Late at the Laptop.......

The squirrels are waiting for me to put the ears on the two feeders.  I found an old feeder in my dad's garage a few years back.  I almost three it away down there and then I brought it home.  Again I almost tossed the old beaten up feeder into the fire then I didn't.  So today I put it up on a tree in the back of the house.

It still works even though the old nail was pretty rusty and I had to work hard to get the corn to slide onto the feeder.  The feeder in the front of the house has been hit already by two squirrels but this one has not been visited as of yet at noon today.

The snow storm did not hit us.  It is in the afternoon now on Saturday and we have a light snow.  I guess the computer predictions didn't get it right so far.  We may not be out of the woods yet on the snow but it sure is going to be coming late if it does.

I am doing battle with my old furnace today.  I needed to buy a new grease gun this morning so I could loosen up a bearings on my blower.  It is still blowing fine but it does have some problems with bearings making some noise.  I do know how to replace the bearings on this very old furnace but would rather wait.  I did have to read the directions to relieve and airpocket so the grease gun to actually work. I think a new furnace is in the future so  my old one is giving me some grief.  We will not freeze and it will all still keep working so no one needs to worry.  It is always the way things work when it comes to timing. PS.
The grease has helped the blower to be very quiet now and the problem sounds it was making are diminishing.  That is a good thing.

Birds do have strange behaviors.  Not a bird was in sight all morning on the feeder and then a light snow started around noon.  They all came in on the second floor and began to eat.  A nuthatch keeps slipping in to grab a sunflower seed and then leaving quickly.  I have not takers on my suet so far but when there is a lot of  snow on the ground the peckers will show.

I was late posting this day but I did get it done.  I was finding things to do that kept me from the laptop.  I hope all is well with my blogger friends.  Thanks for checking in on me.

Shutting Down for Winter........

A fall collection in the flower bed accented with a fallen stick is waiting for it's coating of snow.  Saturday is the day that it will start to snow.  The red leaf is from a stray tree that is a volunteer in the garden. There is not going to be much color left in a couple of days.

The same logs are in the same pile as they were last year. I didn't need them for an emergency to burn in the fireplace. 

The stalks of the last of the phlox are really dead.  They just haven't dropped their leaves. The phlox seems to be volunteers in among an iris bed.

The guy with his bucket was moved to a new location during the week. His bucket has rusted through which helps keep the bucket from holding water.  It is good so the rest of the bucket won't rust away from sight.

Here is another shot of the cardinal bracing himself against the strong wind that we had earlier in the week.  It has been windy a lot around here as the polar vortex mixes with the southern less cold winds.

I am back in the special education room today.  I am only one person today and not covering for two.  The classroom teacher is back today and I am an associate with only one person following them around to different classes. I started my day out earlier today as I had outside bus duty with all the little kids that travel to our other school in Granger. I then moved on to hallway duty until school started.  The elementary is down there and the  middle and high school is here in Woodward.

We will go for some last minute groceries.  We are ok but everyone makes their last chance journey to be sure they can survive the storm.  We have to stop  for some prescriptions and then we will be all set.  It is good for it to be Friday and being stuck in all Saturday will be a good thing. Thanks for stopping by today.

Tornado.........November 12, 2005.

I have not ever been able to get this posted on the anniversary of the day that the  tornado hit our town. It was 9 years ago. A young man, a former student, is out taking shots of the tornado rather than going inside for shelter.  I had been raking leaves and the weather channel was telling us that Woodward had 4 minutes to get into their basements. My leaves were rearranged that day and I never returned to rake them.

The young man does have language that isn't necessary but he did get involved and had great excitement as he put himself into danger's way. You can hear his father yelling at him to come inside.  The tornado seemed to be one large funnel as it approached the town but it did split up a little with the larger part heading toward our side of town.  It is interesting to see Jeremiah notice that it had taken a turn as he looked east. That was at our end of town that it hit coming up Cedar Street.  About two houses away from out house it took a turn into our neighbor lady's backyard taking out all of her barns and farm buildings.  The famous corn field that I share all year ended up with  scattered debris and the tornado kept moving.  Houses were destroyed on the east end of a building development. It took out a house north of Madrid and went on the fly over Ames, Iowa while a football game was getting ready to start. It landed again in Slater, Iowa taking out many houses.

Jeremiah Nance had been in my youngest son's class but then dropped out of school.  A few years after shooting the Woodward tornado he developed a pancreatic cancer and lost his life. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpwVqhryUns

The weather channel is sharing this off and on its channel still today with a lot of the middle of the tape removed. Jeremiah made a copy of this tape and handed it to the local tv stations once they arrived at our beat up semi demolished Casey's General Store.

Checking In and Out...........

I am back to school today as I was called to come in by 10:00.  A teacher is going home sick and I will have to take her place.  I haven't worked in the special education room for a while.  I do enjoy working there and hope the sickness isn't contagious.

We are in for a long haul of cold weather as is everyone else.  I don't remember it getting this cold so soon and staying that way for a long while.  I hope everyone stays warm and safe.  Thanks for stopping by today.

The Middle of the Week.........

While the temperatures keep falling, 14 degrees F. I still have a tropical scene inside the house.  The two fish were rescued a few days ago from the outside pond and the tank water that I placed them in is clearing up enough so I can snap a photo.  I buy these in the early spring as feeder fish. They are 2 inches or more in length.  Their living in an outside tank and natural surroundings outside makes them grow to be large. I think they are probably 4 inches or more in size now. They have has a good diet of mosquitoes all summer.

The tank is probably too small for them but if I make partial water changes and maintain the filtration system they should survive.  I have them sitting in front of all of the hardy geraniums.  The back lighting is a plant light that I have on the table and not on top of the fish tank. I would like to buy a fancier gold fish but then I would suffer more if I lost them.  The ones covered with a lot of fins are easier to catch by raccoons.

The female cardinal showed up yesterday at the feeder for the first time this fall.  She has pretty yellow orange markings on her chest and the nice red color on the wings. I don't know if the color goes away in the summer or not. 

As you can see she has a friend on the first floor helping himself to some free seed. I don't mind as long as the don't stay so long that they have cleared the entire floor of any seed. I will try to get some ear corn for the squirrels and feed them out front of the house.

All feeding parties seem to be limited today as the cold air must effect their eating times. I had a few at the feeder around 9:00 for the first time and they have all left now. I have two feeders hanging next to our dining room windows now and a downy came up and grabbed one seed from it while I was trying to take photos.  He was too close and left too quickly to prove the story. 

As the different birds stalk the feeder the bluejays are the biggest of the birds and really do seem to be bullies.  My wife saw two bluejays scrambling for seed yesterday and the wind was so strong that the weaker bird was blown off the feeder.  The cardinal sits in wait for them to all leave. 

I took my cans of house paint and paint brushes to the basement yesterday.  I have a couple of other paint pans to get down there but my days of outside work are done.  "As is" will be my description of the work that didn't get done.  When the weather people are telling  me that we won't be warming up to above freezing until after Thanksgiving, I decide to throw in the towel.  Again I am saying "as is."  We do have some plans to spot paint some  walls in the house.  We are not going to repaint everything but a problem area that needs to be painted in our stairway will get a new coat in the future.

We may venture out this afternoon for a short while even though it is hard to get use to the cold.  It probably will see warm after we have added a lot of snow on the ground.  I need to buy new sweatshirts to wear for this season as long sleeved shirts don't seem to be enough.  No work again today and I am good with that too.  I hope that all is well with you out there in the arctic world and also in the tropical world.   Thanks for stopping by today.

Winter Arrives..........

As soon as the temperatures fell yesterday the feeder became very busy.  Today with the addition of fresh bird food, the crowd just keeps landing on the feeder. I don't see house finches very often at the feeder but this one was very hungry today.  The  cardinal seems to be the only cardinal to feed here as the male cardinal doesn't seem to be around anymore. The cardinal crashed into my dining room window this morning and it seems ok here.  I don't know why it would do that but it did concerned me.

I just took a photo of a female cardinal and she is all brown with a little red under here wings.  I hope I have not called the male in my past blogs , in his winter color of feathers as shown above, a female because of my older person confusion.  My bird book doesn't tell me much so I will have to get on the net and try to renew the memory that the male does go brown a little bit in the winter. I did notice that the female is a lot smaller than the male and I think I did use to know that too.

 This morning as the birds arrived I could see a lot of posturing for a place at the feeder.  The chickadee goes to battle to keep this junco away from the feeder.  It is an action photo for sure and the neighbors gas meter doesn't make for a great background to the shot.

Birds that we don't see all summer are nuthatches and downy woodpeckers. The nuthatch is too hyper for me to get a photo but I will get it done eventually.  I did see a redbellied woodpecker out there yesterday but I won't see it any more until I get some suet.

The neighbor's white cat was let outside for a while yesterday and she roamed the backyard while I was blogging.  She seems to be too white and fuzzy to be an outside cat but she has proven from her past actions that she can climb a fence or a tree with the best of them.  She was out exploring with the tiger cat that has a deep voice.  The cats are coming to my wife's cat food feeder a lot as the weather turns colder.

I am home and stuck inside today as the polar vortex finally made it to our part of the state.  We had a small snow that has put white on the ground and on the roof of the house.

I worked outside late morning yesterday and into the afternoon repairing a part of the siding on the west side.  At one time in the past I had cut a hole in the wall of the house to insert an air conditioner.  Good idea and a bad idea to do it that way but I was younger and more foolish.  The hole was closed up in a haphazard way and water was coming in and rotting out siding at the bottom of the house.

I had leftover parts of siding that I used in order to replace the whole area.  It was about  a 4 foot by 6 foot area. It is amazing how good it looks after the previous fixed was such a bad thing.  While out there working I had a long sleeved shirt with no coat and the mandatory stocking hat.  It had gotten up to 65 degrees in the afternoon and it was a good time to finish up the job.  Around 3:00 the north winds started to blow and spit a little moisture at me and I had to go in and get a heavy coat to wear.  I was just finishing up putting a coat a paint on all of it when I was in a wind storm from the north.  I finished up as quickly as  I could but still had to pick up all the tools and waste wood before I could quit.  I did get chilled from all that and had to  turn up the furnace heat and warm up when I went inside.  The fix is so good to get done and it looks like it did when it was first built.

These dried up flower heads are symbolic of what the area looks like now.  With the snow added late last night, it looks just like winter.  I feels like winter and the winds keep howling.  I won't do much today inside as I am recovering from yesterday's work.

There is a woodpile that never got burned because of the high winds the last few days.  I think I will plan to burn it with the snow on the ground and then I don't have to worry about  sitting a fire in the yard or neighborhood.  I know a lot of my blogging friends are getting hit hard with winter weather.  Others are suffering with tropical breezes off the ocean. The desert heat isn't so bad this time of the year but some of you there are warm.  Wherever you live, I wish you well.  Thanks for checking in on my blog today.

Monday Morning Views............

It is a warm place to sit when it gets colder outside. The car had just returned from Des Moines and the engine was warm. This guy with a deep voice likes to hang around even though he belongs next door.  He tries to walk into the house as he know where the real warm places are in the world.

It has two eyes and a big white nose.  It came to our neighborhood on Saturday.  I saw a trailer with two outside sheds coming down the street and  I wondered what was going on with that.  The two sheds on that trailer looked like a large long load. We were shopping on Saturday and when we returned we found that our good view of the cornfield is now partially blocked.  It is a larger shed which you can't tell because it is at the back of the lot.  The other shed on the trailer must have gone somewhere else.  I would have been glad to take it off their hands.

Just for fun I will show you the "before" shot.  A couple of years ago an old 1949 Ponitac sat on a spot similar in alignment to the shed.  The car was sold and towed off one day when I was not around to see it go. I was liking the cleared view for a few years anyway.

We have lost most all of our color now outside. The burning bush is the last to loose its leaves.  It looks faded compared to it a few weeks ago. The little red berries will feed the birds in the winter if they don't get eaten before then.

I have two barberry bushes and this one is yellow in color as the other is reddish.  I went out too late in the evening to take photos so I have some blurry photos. I have a blurry eye condition right now so when I put up a blurry shot I have double trouble trying to see if the photo is actually a good one.  The camera really doesn't like the low light and begs for the flash to be turned on for assistance in the shot. I will try to get out today when the sun is shinning. 

The raspberries are now gone as well as any apples on the trees.  I picked up an apple yesterday and it was mushy.  The were so tender and big this year that the apple had split open a little as it fell to the ground.  The last two years it was so dry the apples were smaller.  We did get another apple cobbler made on Friday.  

No work today and that is good.  I did get an earlier, yesterday, warning that the science teacher was having a lot of pain and would be gone today.  He did write back late last night and said he was a lot better and he would work today.  I will stay home and work here instead.

 As I write this blog our neighbor's gray cat and their white cat are roaming the back yard.  Birds are checking things out at the feeder even before I put out new seed.  I bought some seed yesterday and then forgot to get the suet.  That is an old man thing as I have forgotten to get it too many times.  I had a woodpecker messing with a sunflower head this morning and could not figure out why.  My wife said maybe there were a lot of bugs in among the seeds trying to keep warm.  I had not thought of that but I did get a picture. 

Mondays are hard for me to start up on but I will get some inside things done first to get me moving.  I know we missed a big snow and I know we will get snow eventually.  It has been good to get all this moisture after the past two  years.  The lakes and rivers will be filled for sure if it keeps up the trend.  Thank you for stopping by my post today.  I wish you well.