It's Still Cold Out Here!

We had our first snow storm of the season today. It's so cold here. It looks just like it did a year ago (see December 7, 2005: http://stephensclan.blogspot.com/2005/12/its-cold-out-here.html) . JoLee's evening class was canceled. I came home early to avoid the crazy drivers.



I took a picture of our crazy eyed cat. She looks like psycho in this photo. She went out and played on the patio in the snow tonight. She started digging in it until she realized it was making her wet.

We couldn't really go anywhere tonight. JoLee and I played Trivial Pursuit to pass the time. She barely won, by the way. She got questions like "What did Mr Guillotine invent?" and "What Monday night sports tradition started in 1950?" and "What book begins 'I Nephi being born of goodly parents'?". On the other hand, it took her two dozen rolls to finally land on the pink wedge.

Tomorrow everything is supposed to be back to normal. I'll be working a full day and playing the trumpet in our annual Christmas concert. JoLee will be teaching all her classes in Lawrence.

Dorothy's Happy Place

I think I captured one of Mom's happiest moments:
--At the Dallas Mall
--New Grandson in one hand
--Mrs. Field's cookie in the other hand
Does life get any better than this?? (You look great, Mom!)
 

Birds

For my birthday Nate got me some binoculars, and since then we've taken up birding. Turns out that because Kansas is right in the middle of the country a lot of birds live in or pass through our area. A few weeks ago we went to the Arboretum to see if we could find some birds we hadn't seen before. We were happy to find that the arboretum is a great place to watch birds because they have a whole area dedicated to just that.

Around this little cabin are placed a half dozen bird feeders.


Once you get into the cabin you can see the birds through the large windows and talk all you want without scaring them away. The cabin also has a big chart of some of the area's birds, which would have been really helpful if we hadn't brought our birding book.


Here are some pictures of the birds that we saw while we were in the cabin.

Downy Woodpeckers:


Black-capped Chickadees:


White-breasted Nuthatches:


Northern Cardinals:

And Tufted Titmouses:


It was a really good birding day for us because we had never seen any of these species of birds before except the Cardinals.

But our fun at the arboretum wasn't over yet. Nate got really interested in these yellow, softball-size seed pods produced every fall by a native tree. Here they are on the limb and on the ground.




And, as we left the Arboretum, we encountered 5 or 6 white-tail deer. They didn't seem to mind that we were so near. They just checked us out and then got back to browsing.

Zephyr's Halloween Treat

Nate won this bear in a Hallmark company raffle. Obviously it's not the most exciting prize in the world. So he gave the bear to Zephyr. She likes it.