BETTER BE GOOD

It’s that time of year when we all need to be on our good behavior, because you know, Santa is keeping an eye on us. This is not hard to do when you are inside the house most of the time. Of course, you have to leave the house to do shopping this time of year (unless you do it all online), so there’s that. But either way, we should try not to be naughty now because the stakes are high.

We really started to get into the spirit last weekend by putting up our Christmas tree. Every year we try to cram all of our ornaments onto our little tree. It seems that over the years we have acquired more ornaments every year. This year we got three new ornaments way back in May when our friends Mike and Scott visited. They gave us three Star Trek ornaments, and if you know me at all you know that I am a Star Trek freak, so I was delighted! One is the Starship Voyager (seen below) from my favorite Star Trek series, Voyager . The other two are the Starship Defiant (from the Deep Space Nine series and a much smaller ship), and the third ornament is a Klingon Bird of Prey (seen in probably all of the Star Trek series). I haven’t hung up the last two ornaments yet because we are waiting for Wendy to arrive to put up the lights around the room.

We have a bag full of ornaments that we used to hang outside on our Spruce tree. The tree is so big now that they would look funny hanging on just the lower branches that we can reach, plus there is all that snow out there on the ground. So I hung them up on the porch beside the heated hummingbird feeder, which looks like an ornament itself. I got this video the other day of one of my little fellows perched on the feeder beside one of the ornaments. You can tell this little guy has been hitting up the feeder on the regular because he looks rather chubby!

After the last snow fell (I think it was a couple inches), I shot this picture of the sidewalk leading up to our front door. If you look closely, you can see little kitty footprints in the snow.

We’ve had a ton of birds out under the seed feeder. We went to Walmart the other day, bit the bullet and got a bag of cracked corn, which used to be around $8 and is now $17. We are going to ration some of it out for our birds here at the house. Then we’ll take some to the ducks and geese at Randall Park because we promised them last time we were there that we would bring them some next time we went. Yesterday when Linda threw the corn out under the feeder we had hoards of sparrows show up, but also a group of about 14 Quail showed up. This video below is from last Friday when probably the same group visited us. One female Quail, seen in the upper right hand corner of the screen, was even eating the leaves off our Spirea bush.

That’s about all that is happening around here right now. We have more snow predicted, but you never know, that seems to change daily. We will just sit and wait to see what develops. Remember, try not to be naughty and remember…spread the love around!

PARTING SHOT

Summer Girl loves to sit out in the sun, but with the ground covered in snow she doesn’t have anywhere to go. So she made do the other day by sitting on top of a stool on the back porch. Smart girl (she got that from me)!

Join me every Wednesday or Thursday (barring any unforeseen circumstances) for more from the Southerner in the Northwest.