January 2015 is well under way, and it's COLD outside. I may have mentioned that I'm not fond of cold. And today it's cold and gloomy, so twice as bad. But I suppose I shouldn't complain. It's not sleeting or freezing rain or snow. Just cold and gloomy.I have a new group of birds at the feeders. It's not my sparrow swarm from the summer, so I'm only having to fill the feeders about once a week these days. But I looked out yesterday and I have a couple of these guys on the feeder. American goldfinches! I didn't even know they came through here, but I'm glad they do. Pretty birds - even with their winter coloring. And not very schitzy. This one sat and let me take many pictures, so I posted several.
I also have some black-capped chickadees hanging out, and some dark-eyed juncos, and of course, the mourning doves, a pair of cardinals and an occasional blue jay. The juncos are definitely ground birds. They forage in the yard or under the feeders, but I never see them up on the feeders. And they are hard to get pictures of because they're very schitzy, as are the chickadees.
I'm actually glad to see the birds around. After I had both my big trees trimmed up and all the low branches taken off, it seemed like the birds all left the area. Of course that could be partly due to them migrating around that time, I suppose. I have been having trouble with a smell in my guest bathroom. I've looked everywhere and cleaned everywhere and finally decided it was an animal that crawled under the house or into the walls and died and I'd have to live with the smell a while. But that was back around the end of September and I still have the smell, so I was about to call plumbers out, afraid maybe I had another leak under my foundation. I was talking about it to my friends at lunch last week, and one of them said, "google it. Maybe it's something you can fix." So yesterday I googled it, as "sour smelling drain". One of the suggestions that came up was to run hot water full blast through all your drains at once for 10 minutes. Something about trapped gas in the drains coming back up in drains you don't use a lot, and I rarely use that guest bathroom. I figured it couldn't hurt to run water in all my sinks, etc, for 10 minutes, so I did it. The smell is gone. I'm serious. I've had that smell for 4 months, and I fixed it by running water for 10 minutes. Amazing. And on top of that, I almost had a plumbing call too. Guess I'll use that bathroom occasionally or at least just run water in there at times.
I have all my aloe covered against the cold, but I'm kind of afraid of what they'll look like when I uncover them. This has been a pretty extended cold stretch, dropping down to freezing or lower at night and just barely making it to the low 40s during the day. Plus they're not getting any sunlight covered up like that. I'd uncover them if it would stop freezing at night. Oh well. They're pretty hard to kill.
My little pine looks dead, unless you look closely at the fat buds waiting for Spring. And the little peach trees have dropped all their leaves. I'll need to do serious trimming on those here pretty soon - whenever it's warm enough for me to get outside. I don't want to leave it very late, because I want to trim them back while they're the most dormant. And trim all the roses too of course, but it's going to have to be a heck of a lot warmer than it is right now for me to get out there. Did I mention that I don't like cold?
So that's all. Not much going on right now. Maybe next time I post I'll have been able to get out into the yard and putter around.
