What is it about a northwest wind in the fall sounds different than it does in the summer. A summer howler brings a welcome relief from the heat, while a howler this time of the year makes a person shudder. It just sounds cold and depressing. Winter is on its way, but at least we don’t have the snow that other places are getting, thank goodness.

I have some nice bird photos to show, a cardinal pair and a pileated woodpecker,


If you’ve never seen a pileated woodpecker, they are HUGE! About the size of a crow.

I had fun watching this cardinal. I have a hose running to a fountain, and it froze, leaving the bottom bowl covered with ice. The cardinal landed on it and was skittering all over trying to keep his balance.


Free entertainment, LOL!

I finally got around to listing some beads, and this is my favorite,

and some laughs for the day,

Indian Summer?

It’s a warm fall day here, the wind is blowing and the leaves are drying up. I don’t know what it portends, but we have a LOT of pine trees drying up and turning brown, even the big mature pines. I don’t recall seeing so many turning before, even in the drought years. We could use some rain, certainly. I’ve been watering my front flower garden because I plants some new perennials and bulbs. Much as I hate the hot weather, I do wish we could have another couple of months of this. I don’t think this is Indian Summer yet, because we still haven’t had a hard freeze.

We’ve got our wood and hay in for the winter, 50+ bales of hay and three-four cords of wood.

The mosquitoes and black gnats are out in force to get their last licks in. This big boy will be going to the butcher next month, and I won’t be too sad to see him go. He’s been sparring with Dexter, our bull, and I don’t want Dex getting hurt.

I was thinking this morning that I should probably take down the hummingbird feeder, but then I had a little straggler stop by, so I’ll leave it up for a bit yet. This is an earlier picture of a little girl preening herself,

I love storms, as long as they aren’t severe. The power of nature is always awe-inspiring.


The cat was sleeping on the kiln and fell off, here she was giving me the evil eye for laughing at her.

Some bead pics,



and funny Internet pics,

I have Baltimore Orioles, lots and lots of them!! The dark red Oriole is still here, and a couple of others that aren’t the normal coloring. There seems to be a wide variety of coloring this year.




It’s so much fun watching them squabble, and they’re quite noisy about it too. Here’s a couple of grosbeaks,
I had an Indigo Bunting, but didn’t have the camera handy, darn it! Here’s a movie of the orioles this morning,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MICH6KgOCO8&feature=youtu.be

An exciting day at the bird feeder this morning!!! A scarlet tanager!!!! And the dark Baltimore Oriole came back with the rest of the bunch. I had six boys here this morning (seven if you include the dark one), and one poor female.

Such a bright color!!!

In 24 years of working on a Mac, I’m for the first time reverting to a previous OS version. Lion (OS 10.7), in my opinion, has very little to recommend, unless you use it only for surfing the net and social networking, as in a iPhone or iPad. For serious work, it stinks. One of the new features they’re touting is auto-save and resume. If you close an unsaved document, it will automatically open the next time you open that program. In reality, it slows down opening programs tremendously, because it has to look to see if there are any unsaved documents. And it locks documents older than 2 weeks. Actually, that was the last straw for me. I have a folder of 118 photos of beads that need to be cropped and edited. I have to individually unlock each one to work on it. So now I’m copying data off of one of my hard drives, and tomorrow morning, after it’s all done, I’ll reinstall Snow Leopard. Disappointing!

It has certainly been a huge change in weather this past month and a half. All summer we had lots of rain, but then the spigot turned off in September. We’ve had the driest September on record, and today was the warmest Oct. 5th on record (over 125 yrs. of records). We really need rain, and I will not at all regret seeing 80s go away and nice cool 60s come back.

The birds certainly have been enjoying the weather, though. This one took a bath and sat in my tree fluffing up and wiggling his tail feathers; I just had to watch him and laugh!

 

 I love chickadees, they are so lively and saucy. Here’s one enjoying the water.