Cold, Ice and Beauty

The lovely weather continues. It's still cold, though the sun has disappeared again. But to replace the sun we have beautiful hoar frost. Everything is covered in ice crystals as the dampness freezes out of the air so whole trees turn white, as you can see on the far side of "our" lake.
On our walk today I took a lot of pictures. I added two as extras but now they are included as links to my flick. The first extra shows crystals on the edge of the stream, the second shows  crystals growing out of the frozen lake, with a piece of dead grass as the foundation. Naturally Jan's blip + extras are also from the walk, and her pictures have a slightly different take to mine.
Once back from the walk we found it hard to leave the outside world so Jan warmed some mulled wine (glögg) and I lit a fire just off the new veranda at Betty's. We sat there while the world turned dark, eating stollen and drinking warm, spiced, wine. That's a pretty good end to an extremely lovely walk.
If you want to see still more pictures I've a flickr album showing another 18 pictures with more frost crystals and the fire we finished off with!