CNN

With sometimes hazardous and unpredictable weather awaiting them, readers gave us a firsthand look at ice storms, blizzards, freak warm spells and yes, an avalanche. Heck, you even showed us snow in the Arizona desert and southern California.

We've also been getting major kicks out of the absolutely stunning photos of ice hanging off various things. You've found snow and/or icicles on various types of lawn ornaments, fiberglass cows, golf carts, winterberries, crabapples, leaves, chairs, bicycles, barbed wire, chain-linked fences ... and each one is uniquely beautiful, like a snowflake. According to Jackalope-tracking I-Reporter Greg Holmes, it's only natural.

"I think the question is not so much why shoot photos as why not," he writes. "It's all a beautiful and natural special effect, really, like fireflies or a meteor shower or the aurora. I mean, if you'd never seen snow ... if you'd never seen ice ... they'd be new and wondrous things to you ... fleeting tableaux which are available today but plowed and grungy tomorrow, and melted away altogether soon enough."

What do you think? And has anybody seen ice hanging off garden gnomes?

Against the backdrop of Lance Armstrong's cancer battle, I-Reporters stepped up and put faces on the disease -- faces like Nathan Greene, 10, of Muncie, Indiana, shown with the class pet.

Greene has leukemia and gets chemotherapy every month, and yet still musters the energy to play basketball. He and other survivors exemplify the determination to look death straight in the eye and get on with their lives. People opened up about personal experiences, and cutting down the information for our gallery of stories was challenging.

Mary Coulter, Kendal Seidel and Joey Maher's tales, documented in an audio slide show, are funny and moving. Clearly, as Maher said, a positive attitude goes a long way.

Coulter's hilarious Italian greyhounds and Maher's sarcastic cancer-fighting shirts had us laughing and crying at the same time. "Chemo junkie?" Love it! (Maher's shirts can be found on the family's Web site.) And Seidel's battle against late-stage ovarian cancer is a remarkable tale of beating the odds.

Read a selection of the e-mails we received, and then take a look at our gallery and slide show. And then, tell us what you think.