It snowed here for the first time worth mentioning in a couple of years.

Although it was thin on the ground and it’s pretty darned flat here, I was inspired to excavate the little wooden sled with the Made in the GDR stamped on it that came with the house and take it on a walk with Spouse and Rudolph Rupert Rocket Dog (who can’t get enough of shoveling through the snow with his snout). Unfortunately, there wasn’t really even enough snow for me to pull the (empty!) sled and I ended up having to carry it over what passes for hill and dale, much to the amusement of all our neighbors. And we really tried everywhere, cutting through the brush and across the fields by the wind turbines at the top of the hill (which is actually called a mountain on the map although it is only 55 meters tall and takes three quarters of a mile to rise the additional 21 meters of elevation from our house.

But the walk was not for naught in the experience department because then we stumbled across this.

In case you’re wondering, yes, that is a headless dead deer picked over by birds. Not sure how the poor thing came to be dead, but, obviously, at some point, somebody cut off its head and judging from how much innards went missing from the body in the two hours between when we stumbled across it and when I came back with my camera, it can’t have been there more than a day or two.

I was very impressed with the ribs.

And by the vegetation that had died in vain.

But this isn’t half as exciting as what my friend Sarah, who lives in Anchorage, Alaska, had in her yard last week (in addition to way more than enough snow to sled on, although it’s even flatter in her neighborhood than it is in mine).