Road-kill.

In the years we've lived in Texas, we have seen all types of animals in the road, on the road, on the side of the road... all dead, all coming under the heading of road-kill.

When we lived in Clear Lake, there were countless squirrels, a few field mice, hundreds of frogs and lizards, and the occasional bird, along with the sad bodies of lost and/or abandoned puppies and kittens . Since moving to the Hill Country, the list has grown to include possums, raccoons, buzzards, skunks, rabbits, abandoned and/or lost dog and cats, deer... and you couldn't call it a day without seeing at least one dead armadillo.

This morning as I drove into town, there was a wild hog on the side of the road. And not even up on the highway.... it's right on the road going out of our community towards the main highway. My husband saw it yesterday on his way out to his second home (Home Depot-- where they actually know him by name). He came back and told me about the 'huge pig' on the side of the road. He said he didn't know if it was hit by a car or if it had been shot. (Wild hogs can do major damage to a property and home-owners don't exactly roll out the welcome mat for them.)

So there I was this morning, driving down and around the hills going towards the main highway with Barry Manilow blasting in my car, and there it was..... the lifeless body of the wild hog..... and it was huge. We're not talking wild hog as in that cute little pink pig in the movie Babe. This hog was covered in black hair and was about the size of a full-grown German Shepard dog. Huge. And not too pretty to look at, I can tell you that.

I don't know what's going to happen to it...... how long will it lay there on the side of the road? The buzzards have already found it-- when my husband first spotted it, there was a huge turkey-buzzard near the body (probably thinking how best to attack this massive feast). I'm guessing that within a few days, there will be a flock of buzzards surrounding that hog, and it will look somewhat like a Norman Rockwell painting-- everyone gathered around the Thanksgiving table for a holiday dinner.

Switching from red to green....

I don't know where the week has gone, but we're already at the end of it now. The day after our post-Valentine's lunch party, I took down all of the red and pink hearts, and the red and pink glassware..... everything is packed away in the Valentine boxes. The day after that, I took out the St. Patty's Day decorations.... green shamrocks, green glassware, the little shamrock tree that I made a few years ago. The living room and dining room look like another party is just around the corner, which it is. We will invite our friends back for a St. Patty's/Spring lunch before the end of March.

And then those green decorations will come down and go into the box..... and the Easter decorations will come out.... and so it goes. As each holiday box gets unpacked, I go through the decorations and take out the ones that have seen better days, the ones that came from long-ago yard sales...... I'm keeping just the best ones, and donating the others to the local thrift shop. I went through all the decorations before we moved into this house a couple of years ago, but it seems there's always something that can be passed along to the thrift shop.

My friend V and I have been eMailing one another, still catching up after all the years we hadn't been in touch. We're laughing at all the things we have in common still.... the same things that brought us together so many years ago are still part of us now. Neither she nor I can just sit and watch TV....... we need to be doing something else while we're watching and/or listening to a program. We both still like handcrafts, we both still love to read, and neither one of us likes to cook unless we have the time to really cook. We both shop all year long for birthday and holiday gifts, keeping the items in a closet till it's time to wrap them up for gift-giving. Her husband laughs at her for doing that, my husband does the same with me. V tells me that her husband is quiet and mellow, very mild-mannered and laid-back (ditto for my husband). She said her husband has a wicked sense of humor (ditto for mine also).

It is amazing to me that after all these years of not being in touch with V, we've come together again seamlessly and easily, without judgment or question. "Life just got in the way..." -- we both said the same thing almost at the same time in a phone conversation. That's another thing we always used to do-- we'd finish one another's sentences. Who knows why things happen the way they do.... life just goes along, and it is what it is. What you do with the time you have is what counts, and right now, we're both happy to have found one another again, and we're having fun catching up and going on.


One of the best parts of the lunch last weekend with the neighbors-- B brought me a little vase filled with yellow daffodils from her garden. They lasted all week... that sweet perfume filled the dining room, and somehow the aroma of those daffodils just smelled like the color yellow should smell like. That sounds crazy, but that's how it seemed. Makes me want to plant some bulbs out in the flowerbeds..... but then I think that the possums and raccoons and armadillos might just dig them up and eat them. I will have to ask B about that..... how does she prevent the local critters from destroying everything in the flowerbeds?

Post-Valentine lunch party.....

That was today...... our Valentine's lunch which we had to cancel last weekend because of my bad back and the plumbing problems from the hard-freeze. There were nine of us around the dining room table this afternoon... our newest friends H & K were up in NY for the weekend, so they couldn't be here. Other than small dinner parties for four or six, this was the biggest group we've hosted here in this house. Not that nine people is a big group, especially since our Clear Lake party-guest list was nearly 40, and sometimes 60 for our Christmas parties.... but we thought we'd start out small and work our way up to a longer guest list.

K & B drove up from Houston to be here this afternoon, and our closest friends from our little hill community filled up the rest of the table. The dining room table was all decked out in red and pink, with hearts scattered on the table, heart-shaped candy boxes holding the vintage Valentine postcard-place cards..... and at each place setting for the ladies, I had red heart Mardi Gras necklaces. In the center of the table, my white Valentine tree covered in heart ornaments. If that table couldn't make everyone smile, then nothing else would have worked.

Before the lunch was even half over, one of our neighbors told us how perfectly grand it was to be here, and she hoped I would do all of this again for another occasion. (Well, that was my idea.... to get everyone here as excited about having parties as our friends in Clear Lake used to be.)

True to our party-style in the old house, we made this a pot-luck lunch, asking everyone to bring a covered dish or a dessert. As a result...... we had a first course of tossed salad and cold cocktail shrimp, then vegetable lasagna, spinach quiche, carrot and onion casserole, and pesto-cheese rolls. For dessert-- a killer chocolate cake, apple cinnamon cake, and pecan pie. Along with pineapple/grapefruit punch and sparkling cider, tea and coffee, I'd say we all had a wonderful feast in our dining room today.

Everyone went home with their own heart-shaped boxes of candy, their vintage postcard place cards, and their Mardi Gras heart necklaces.... and everyone said "When are we going to do this again?" Ahhh..... just what we always heard in Clear Lake. Our dining room was christened today with the first of many get-togethers.

The weather has quickly turned from winter to summer.... our neighbor B brought me a bouquet of yellow daffodils today.... she said they began blooming in her yard a couple of days ago. Well, it's nice to know that the hard freeze didn't kill all the flowers. Pretty soon, our fields will be covered in wildflowers..... and I will be cutting them and putting them in vases all over the house. Yet another reason to celebrate--- "The wildflowers are blooming.... come to a party...."

Re-connecting...

The surprise letter from my friend J in England got me to thinking about my old high school friend V....... she and I were best friends for each of the four years in high school, and then we lost touch with one another within two years after graduation.

From time to time over the years, I had tried to find V.... never was successful. When our high school class had their 25th reunion some years ago, I tried then to find out what happened to her. Couldn't find a thing. This time, though, I asked for my husband's help, computer-wizard that he is. And wouldn't you know........ it took him less than an hour and he thought he found the right V on the Internet.

I sent a letter off to the address he pulled up on the computer, hoping against hope that it would get to the right person. In the letter, I sent my eMail address for a quick contact. The letter did indeed get to the right V ("I'm your V!" she wrote back in an eMail). In fact, when V saw my letter in her stack of mail, her first thought was that the handwriting looked familiar........ and when she saw my return address on the envelope, she said she had tears in her eyes when she realized the letter was from me. She said she had tried to find me from time to time over the years, but it just didn't work out.

We eMailed one another during the week, and we spoke on the phone for two hours this afternoon. And just like that, it was like the past years just disappeared and we were just L and V, together again, as if we'd never lost touch. I invited her here, she invited me there....... we will keep in touch now with eMails and phone calls.....

This has been a great day.

Royal surprise.......

A letter arrived from England a few days ago...... as soon as I saw the name on the envelope, I knew who it was from..... a long-ago friend J who started off as a pen-pal with me and another school-friend of mine. My school-friend B had begun a pen-pal friendship with J, and she talked and talked about their great letters crossing the Atlantic every couple of weeks and asked if I would like to write to her also. Writing has always been a passion of mine, so B didn't have to ask me twice.

After a few years of sending letters back and forth, J decided to visit the US to meet B and myself. We were all either just-married or about-to-be-married at that time, and we all got together at my house on Long Island for dinner. We all had such a great time, and we talked and talked late into the night.

The three of us, J, B, and myself, kept up the letters through the 1970s and most of the 1980s. J moved from England to Malta, B moved from NY to Connecticut, and I moved from Long Island to Texas..... and we all lost touch along the way. I thought of J from time to time, especially when my cousin F and I talked and eMailed about the goings-on in Britain's Royal Family. Over the years, I had forgotten J's last name, couldn't remember B's married name, and time just marched on. I tried a couple of times to find J on the Internet a few years ago, but didn't have any luck at all.

But just a few days ago, there was J's letter in my mailbox..... she had managed to find me through sites on the computer. The address wasn't quite right, but the post office got it here just the same. She sent me her eMail address so I quickly got on the computer...... and then also sent a letter through the post office, just in case the eMail didn't go through.

J answered my eMail...... and just like that, it's as if all the years never passed by and it seems as if we were just in touch last week. I told J that if she's ever of a mind to cross the Atlantic again, she can surely come visit us here and stay in the cottage.

Hopefully, by that time, the plumbing problems in the cottage will have been fixed. As I type, my husband is at Home Depot getting supplies for himself and the handyman. The pipes in the barn will be fixed first, just because it's an easier job (even though twice as many pipes burst). So the guest rooms above the barn will be up and running way before the cottage.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that next winter won't have the same plumbing problems that we had this winter and last winter. Is that too much to ask?

Winter now seems to be just a memory..... we are back to sunny blue-sky days, and temperatures in the high 70s-- which are our 'normal' winter numbers. Normal. With the last couple of winters we've had in this state, who even knows what normal means anymore.

Valentine's Day

My husband and I celebrated Valentine's Day yesterday with brunch at The Hullabaloo Diner up near College Station. I ordered their special sliced-strawberry giant pancakes (I ate less than one-fourth of the serving there, and I still have enough of those pancakes in my fridge for five more servings-- they heat up nicely in the microwave).

Today, my husband and W the handyman are celebrating Valentine's Day by fixing the frozen pipes in the barn--- those are PVC pipes and my husband decided to do those himself rather than pay the plumber to fix them last Friday. My husband discovered pipe fittings called "shark bites" at Home Depot and he's in pipe-fixing heaven.

I was at WalMart bright and early this morning, doing a major grocery shopping. When we didn't have running water in the house (thanks to the deep-freeze that blew through Texas), and due to the fact that I pulled a muscle in my back during the same time, not much food was getting cooked in the kitchen. My husband was going into town and bringing cooked foods home from the little cafes in town, so all we had to do was pop things into the microwave.

But the water is back (thank goodness) and my back is just fine (three cheers to that), so now it's back to filling up a cart with groceries, taking groceries from the cart to the moving belt at the check-out counter, then back into the cart with the bags, then the bags go from the cart to the trunk of the car, then from the trunk to the back porch, then from the porch into the kitchen, then everything gets put into the pantry or the fridge. What is wrong with that picture?!?!?

During the week that I could hardly move because of my back, I spent the time reading and watching HGTV programs and cooking shows on the Food Network. There was a recipe on one of the shows for homemade ravioli, using pasta-strength wonton squares. It looked so easy.... and I found those pasta squares in WalMart today, so that's what we're having for dinner tonight: homemade ravioli with ricotta and spinach. My husband and I decided years ago not to go to a restaurant on Valentine's Day-- we either go the day before or the day after, to avoid the crowds. So we will have a nice dinner in our dining room, which is all decorated for Valentine's Day. As my friend J used to tell us when he came to our Valentine's parties at the old house--- It looks like Cupid went crazy in this house.

I will keep all the Valentine's decorations up till after our lunch-party this coming Sunday. Our friends here haven't seen our Cupid-crazy Valentine decorations, but our friends coming from Houston will feel right at home with all the red hearts and Valentine trees.

A magic trick.....

Watch this....... I am standing in front of our kitchen sink.... nothing is up my sleeve, nothing is in my pockets....... I am turning on the cold water tap...... and voila! Cold water is coming out of the faucet. Now I am turning on the hot water tap.... and once again-- Hot water is pouring out of the faucet. If that isn't magic, I don't know what is.

You get the idea...... the plumbers were here yesterday and fixed not one, not two, but three broken pipes. We knew about the first two, but were surprised when they found the pipe behind the washing machine had split. And it was a copper pipe, totally insulated. Two plumbers came... and older man and his helper. The older man, I believe, must have been born and bred in Louisiana-- we could hardly understand a word he said.... quick-talking, heavy on the Cajun-accent, and half of his teeth were missing. (Not a judgment, just a fact.) But he knew exactly what needed to be done, and he did it so easily we probably could have blind-folded him and the job still would have been finished correctly.

Everything is nearly back to normal here, except for the laundry. My husband has to put in some new insulation behind the washer, around the new pipes........ then he will put up a little trap door to cover the hole in the wall behind the washer where the plumber had to cut to get to the broken (frozen) pipe. Then back goes the washer, then the dryer.... my laundry room will be up and running again.... and voila! I will be able to do the six loads of laundry that accumulated during the week that I had a bad back ache and the pipes froze because of the single-digit temperatures that blew in from the north. (Take note of this date: I am actually looking forward to doing laundry.)

We had invited friends over here tomorrow for a Valentine's lunch, but we have postponed that till next weekend. We knew the water pipes would be fixed yesterday, but two days just wasn't enough time to get through cleaning and laundry, get grocery shopping and cooking done, and leave my back in good-enough shape to enjoy having company. Everyone certainly understood the problem when I called them a few days ago...... and I apologized for the inconvenience...... and they will all be here next Sunday instead of tomorrow. I hated to postpone, but it was the best thing to do.

Today is a beautiful day....... the temperature is going up and up and up..... we'll be close to 80 degrees within a few days' time... and all will be right in this little corner of the Texas world.

And if all of the above isn't enough to make us smile, my cousin F in NY sent us a box of New York Black & White cookies..... it was a Valentine's surprise for my husband. Of course, I had to taste one...... totally delicious. No one in this state knows what a black & white cookie is, but just one bite of those NY-famous cookies and we both felt like we were standing in a New York bakery. I don't care where you live.... you just cannot beat the bakeries in New York and New Jersey.

Freeze this....

.... and everything is indeed frozen, including the fabric tents outside the chicken coop. We had light rain early this morning and just as it was getting light outside, the temperature dropped to below freezing and the fabric attached to the fence of the coop turned into a frozen swath of ice. Ditto for the rain that fell on the porch and the steps-- ice. Ice all over the porch. Icicles on the fountain.

We are still coping without running water in the house. My husband goes to the barn for buckets of water to use for the bathroom commodes. He says this has brought a whole new meaning to "The Bucket List." The plumber was set to come here the other day, but then both he and my husband checked the weather and saw that we would get another two days of below-freezing temperatures (today and tomorrow).... so now the pipe-fixing day is set for Friday. I will believe it when I see the plumber's truck in our driveway. No, scratch that. I will believe it when I can turn on a faucet and water comes out of it.

The wind has been fierce this morning... so terribly cold out there that I honestly don't know how the chickens can stand it. They are still laying eggs, still clucking around the yard and digging for bugs. When I went out there to check for eggs this morning, all five of them ran towards me. With my back hurting for the past week, the chickens haven't seen very much of me except early in the morning and then again when the sun goes down at lock-the-coop time. When I do go out there, I bring them a treat..... this morning, they got some chopped-up carrots, which they love. Yesterday, I diced up a banana for them. I think the chickens are getting bored with plain old white bread... when I toss that out to them, they look down at it, look up at me, then they'll eat it only after I've gone back inside. Picky, picky.

This is the second winter of frozen weather in this part of the state. We thought we would sail through January and February with our normal Spring-like temperatures, but the weather gods had other plans. Priority #1 for my husband and the handyman will be to build an insulated enclosure around the water-pump in the barn. Ditto for the water pipes underneath the house. The pipes that connect to the kitchen sink were insulated before they froze, but this month's winds were so heavy that it must have created way-below-zero temperatures underneath the house.

The weather has been so un-civilized. So un-Texas. I'm trying my best to keep everything in perspective, but I'm the first to admit that I've been cranky this past week. To paraphrase that proverb from a few weeks ago: Every frozen moment is a frozen miracle.

Pump this...

Where to begin.... well, let's see. The temperature is warmer, so that's on the plus side. The wind has kicked up, so that's on the minus side. The handle on the water-well pump-thing seems to be working, so that's a plus. And that's about the end of the plus-items. On the minus list.... there is a broken and/or frozen pipe on the house, the cottage, the barn. Translation: even though we can turn the water-well pump to the 'on' position, the water isn't flowing into the house. Ditto for the cottage and the barn.

My husband went underneath the house-- copper pipes at the problem area, so he couldn't fix that. Same story for the cottage and the barn. Translation: call the plumber. The plumber didn't answer the phone on Saturday. Sunday was SuperBowl-- fat chance of getting a plumber out here on that day. This morning, my husband got hold of the plumber. He was all booked up today and will plan on being here tomorrow. Plan on being here tomorrow? I hope that translates into I will definitely be there tomorrow.

Give me a blessed break. It's been a cranky few days..... between my back ache and the plumbing problem, all I've been doing is sitting in the TV room with the cats, either reading my books or watching Say Yes To The Dress, Cake Boss, or Paula Deen's Best Dishes. I've come to the conclusion that brides don't know what they're in for after that one day of dressing up like a princess from head to toe. Of course they're going to say Yes! to their beautiful dress. But will they say Yes! to five days without running water in the middle of 23 acres in the Hill Country of Texas?!

The Cake Boss show.... I love that program. It's about a big Italian family working in their Hoboken New Jersey bakery.... they work, they argue, they bake cakes, they yell, but in the end, they're all together as a family. No one seems to hold a grudge. Miracle of miracles. As for Paula Deen and her best dishes--- all of Paula Deen's recipes look wonderful. We have been to Savannah and we ate in her restaurant every night-- it was just that good. But I don't want to follow Miss Paula's recipes in my own kitchen... too much butter, too much mayonnaise, too much everything-- no wonder it's all so good.

Tomorrow is supposed to be the day. I have three loads of laundry to do.... the dishwasher is filled.... my hair needs to be washed. I have not been to town since this whole water-thing started. And when I do go into town, it will be a grocery-shopping trip because we're still planning to have the Valentine's lunch on Sunday. My back is nearly 100% better now.... all we need is the running water..... and then I won't have to call up the neighbors and tell them we'll have to cancel this weekend's lunch. I would hate to do that, but if everything isn't turned on and running properly by Thursday, then Valentine's Day will have to wait.

Snowflakes.....

We woke up yesterday to one-half inch of snow and temperatures just at the freezing mark. This is the second winter that we've seen snow up here, and only the second time that people up here have ever seen snow. Because the temperature didn't get much above 39 degrees yesterday, most of the snow is still here. Today's high temperature should be around 50, so everything should be melted by this afternoon. And tomorrow, the Weather Wizards are promising 60 degrees-- a heat wave indeed.

Today is the day that my husband and our neighbor J will fix the handle of the water pump/pressure tank, or whatever that thing is in the barn that makes the water come up from the well and flow through the pipes and into the house. Real running water.... can it be true? We have been going to neighbors J & J for hot showers, and for buckets of water to keep the tanks of the commodes filled up. We have six bathrooms in this house (plus one in the barn, one in the cottage, and one connected to the garage) so we didn't have a problem with lack of toilet facilities-- as long as we had buckets of water on hand. Thank goodness for good neighbors.

My back is much better, thanks to the Ibuprofen tablets. Today should be the last day that I will need to take those, but I've already added that item to my shopping list so I'll always have some on hand. And I've already told my husband that I won't be helping him lift heavy things in and around this house anymore, not even if there is a bat inside the house. We have no idea how that bat got into the house in the first place. The bat itself is so tiny that it can fit into the smallest opening-- the wings of those small bats are huge when they're flying, but lay very close to its body when the bat is walking up a wall. Never thought I'd be writing so calmly about a bat.

The chickens hardly came out of the coop yesterday, with the snow being on the ground and frozen all around their coop and fenced-in yard. They were clearly not happy little hens during this latest hard freeze. Our neighbors J & J laughed out loud when they saw all the sheets of fabric that I had attached to the coop's fence. That was my attempt to keep as much of the cold out of the coop as I could........ they said my chickens are spoiled. Well, so what? I worry about them..... they're not just chickens, they're my chickens.

The cats have been inside for days and days now, except for Gatsby who will go outside for just minutes at a time. For an outside cat, he now prefers to be inside except when the weather is just purr-fect outside. While I was resting on the sofa in the TV room, taking the Ibuprofen pills and waiting for my back to get better, the cats just slept in that room with me, being very quiet and sleeping right along with me. (Those pills made me very tired.) Every once in a while, one of the cats would come up to me and put their nose right next to my nose, as if to say Is she still breathing? Or do we have to find someone else to feed us? Seriously, I think the cats knew that I wasn't feeling very well. Unless I have a book in my hands, they're not used to seeing me sitting still for such a long time. (And when they do see me with a book in my hands, they do their best to get right on top of the page that I'm reading.)

I was hoping this would be the last of the bad weather, but the Weather Wizards are predicting another freezing night this coming Wednesday. I am so sick of freezing temperatures, so sick of bad backs and bad weather. But it is what it is...... and what was that proverb that I typed in here a couple of months ago? "Every moment is a miracle." Well, every moment without running water makes you especially grateful for all the moments when the water was running.

Winter Weather Watch

Never thought I'd hear those three words on the news: winter weather watch. But that's what we're having..... another frozen blast of winter. The city of Houston is officially closed tomorrow.... schools are closed and everyone is advised to just stay home. (Not only Houston, but in all the cities and towns of this state that are being hit with below-normal temperatures.)

My husband drove into work this morning and then The Powers That Be there decided to close the buildings and cancel everything for today as well as tomorrow. Unless one works for an emergency service, people have been told to stay home tomorrow. We were just watching the news on TV and there are some teeny drops of sleet falling in downtown Houston. Not a soul is on the streets, not a car is driving on the city roads. When I think of what's been going on in the northeast, what's happening in the Houston area is just a drop in the rain-bucket.

Speaking of buckets..... my husband has had to go to our neighbors J & J for buckets of water. We thought we were doing so good during this latest hard freeze (as the Weather Wizards call it)....... turning off the water at night, turning it back on in the morning. And it was working nicely till yesterday...... my husband went out to the well to turn on the water and the handle broke. It was just so frozen that it broke, plain and simple. We called a plumber but he suggested we wait till Saturday to fix it-- that's when our temperature is supposed to go back to the mid-60s. The plumber was afraid that if he fixed it, the handle would just freeze up and break again. Top priority is now going to be to enclose that pump system so the hard freezes can't do this again.

As if all of the above weren't enough...... I hurt my back two nights ago as I was helping my husband lift the mattress and box-spring from our bed. (A king-sized bed, no less.) We were doing that at 1:30 in the morning. Why? Because there was a bat flying around the house and he flew into our bedroom and hid himself in the fancy-dancy wood moulding over the windows above the bed. The only way for my husband to get the ladder in the right place to capture the bat was to get everything off of the bed so he could position that ladder in the middle of windows, which is right where the middle of the bed's headboard is.

The entire production took two hours, from first-sighting to releasing that bat. My husband managed to get the bat at the end of a long piece of wood... the bat just crawled on the wood and my husband walked slowly down the ladder and out to the upstairs balcony. When my husband hit the piece of wood with his hand, the bat flew off. I was not watching all of this.... I was outside the bedroom door trying to make believe that I didn't hurt my back moving the mattress and box-spring. Then of course, we had to put the box-spring and mattress back. I honestly don't know how I managed to help him do that, but we got everything back in place and fell into bed exhausted. By the time I woke up in the morning, I couldn't get out of bed. Ditto for this morning.

For someone who doesn't take so much as an aspirin, I finally had to give in. I called my cousin L to ask her what I could take for the back-ache...... then called neighbors J & J to see if they could go to the pharmacy for me (my husband wanted to stay home, but I had insisted he go into work for today's meetings). Luckily, J & J had just what I needed in their house and they brought some over to me..... and also checked on the chickens before they left.

I was just as worried about the chickens as I was about my back. The chickens were fine... their water had frozen in the bowl in the coop, but J & J got fresh water out to them, and after the first couple of pills got into my system, I was able to do that myself late this afternoon. I will be taking those pills every four hours till I can bend down and touch my toes, I swear.

We are supposed to get either sleet or snow tomorrow, depending on which way the wind blows and which clouds come over the hills here. The TV Weather Wizards said we could get between one and three inches of snow. Possibly. Maybe. (Do they really know?) Whatever we get will be gone by Saturday as the temperature climbs back up into the 60s, after staying below freezing for the past four days. The plumber will be here on Saturday, and this will all be just a memory. Another winter memory. Second winter in a row that the water pipes, underground sprinklers, and well-water systems are bursting and popping all over the state. Not exactly yee-haaaw moments.

Is it Spring yet?

The answer to that question is No! even though we've just had a few warm and sunny summery days here.

We woke up at 4:30 this morning to the sound of 70-mph winds. Sounded like a freight train, and the noise reminded me of the windy night when Hurricane Ike marched through downtown Houston. It was so windy this morning that we didn't go back to sleep. I had flashlights and candles ready in case the power went out, but that didn't happen. Thank heaven for little blessings.

The cats are inside and will be going through cabin fever again before the week is out. Gatsby went outside for less than two minutes this morning, then he sat by the back door waiting to come in. And to think the other night it was so warm out there that he slept in his favorite chair on the back porch. Poor cat must be wondering what happened between then and now. So are we.

The wind has died down some, but it's still blowing out there. Most of the tent that I had suspended over the little yard by the coop has been blown to bits. We really need to re-work that space outside the coop-- frame it with wood and put chicken-wire all around it so I can eliminate the fabric-tents that I've been using to keep the chickens out of sight from hawks. And that one side of the coop that faces the backyard..... it would be nice to add plywood sheets there, right on top of the fencing, so the wind doesn't come screaming into the coop from that side. It's the only side of the coop that isn't protected from the wind, and the plastic sheeting and fabric that I've hung up there just doesn't cut it on days like today. I can hear my husband now: These 'free' eggs sure do cost a lost of time and money.

We will have freezing nights until Friday.... then the night-time temperature will go back to 50 or 60 degrees. For the second year in a row, we're having a never-ending winter, along with the rest of the country. Global warming? More like global freezing.