Birds and Relatives.....

I am down to two birds.  They are brothers.  I lost the female a few weeks back from self injury to here one wing.  These guys are adjusting but they did call for her for a few days. I have been giving them more window time to watch the outside birds peck fallen seeds from the snow.
They do load alerting noised if things look dangerous out there with larger birds in the area.  I have had these two birds over 15 plus years.  They were hatched in a nesting box back when we were at the old place.

The weather is the talk around here for a few days.  As that vortex shifts down we will be having extreme cold temperatures.  My neighbor got out and blew some snow out of his drive early mooning.  He is older that me but must dress for such cold weather. I take the dog out and I am really suffering with the wind chill being so severely cold. The skin keeps on burning on the face after you get back inside. Today is not our worse day and it is really miserable.  I don’t know how much colder we can stand.  It seems to be too cold for the birds this morning. They tend to feed at certain times though and maybe mid afternoon they will stock up on more seed. I had to shovel my deck yesterday so I would have a good path to get to the feeders.  Earlier I had to wade in deep snow on the deck.

I need to fill this feeder again.  You can see who is emptying it on the ground.  The birds like his spills as they can eat on the ground. It is a little easier to fill as I can bring the feeder in through the dining room and go out to the garage where it is out of the wind. I am down to only one squirrel.  We had three at one time but the population has reduced.

It is a great day to stay inside.  I did make a quick trip to the post office to get out some important mail. Now that I am back the car stays in the garage.

 I have been doing some family tree work on days like this. I woke up in the night last week and remembered our family trips to Colorado.  My mom had a first cousin in Torrington, Wyoming and many summers the parents loved stopping to see them.  There are good memories from that but I still get embossed about how they would stop and sponge a couple of nights stay from them.  Anyway, when I looked up the cousin, she, Eva White, had died last October recently at the age of 95.  She was my mom’s first cousin.  By finding that obituary, it put me on the trail of five great uncles and all of their children and grand children. The sister of the five was my grandmother.  All of the families were based in the Winterset and Lorimor area in Iowa. That is covered bridge country where the famous bridge movie was made. That family met at a reunion every summer in Macksburg, Iowa on Memorial Day.  The family graves of that group are buried in Moon Cemetery near there. Decorating of graves was the second reason we had the reunion.  All of the distant cousins from the Great Uncle families were mostly my age.  Today I find pictures of them on Facebook and they are all old like me now. The one shocking find was of one of my cousins, Gary W.  He was the tall, dark hair, very handsome cousin.  When I saw his photo last week I was surprised to see my old Great Uncle Lee.  I did not recognize Gary but I sure knew he was from the family. The whole process is fun and yet the aging process drags on as I see I probably look like all my other cousins.

The arrangement of paintings on my wife’s studio wall brighten up things in the house.  Her studio works well for her and she has great lighting and sufficient room to have a couple of paintings going on at the same time. She is working on a lion right now and she has yet to get the whiskers on it and a few shining spots in its eyes. The paining will end up on my sidebar of my blog some of these day, ready for your viewing.


The night, last night, was clear with moonlight lighting up the out of doors.  I could not find the moon but it certainly was bright out there looking like early morning light.  Around ten o’clock the one neighbor south of us had his people clearing his driveway.  It was strange seeing people out working at eleven at night, blowing off snow of the driveway.  Thank you for checking in on the cold and elderly.  I hope all are doing well out there.