Longest night

So, welcome to winter, where the temperature right now is -36C and the winds are calm. It's kind of nice, really. The cold is quite manageable, it's the wind that makes things uncomfortable in a hurry.

And as this is winter solstace, it also means this is the longest night of the year. I like to think we're in a part of the world where that actually means something. Further north around Arctic Bay, well, it's dark pretty much all the time. This day does have its significance as they're beginning the long crawl towards seeing the sun above the horizon in a few weeks time. And further south the days are noticeably shorter, but not quite so dramatically.

Anyway, sunrise today was 9:22 am and sunset was 1:43 pm, so it was a whopping 4 hours and 21 minutes of the sun above the horizon. Add another hour on each side of daylight and we're getting about 6.5 hours of daylight, 17.5 hours of darkness.



And, you know, every now and then you get cool sun dogs like these. They are a bitch to photograph, though.

But yeah, we now begin the slowly climb towards more normal amounts of daylight. That's why you tend to celebrate these things.

And now, one more photo. My friend Jaap send me some weird glasses along with a Christmas card. But they refract light in cool ways when you put them on. So on a lark I tried putting them in front of my camera lens to see how they would work. As it turns out, not so bad at all.



Back to work tomorrow while Cathy lounges around at home. Which kind of sucks for me. Then again, I suspect work will be pretty laid back this week. And it's only for 2.5 days.

Last Five
1. This protector - The White Stripes
2. Back to me - Kathleen Edwards*
3. Heavy metal tears - The Pursuit of Happiness
4. This is such a pity - Weezer
5. Learn to live with what you are - Ben Folds