The Road South

I took this photo a few days ago, and liked it enough to share. It was taken on Coronado Heights, looking towards the south.

Looking back I find that I first installed the MT-Blacklist plugin about a year ago. Since then the amount of comment and trackback spam has done nothing but increase, seemingly with no end! I really noticed this after a period of not using MT-Blacklist; every day there were more and more spams to be deleted, and ips to be banned. I started using MT-Blacklist again about 3 weeks ago; it’s made quite a difference, as these stats show:

MT-Blacklist Stats
Comment spams blocked: 3103
Comment spams moderated: 455
Duplicates blocked: 0
Blacklist - Strings: 2476
Blacklist - URLPatterns: 33
Blacklist - Regexes: 24
Blacklist - FlexProtect: 0
Blacklist - Pending: N/A

*You must be using MovableType in order to use MT-Blacklist.

Though the first snow of the season doesn’t usually last long (and if fact, last night’s snow should be mostly gone by sundown), it sure is beautiful in the bright morning sunlight.

Here’s a selection of shots from around our house this morning:

So has winter suddenly arrived in mid-central Kansas. After weeks of unseasonably warm weather, (we’ve been tracking Bristol, UK and San Jose, CA temps within 10 degrees day and night), winter weather has arrived.

This morning it was a good 20 degrees colder here than in either of the aforementioned locations, plus, we’ve got a few inches of snow on the ground.

I’m not complaining though. The house is warm, the scenery outside is beautiful and in any case, we’re only just beginning (so I’ll save my complaints for a while longer).

A little after 8:30 PM it began snowing here in Lindsborg. Our first snow of the season and our first snow in many, many years. The snowflakes are big and moist; the deck and trees are already turning white with close to an inch of accumulated snow. Now I know this post will seem silly to our local family and friends, but for everyone else living in a more temperate clime, here’s what you’re missing:

We’ve been having unseasonably warm weather this fall, with lows no colder than the high 30s; that’s likely to change tonight as we head all the way down to the high teens. Brrr.

Update: We ended up with a bit over 5 inches of snow overnight. Here’s another view of the bird feeder and tree in last night’s photo: