February 23rd...........

The squirrels seem to want to hit the bird feeders harder than usual.  I decided to throw out a small ear of corn and they really liked that idea.  They liked it so well that once it got almost eaten, one of the took off with the whole ear of corn.

 A year ago today our grandson was born.  AJ is one year old already.  His card was decorated with the same character as was AJ's father really like when Andy was young 35 years ago.  The card plays the wonderful thing about tiggers is a tigger is a wonderful thing.

I assume there is a party in Chicago today and I won't post any photos of AJ until those get to be shared by his dad.

I assembled a frame job yesterday.  A friend of mine made the walnut frame from a salvaged walnut church pew. He needed my expertise to figure out how to mount the mat and place inside the stretched canvas piece.  It turned out great.

I took the photo to show the friend how I pulled off this frame job.  It takes engineering skills sometimes to frame things for people. The stretched canvas item should never had been matted and the frame should have just gone to the edge of the object.  But we did pull it off both the guy making a wonderful frame and me figuring out the final mounting problem. The customer is always right. 

Hardy geranium buds are now forming on some of my indoor plants.  They must have started budding once the days are getting longer.

It has been a busy three day weekend and it almost is over now.  We are headed into an Arctic route again with highs in single digits coming by mid week.  I guess that we have had snowstorms in March so I don't need to complain.  I do feel aches and pains because of the cold weather and sinus pain is just normal when you go out into this cold. The sun shinning right now makes it balance a little bit.   Thanks for coming by today.  Take care of yourselves.

Another View.......

I had a darker version of the windmill that I shared last week on my Photo a Day.  This is the other shot I took having the camera turned away from the sun.  It gives me a good view of the river birch and and the garden shed.  We will be warming up again today before we head to the deep freeze next week.  I don't know when the tilting of the earth will start to change this vortex thing but it should be soon.  We have an ice mess on the local streets and large chunks of snow along the roads but I think a little more above freezing temps will help it out to eliminate more of it. Staying home today unless something comes up to do.

No Saturday school today and I have a small frame job to do.  I am assembling a frame job for a friend woodworker who can make frames but can't assemble the pieces into the frame.  I will finish that job today.  The sun is shinning today.  Except for another journey to the neighbors house I may get some rest today.  Thanks for stopping by today. 

Friday is Here...........

The snowstorm yesterday left things coated on the north side of everything. The large amount of rain and hail we had before the snow was said to be equal to about 7 more inches of snow if it had been in the form of snow we would have been in a worse mess. I heard that they had shut down I35 north of us all the way to the Minnesota border and opened it up again this morning.   We had a mixture on the ground that is now all frozen in chunks with 16 degree temperatures.  Of course this afternoon we will be up into the low 40's in F. temperatures.

I shared on my Photo a Day blog another shot of this cardinal.  The bird was busy flying down into the juniper shrub and picking off the purple berries to eat.  I hear stories as well as have seen on facebook larger number of robins that are out there.

Barney in position to bark at cats that he can see through the cracks of the fence. I think he has to be pretty bored to have to look through the cracks.  But the dangerous mean cats of the neighbor have been warned.

Our town streets are still iced over and the snow was pushed off of the streets in large frozen chunks.  I do think that the 40 degree temps will soften some of that and make some of it diminish.  No school today so we may go on an adventure.  It will be warmer in the afternoon and the sun is shining.  I guess Saturday is going to be another bad day for us with the vortex striking our state again.  I know all of my blogger connections out there are having various forms of weather.  I hope that we can all look and see robins making their nest very soon.  Thanks for stopping by today.

Blizzard.........

Blizzards are always worse when you are out in them.  It doesn't look that bad out there when you view this shot of the out of doors.  We started out in the morning with dark gray skies.  By 9:00 we had thunder and lighting with lots of rain.  We needed the rain.  Then it started to hail medium sized pieces of ice and then it  snowed.  It was the big, heavy, wet snow that makes driving very difficult.  School was out at noon and as I drove home I couldn't get the car to make any turns or even to stop.  The surface was heavily water coated with thick wet snow on top of it.  I would turn to drop off a bill at the phone office and I couldn't get the car to turn when I turned the will.  I would slide with wheels turned and kept on going straight. 

The snow was heavier than this fluffy snow effect.  The snow is so wet that this tall Japanese yew is smashed down from the weight of the snow. 

 

Looking out my front door you can see the snow plastered to the side of the column and railing.  The  snow now is dropping off of the trees from its weight and the chunks fall on the roof sounding like we are being bombed by branches. You can see all the holes in the snow from the smaller clumps landing on the ground. 

I guess I didn't tell you that I did make it home safely.  In fact I drove to the post office and then home for lunch.  After that I  went out in it again to retrieve some food that the neighbor lady wanted my wife to prepare for her.  She can't run her gas cooking stove as she is on oxygen right now.  I took it back over after clearing the snow from the car for the  third time. I am now home for good and it is still snowing at 5:00.  Looking out it doesn't seem so bad but the wind is now blowing.  It will be interesting to see what that will do as the snow is too wet to blow around.

I am done with the three days of being the sub for Physical Education and Health.  I had class with every high school student sometime everyday during the week.  We have Friday off so  it will be nice to have a three day weekend.   Thanks to you all for checking in today. 

Wednesday's Wanderings......

I don't think the cardinals are molting.  I just think one of them dropped a feather for some reason.  Bird colors don't always appear as we think, they are a reflected colors in some cases.  Sometimes when you see a male cardinal it can have a very brown color reflecting from its back.  In a different light they appear to be completely red.  This feather is the same.  If I could twirl it you would see flashes of red showing.

When my sunflower seeds are gone from the  variety seed the cardinals disappear.  I bet they eat millet only as a last choice if they are really hungry.  I will fill the feeders this afternoon since a blizzard is on the way.  I have noticed they eat early morning right before a snow and then return in the evening if things have calmed down.  The purple finch are showing up a lot more than they did to the feeder but they hang out at the grain silos north of town eating up the spilled seed corn.

The Austrian pine has grown since I planted the a few years ago.  The one on the other side of the sidewalk caught fire during the burning of leaves this past fall. I am going to leave it for the summer and see what it will look like after the end of the season.  It is sad to see but I could still look good with just one of them out there.







As mentioned earlier, blizzard warnings continue.  Early morning national weather thought maybe Iowa wasn't on the map, but later in the morning Al Rocker did finally admit the storm would travel through Iowa  before moving into Illinois. The early map didn't show any weather over Minnesota nor Iowa.  I guess they were in a hurry to do the weather when they first set up for the morning.
I am in the PE department again today doing the health side of classes and also the weight lifting classes.  I didn't take the lifters to the weight room and they just played basketball.  It is an abbreviated short day today so I will get out of here early today.  I need to stop a second and check on the neighbor and the rest of the day is mine.  Thank you for stopping by today.

PS  I won some dishes from Blackberry Lane's giveaway.  More news later but you check out her blog to see the dishes I won.  My wife is so happy and was sort of surprised.  I didn't tell that I had entered the contest. 

White.......

The Japanese yew puts out a great display of snow when it gets dumped on like we did yesterday.  Some people clip these into round ball shapes but I like them natural.

We had the new fresh coating that actually made it look better out there.  Now the animals can put in new prints in the snow.

My bridge to the pond is almost covered with snow.  The tops of the posts sort of show how much snow we had.  The bridge itself shows the true measure of the amount of snow that we received.

I am not back into the classroom today but I am back into the gym today.  I am doing high school physical education.  They had free basketball today, no exercises before as the day is a shortened day.  I am tired anyway and hope to get home early today.  We need to pick up meds in a neighboring town and groceries for the neighbor.  She has a long list for us. In spite of the threat of another snowstorm on Thursday we are enjoying today's warm weather.

I see our yesterday's weather has hit the east coast now and it is big news now.  We didn't get recognized for all of our snow yesterday but Illinois seemed to get a bad storm.  I guess the storm didn't start to fall until it got to the Illinois border.  Well, anyway, I hope all of your are doing ok out there.  I know some are not having normal weather right now but I hope it doesn't last for very long.

Thanks for stopping by today. 

Walking Down the Street............

Jeep tracks in the snow is all you can see when you look down the street. It is Monday and we had our new batch of snow fall all morning.  Early morning it rained that froze a good coating of ice on things and then it started a thundersnow.  It looked like rain as it fell.  I had to go to the neighbors to check on her this morning and I didn't really want to thaw off the ice first from the car.  I took an umbrella and walked over across and down the street.  I have never used an umbrella in snow but it was nice to not be covered like a snowman.  I let Barney back in at breakfast time and he was covered with a white layer of snow.  It snowed two inches in less than an hour and then snowed more.

I wasn't going to use the motion shots anymore but the look of the juniper shrub and the pine tree in the back didn't prove to have a definite point of interest. When I saw what the snow was doing I though it worked better,  unifying the photo.

I call this my "building from Sochi" photo.  I am sure Russia wished that they had received our snow.  We added three maybe four of more inches of snow.  The beat-up feeder doesn't have seed in it right now so it looks like an abandoned Swiss chalet.

It keeps looking promising but it has yet to bloom.  I am glad I got it to finally bloom.  It was all foliage for two years and in the summer I just took it to the basement and left it alone.  I didn't really have any hope for it. The stem has shot up after putting out leaves and now will have three blooms. You can see the snowstorm going on in the background.

No school today as the two hour delay would not have helped with the road conditions.  It has now  warmed up enough to melt some snow.  I did get called to go in to work today but they did cancel it by 9:00.  I was busy the past days and photo deficit but I am now back.  I had a day off and used ever bit of time for other things.  I should be able to stay strong now as I took a lot of photos this morning.  Everyone take care and thanks for stopping by today.