It snowed this past weekend! Saturday morning I woke up to pouring down rain. As the rain stopped and the sun shone through the clouds, I stepped out front and was amazed to see snow all over the foothills and mountains north of our house! It was unbelievably beautiful, but the temps in the 30’s were unbelievably cold!

Late Saturday afternoon it began to rain extremely hard–but it wasn’t rain, it was hail! Pictures are posted in the photo gallery under the title “Snow 2006.” It totally looked like my car had just come down from a snowstorm in the mountains. Really weird to walk outside and have hail crunching under your feet.

Spent most of the day on Saturday doing taxes for friends and getting my stuff sorted out and ready to go. So far everyone is getting refunds…hope that holds true for me as well. As long as I don’t have to pay anything I’ll be happy. But, this is the first year I’m not able to claim Patrick as a dependent, so we’ll see what happens.

On Sunday I went to the Wisteria Festival in Sierra Madre with Patrick and Veronica. Sierra Madre (right next door to our neighborhood in Pasadena) has a wisteria vine that blooms at this time of year and is the largest in the world, spanning over a few blocks. In addition to running buses up to see the vine, the city sponsors a craft fair in the center of town. We walked down from Veronica and Patrick’s apartment (2-3 blocks) to the craft fair. I bought some earrings from a place I’ve bought from at other fairs, and got a small print of downtown Sierra Madre. After a couple of hours, we had seen it all and were ready to head home. Plus it was chilly and it began raining just as we were leaving.

No question winter has set in–better late than never, I guess. Although I could have lived with never! No doubt my heating bill will escalate this month in that I’ve had to run both heaters quite a bit in the last few weeks. Oh well, I just can’t handle temps in the 50’s–inside!