hey North, your weather is down here drunk on my lawn and you need to come get it

I've been watching the birds at the bird feeder all morning. There's some new birds, I think, but they won't stay still long enough for me to get a good look and maybe identify them. Maybe the goldfinches weren't goldfinches after all or maybe they've already migrated on. If they were/are here then it is the non-breeding coloration but then I saw a few that I'm pretty sure that's what they are. And sparrows, many kinds of sparrows. And another little bird that looks like maybe a goldfinch but then it doesn't, perhaps a vireo or a flycatcher, neither of which I don't think I've ever seen and maybe a few of the warblers are still around. They're all very feisty out there today chasing each other away anticipating the approaching cold weather perhaps.

And cold weather is approaching. An arctic blast is arrowing down to us. It's already causing havoc in the northern part of the state with a 100 vehicle pile up outside Dallas and another smaller one around Austin because it's not just cold, it's rain and snow too so the highways are icy. It's currently 35˚ this Thursday evening and this is what they're predicting for the next 7 days...

Eleven degrees Monday night!!! with maybe snow and/or sleet! This doesn't happen here. I've already covered the ponytail palm with help from my sister. Also a poor attempt at protecting the big jasmine that was already putting out buds over in the shop yard. At the house I've covered the porterweed, the hibiscus, and the gardenia and brought in all the pots I had taken outside plus one or two more that I didn't worry about with a light freeze. There are other things I want to cover but I ran out of time and materials today as it started raining. I'm going to lose all the Boston fern that I've spent the last three years trying to get re-established on the west side of the house. And the emerging buds and flowers on the azaleas will get destroyed so no blooms on them this year. The yellow bells and the purple orchid bush will freeze to the ground as will the two yellow and one pink angel trumpets and I don't know if they will come back from a deep freeze. I'd like to cover the plumbagos but it might be easier just to replace them. I hung the big tarp across the back of the garage to help protect the plumerias and night blooming cereus and discovered the nest wrens are making. It's that pile of leaves back there in the plastic box of work gloves. I knew they were working on a nest but I thought they were refurbishing the old one on the top of the motor housing for one of the garage doors.

After it started raining I came in and covered some of the windows. We don't have any curtains, just mini-blinds, and the windows in the lower part of the house don't even have those so I tacked up some old sets of flannel sheets over all but one wall of windows.

We were busy at SHARE today but not because we had a lot of people come in, about 10 I think, but because we had a lot of food delivered. First some private donations, including 200 pounds of chocolate candy, 

then the truck from Walmart, and finally the big truck from the food bank in Victoria. And I got the shelf of soup organized again.

I'm ignoring writing about the impeachment trial because it makes me so angry knowing that the traitorous republicans will not vote to convict. I mean, what does a president have to do, how bad does he have to be, for them to decide it's bad enough to convict? Extortion wasn't bad enough and now an attack on our very democracy, an attempt to overthrow the election and install himself as president for life isn't bad enough? Some won't vote to convict because they are all in on Trump, others won't vote to convict because they are afraid of Trump going after them when it's time for re-election but I have to say, if they won't do their jobs out of fear of losing their jobs, they don't deserve their jobs to begin with and as to that  today, 15 republican senators didn't even bother to show up and Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and Mike Lee were seen meeting with Trump's lawyers today. Well, they're going to lose one way or another because the democrats won't forget their dereliction of duty and we will be reminding the voters of that when the time comes so you'd think they would rather lose their jobs over doing the right thing as opposed to doing the wrong thing. 

And once again I am behind reading your blogs.