Gardening and Observing Life in SW Washington

Ylee and Sandi: Oh my! I'm glad I don't have junkyards next door as you both do. My neighbors may be lazy, but at least their houses and front yards are neat, if unlandscaped. Besides looking disreputable, old mattresses left outside would make good condos for mice. And mice breed like, well, mice -- born pregnant, with a new batch about every six weeks. Yuck!

There is someone farther down the paved road (not visible on the approach to my house, thank goodness!) who has lived here for at least 50 years and still has every vehicle he's ever owned scattered around the property.

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We did get a bit of snow here: about an inch Saturday evening and half an inch on Sunday afternoon. With a thin layer of ice underneath, naturally. Just enough to look pretty without causing any problems, except for being somewhat slippery. Birds everywhere, but I think it's just that they're more visible against the white background.

I haven't been very sociable lately, mostly keeping to myself, but I intend to make it around to visit many WUblogs in the next few days. Have a good week, all!

Jus, and Sandi: Yep, snow! It's been white here since Saturday evening, but so far, only flurries with a total accumulation of 3 inches. Big snow (at least by our standards) forecast for tomorrow. I have to keep an eye on the greenhouse when it snows heavy as the pitch of the roof is not steep and will need to be cleared.

Poppy and Jus: One good point about my junkyard neighbor is he has a couple of log trucks that "blaze the trail" on the paved road out to the highway that gets plowed. As long as we drive in and out on the gravel road from time to time, we know we can get out. A few days of the white stuff is kinda fun. After that, I'm ready to get back to rain.

Pros: Glad you like Silver Falls, too. Looks like it's out of commission right now, but sure was pretty with snow all around yesterday.

Reno! Welcome! I always love to see a new face around here. Hope you'll come back. And thanks for the invite. I'll drop by and get acquainted real soon.

Ggrrl: You're right about the arthritis. There's that happy medium in between rust and hurt-a-lot and I try to stay in that zone as much as possible. Sometimes though, I just gotta do what I gotta do and deal with the consequences later. Your gardening plans sound great. Be sure to take some "before" photos, so you'll have something to compare to the "after". And, of course, we'll want to see them someday.

Skye: With those temps, it must be primo gardening time. Did the recent SE freezes cause any damage around your place?

Ylee: Silver Falls cam is back up. Looks a bit foggy there now and just barely above freezing. Maybe that fog froze up the cam earlier.

Ever since Brother taught himself to play the organ, I've wanted to hear him do Booker T's "Green Onion". Finally got my wish!!! I have yet to hear it live, but somebody did put it up on YouTube. So proud to be able to share this with all my WUfriends.

Thanks for the kind comments about Little Brother. He's a musical genius and I'm very proud of him. Our mother taught us both how to play the piano. Then he learned bassoon and was a member of the Portland Junior Symphony for awhile. A few years later, he attended Mannes College of Music in New York. A few years after that, he was playing bass with various bands in San Francisco and then back in Portland, where he taught himself to play bass violin. Sometime in the 90s, he got into the organ repair business and taught himself to play. All together, I think he's been playing organ for 15 years or so. Now he enjoys playing gospel organ in church as well as local jam sessions.

Puget: I added a comment and some photos in the header telling about our snow. I'll stop by your blog later to see if you got much. Not sure, as the forecast last night was saying snow south of Seattle and a cold arctic blast north of Seattle.

YCD, Sandi, Jus: It was quite a lot of work to clear the greenhouse roof. Since it is heavy plastic sheeting, I've found the best way is to whack it with a broom from the inside, bouncing the plastic. With every bounce of the plastic, the snow hops down the slope of the roof until it finally slides off. The English Laurel suffered a few broken branches from being smashed down. No snowman. I was too tired and soggy after an hour outside.

Currently, there is a light drizzle falling, snow is falling off the trees in great glumps. Pretty sure there will be a layer of ice on everything later when it cools off a few degrees. There must be a hundred birds or more coming and going around the feeders today: chickadees, juncos, sparrows, starlings, red-winged blackbirds, stellar jays, mourning doves, and others I haven't identified. Fascinating to watch from inside. The cats think so, too.

Good morning, all! Thanks for stopping by with your comments. We generally only have one snow event per year, which is fine by me. Pretty to look at, but a real pain when there's as much as we had this time.

I'm back in from replenishing the bird feeders. The little guys went through about 3 quarts of mixed seed and 4 quarts of black oil sunflower seed. I last refilled the feeders late Tuesday afternoon. Lots of little birdies to go through seed that fast. They have it tough when their natural food source is covered with snow.

It continued to drizzle all night and still is this morning. The snow depth is now about 6 inches and most has fallen off the trees. My view from the deck tells me there are branches down, but nothing worse than that. Shrubs around the house will need a bit of pruning where there is breakage. Thankfully, the temperature here has not dropped below 32F, even overnight, so no freezing rain, just very crunchy, wet snow. I've been hearing on the news about flooding south of here, in Oregon, and power outages from hurricane force winds that struck west and north of here. All we got was way more snow than just about anyone else.

Good morning, all you snow bunnies, snow voyeurs, and WUfriends!

Birdies went through another 3 quarts of mixed seed and 4 quarts of black oil sunflower seeds yesterday. I'm running low on the ingredients to make my seed mix: chicken scratch and Del's Feed dove and quail mix. I've found that good old chicken scratch is very popular with many birds and it's less expensive than actual bird seed.

It drizzled most of the day yesterday, with temps hovering at 32-33F. Only about 4 inches on the woodshed roof (that's the little lean-to visible in one of my snow pics).

One of the neighbors drove into the ditch on our private road yesterday. It's not like there's any slope to cause sliding, so not sure what the story is. They got a tow truck to pull it out eventually, rather than a tractor from the neighborhood, so I'm guessing there was damage.

Power was out here for 3 hours last night. I heard the Seattle area had over 250,000 customers without power and it will be as much as 4 days before all power is restored. They had freezing rain most of yesterday. I see Puget does have power, as she posted a comment on her blog earlier this morning.

There are good prospects for being able to get out this afternoon. It's currently 36F and foggy, warming to 50F this afternoon. Flooding is a concern as rain comes in, melting the rest of the snow. Two people are dead in Albany, OR, because of mistaking flood waters for driveway leading out of a supermarket parking lot. Anyway, if the private road looks passable this afternoon, I'll get out while the gettin's good, bound for Longview-Kelso to stock up on birdseed and humanfeed.

For Gamms and others who are wondering, we don't get a lot of snow here. Generally only one snow storm a year and some years not at all. Seattle only has 20 snow plows and Lewis County, where I live, only has a few (not sure of the exact number). The whole county only has about 70,000 people, but many hundreds of miles of roads.

Sorry I haven't been around for a couple of days, but I'll bring you up to date.

I did, in fact, make it to town on Friday. I could see that the private road, shared with two other households, had gravel visible in the tire tracks. Our driveway, however, was another matter. My little front-wheel drive Hyundai balked at 5 inches of really wet, crunchy snow. It got stuck about every 6 or 8 feet, so I would back up to get a run at it, get stuck again, as so on. I do not shovel 150 feet of driveway. I refuse. Period. End of discussion. Persistence paid off and I finally drove into bare gravel tire tracks and then onto wet, black paved road. It was free sailing from there.

In town, it looked like Christmas shopping season: a lot of traffic for towns the size of Longview and Kelso, parking lots full or nearly so, a long wait at the gas pump, etc. I'm no dummy, so it didn't take me long to figure out I wasn't the only one who had been snowed in.

Saturday is house-cleaning day and board game night. We had a good turn-out, so DH moved furniture in the living room and set up a second game table. The house didn't clear out until nearly 1:00a.m. and it was after 2:00 before we went to bed. Usually, everyone is gone by 11:00, but they had been housebound earlier in the week, too, and were glad to be out and about.

So I slept in this morning until the cats demanded their breakfast. Then I decided to settle in the recliner with some tea and a book and promptly fell back asleep with two cats holding me down. Oh, well. Good news is there are plenty of left-overs in the fridge, so I don't have to cook tonight.

Oh, one final note about this week's weather is, when I checked my rain gauge yesterday afternoon, there was 3.4 inches of water in it. I have no idea how accurate that might be, if 17 inches of snow melted straight down into it or how much of the rain made it in. It is very soggy around with a lot of rain on top of rapid snow melt. And more rain on the way.

Have a good week everyone. I should return to my usual routine tomorrow.

Ylee: They made me catatonic. I was absolutely defenseless.