mid-January

I saw a group of geese flying west and a large group of geese flying southeast. In mid-January.

I saw a daylily had bloomed. In mid-January.

Woodland violets, dandelions, and 10-petal anemones are blooming. In mid-January.

The woodland petal pinks are starting to put up bloom stalks. In mid-January.

The red climbing rose is blooming, the confederate rose is putting out new growth, the clover is rampant and starting to bloom. In mid-January.

I cut back one of the confederate roses earlier in the week and should cut back the other one before the new growth gets too far along. I thought about planting the camellia today since it's done blooming but decided to wait til next week. What I did do today was continue to cut out the dead canes in the climbing roses and pull out the dead branches caught in the tangle of canes. I had already cut the ones I could reach from the ground so today I got the ladder out and worked higher. It looks a lot better, cleaner, even though there are three long thick canes maybe 3/4 to an inch in diameter that I'm pretty sure are dead but they climb really high into the crepe myrtle and I'm not sure if they have growth on the ends. As you can see from my pile, I do occasionally cut a cane that looks dead but isn't. Oops.

If I had our 10' ladder I could get high enough to see but Marc basically gave it away to the guy who comes around and does some tree work for us. He asked to borrow it one day, would bring it back when he finished and Marc told him no hurry. That was before last winter. I'm going to have to go buy a new one.

I also picked up errant sticks as I happened upon them and pulled up a couple of handfuls of clover, my annual spring task to keep it from smothering the bluebonnets. My neighbor drove by and stopped one day last year while I was out there pulling up clover to tell me you know it's gonna grow back. Yes, I know.

Rocky finally got the extra downspout put in (the one on the left) and the gutter screens on to keep the leaves out Thursday. Now, hopefully, when it rains hard all the water that poured off that section of the roof (two valleys feed water onto that section) will be diverted away from the slab. I get a little nervous when it rains hard and the water starts standing along the slab.

The other thing I did yesterday was drive to the Evil Empire and get a plunger. We used to have one but it is nowhere to be found so we think it floated out of the garage and off during the flood. Anyway, the toilet in the big bathroom is flushing very slow and never completely empties so you don't want to do anything in it that you don't want to be seeing. The plunger did not remedy the situation so, luckily for me, Rocky was working at another house on the street and I was able to tell him and he'll be down to fix it.

For all it feels like spring out there, winter is supposed to make an appearance Sunday and Monday. We'll see.

I'll leave you with squirrel acrobatics. I put some shelled pecans on a slab of stone on the ground for the squirrels hoping to distract them from the bird feeder. They have so far ignored the pecans.