As my fellow-Knoxvillians know, we had a brief - make that very brief - taste of winter recently.

I've missed our old snowy winters of late, so I stepped outside and took a few evening snow pictures while the opportunity was ripe.

This is a pic of my favorite Knoxville, Tennessee snow-sprinkled yard. It doesn't matter where it is, I just like the place. :-)

From the looks of the still-black roof and snowy yard, it looks to me like they don't have much in the way of attic insulation. I bet their heating bill is a bear!

These next two pictures are of one of my favorite places to stop and take a few quick shots on the way into or from work.

I just love this place! The river and the railroad bridge, and the trees and hills around it...Nice, peaceful Knoxville waterfront location. A shame I can't afford such property!

On this particular morning, there were actually little sheets of ice all over the river. You can see them as darker spots on the water. That doesn't happen too often around here any more!

And the water was so peaceful, it was like a mirror. No boats, no birds, no fish jumping -- just the river looking for all the world like it wasn't moving at all.

It was a great Knoxville nature moment, if I do say so myself.

Speaking of which, if you're a Knoxville nature lover, and you'd like to submit some of your pics to this photo blog, I'd love to see them.

I heard about the downtown Knoxville, Tennessee McClung warehouse fires about 8 a.m. the morning after they started, and got to the scene at about 8:30.

That was 7 hours after the fire started, but as you can see, it was still going strong.

At left is a picture of 2 firefighters in a lift bucket spraying water over the 2 McClung buildings that didn't catch on fire.

I took this pic from the lot behind the warehouses on Summit Hill. It wasn't an especially cold morning, but there was a stiff breeze blowing as I took the shots, and it blew water from the hose on those of us standing there like a freezing full-force rain storm.

It made me have that much more appreciation for how difficult a fire fighter's job is.

In the picture at right, you can see several Knoxville fire fighters training their hoses on the McClung fire from the roof of an adjacent building.

I heard they sprayed several million gallons of water into the McClung buildings over the course of that and the next several days.

I took this last picture from the I-40 West onramp out of Downtown Knoxville.

This view is of the front of the warehouses, and you can see that the walls had already begun to fall in on themselves.

Not to over-dramatize our local tragedy, but the beams sticking up into the air through the smoke, flames and rubble really reminded me of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks.

There were several fire fighters harmed during the efforts to stop the McClung warehouse fires, and the cause of the fires is still under investigation.