* FYI for those of you in the United States: my university's holiday special, "Christmas at Belmont," will be airing nationally on PBS again this year, including performances by 400 students and faculty from our School of Music, and hosted by alumna (and American Idol finalist) Melinda Doolittle. The program is scheduled to air across the country on December 23 at 9PM Central/10PM Eastern.
* Today is cool and grey, so I thought it was a perfect time to take some pictures of a place I find strangely atmospheric and eerie, an abandoned "company town" in eastern Burke County on the Henry River here in North Carolina.
Here are a couple of the photos :


You can see more pictures from this set here.
"Hear! hear!" screamed the jay from a neighboring tree, where I had heard a tittering for some time, "winter has a concentrated and nutty kernel, if you know where to look for it."
~Henry David Thoreau, journal entry