, and I can’t bear the thought of staying indoors for the third day!

* * *

I drove to Ljusdal last week, on a day when we got hit by a particularly nasty warm front which turned all the roads to bowling alleys. I saw a lot of cars which had stopped right in the middle of the road, just too afraid to drive any further, waiting for the gravel truck. I drove past them at a break-neck speed of 30 km/h. I have never experienced that kind of conditions, at one point I noticed that my hands were hurting for squeezing the wheel so tight, as if that would help the car to stay on the road. It took me five hours to get to Ljusdal, when it normally takes three.

And a few weeks ago I did a day-trip to Åre to see the women’s Word Cup slalom competition, that was a nice experience. I don’t do any alpine skiing myself (what I said earlier about keeping my bones intact) but I like to watch the competitions on tv and I’ve always wanted to see a race on the location, and now it finally happened!

Instead of taking new pictures, I’ve spent more time on processing old ones. I did a Lightroom workshop and learned a lot and been re-processing pictures. Some pictures look radically different now, others not, but at least I now know what I’m doing. Of course there is no wrong or right with the processing, as long as you end up with a picture that looks like you want it to look like, but I’ve always had this feeling that I’m missing something and with some tricky pictures I’ve just simply given up when I couldn’t make the picture to work out.

I just hope that I can soon go out and create some new pictures…. but looking at the weather forecast, there’s no help in sight. We really need a big dump of new snow and no more warm spells!