The End of the Week........

I did many small jobs yesterday and one of them was to drain the fish pond.  No more reflective water shots will be posted but now maybe I can get some fish photos.  I dug up my son's old fish tank, small, and put the two fish into it.  They are sitting among the geraniums now in the bird room.

Draining the pond was easy as I put the garden hose on the pump and sent the water away from it.  It was too cold of a day to do this task but the future weather is predicted to be much colder.  We were at 30 degrees F this morning when we got up.  The bottom of the pond was full of sticks and leaves so I had to get a rake and clean out some of the debris.  I had to wait for these two to come up to the surface for me to catch them with the net.

I am having a lot of birds at the feeder today. I have no photos to prove it but as I have shown in my history, you will be seeing lots of bird shots.  I had grackles at the feeder today along with one chickadee. A woodpecker with a red head was at the feeder yesterday but I don't have suet out yet. I have to relearn all the names of the woodpeckers but I think it was a downy.

In the middle of the day while working on a frame job, I stopped and worked on a kitchen project.  I had found some shelf boards in the basement that looked great for the two cubicles in the kitchen.  I ended up getting the slats nailed in to hold the two shelves and then painted it all with white enamel.  Of course now I will be having to repaint all the kitchen cupboards which is a much needed thing.

Once the paint was dry I put the shelves in and my wife did the rest.  We really were needing the shelves in there so we could more easily access them.  We had to lift out piles of dishes to get to the larger ones at the bottom and that was inconvenient.  The palsgraf dishes are the new ones that we won on the internet via our friend on Cattails blog.  The palsgraf Heritage pattern has been our wedding dishes for 30 years now but we could never get to them easily in the cupboard. So we use both all the time now. The white ones have more smaller dessert plates and two sizes of bowls.  The bowls in the new set get used for serving dishes as well as great salad bowls.  It is so easy now to get to the dishes and use them.  The paper plates on the white side are what we use when we don't want to get a build up of a lot of dishes to wash or are used for Buttons cooked chicken meals.

The phlox are a tough plant as they keep getting mild freezes and they still stay green.  Our harder freeze last night may take them out.  I like leaving them up all winter as the dead stems look so good in the snow.  I finally got my dahlia plant dug and I have quite a few new tubers for next year to plant.  I planted my neighbor's donated seed geraniums into a smaller window planter and that is going to be placed in the dining room window.  With all the light I should have blooms all winter.  The geraniums had never been replanted from their original small nursery pots so they should be really glad to get their roots to stretch out a bit.

I will wait until it warms up this afternoon before I venture outside.  I have one last storm window to put back on after the paint job and I have lots of sticks to pick up.  I have found an area on the west side of the kitchen that should be scraped and repainted but I will have to wait for the sun to shine on that side of the house. That side is the original 110 year old siding and it holds paint well. It feels more like winter each day and the weekend will be a cold one.  It will be time to get the winter coat out or wear heavy sweaters with a light coat.  The cold air coming down from Canada will effect us a little but it looks like it may swing further east and we will just be on the edge of it.  Typhoons causing the vortex is an amazing thing. 

Thank you for checking in today.