2012YIP - Dog days of... winter?

While we were on our way home from town today, we started tossing around ideas for lunch. We debated coming home for self-serve lunches, or stopping somewhere on the road. We established that we were both hungry, but not starving so atara suggested we might hit up a coffee place for something light. I started running through the rather thin pickings for coffee places in Winnipeg that were not Starbucks, Tim Hortons or Robins when I suddenly remembered Mountain Bean up on Henderson. This place caught our eye some time back, and it has been on our must visit sometime list for ages.

It turned out to be a pleasant little place stocked with lots of coffee marked as "fair trade", and sporting a variety of tasty and inoffensive foods. I grabbed a sandwich and coffee, while atara settled on apple crisp and tea. We planted ourselves by the window and could not help but notice the dog chained up outside the restaurant. Normally I would be concerned if I saw a dog chained outside in the winter here, but our weather has been freakishly warm this winter, and she looked more bored than cold. Black dog on white snow. The detail on the dog is not great in this shot, but I don't know a lot of cameras that would handle that kind of contrast well without using HDR or some kind of exposure lock.

By the time we got home from lunch, the weather had turned amazing. +7 is almost unheard of here at this time of the year. If it is not another record, I am sure it will be very close. We put dressed up in our fall wear and went for a pleasant, hour-long stroll around the park. Usually the snow here is too pebbly, or powdery to pack into a snowball, but with the warmer weather you can actually do fun things with it. Somebody took advantage of the occasion to make a snow family.
( A couple of other random winter shots )