We had what looks like 3-4 inches of snow overnight last night. Enough to come up to my ankles, but never over my boot-tops on the walk to the mailbox and around the block this morning. It was a little chilly when the wind was blowing, but that wasn’t much of the time, so I worked up a pretty good sweat in my big sheepskin jacket.
The scenery around here looks so different with a coating of snow. The only real color remaining is the yellow of the few aspen trees that haven’t dropped their leaves yet. Otherwise it’s a white to dark green palette. Pretty!
Had a bluebird sitting on the birdhouse the other morning. Not sure if it’s a mountain bluebird or a western bluebird. I’m pretty sure it’s a juvenile male.
I’m not sure if this is the same bird that landed on my shoulder one evening while I was taking pictures of the sunset, but we have a few that hang around the house. I’m hoping to build a couple houses for them over the winter.
We’ve got a small tree cholla growing outside our east-facing bathroom window that reminds me of a prickly baby Groot. As summer turned to fall, it’s been turning more purple and I’m not sure if that’s normal or if it’s sickly. I guess we’ll find out next year.
Edited to add: my sweetie read up on chollas and says they turn purple in the fall and that’s normal. Glad we don’t have to worry about the little guy being sick.
There was a pretty #sunset this evening. Not a ton of clouds or a ton of color, but still pretty. And I was out working in the shop to see it, so you get to see it, too.
I’ve been working on other projects, like my lathe, lately, but I’ve also been slowly building more bookcases. I think with this most recent batch, I’ve passed the halfway point in the construction.
It’s nice to be able to unpack more of my books, but it’s always a slow process, since almost every box of books contains at least one book that I want to peek inside before I put it on the shelves.
Ah well. As long as I keep making progress, my sweetie is okay with me dawdling a bit.
As for the progress pictures, this is likely to be the view for all of them in the future. My iPhone’s camera can just barely capture them all if I stand with my back against the opposite wall.
We’ve been busy painting the past couple weeks. Well, my sweetie has been. I’ve been moving ladders and drop cloths and stuff that doesn’t involve going up and down ladders.
She got a new coat of stain on all the wood trim on our house. I don’t think the previous owners ever did that, and the wood was in pretty rough shape.
The bench that sits in our portale also needed a refresh. I knocked it together in a couple hours for a Fourth of July picnic in 2017, then coated it with a couple coats of leftover house paint. But it has been used as a workbench and saw horse over the past year, and it was looking pretty rough, too.
I rounded off the corners of the bench, removing the worst of the damage. My sweetie sanded it lightly and put on three coats of some new enamel paint we bought (40% off at Sherwin-Williams, and still $25 for a quart). We both think it makes the entry to our house a lot more appealing.
Chamisa grows pretty well in disturbed land around here. It’s blooming now, and fairly pretty, but it’s related to sunflower and goldenrod, and makes my allergies go.
When it gets big, as the one in the photo above, the lower branches will break and fall to the ground. We’ve been cutting the more overgrown chamisa out of our yard, and the layer of dead branches, dusty pollen and flowers can be a few inches thick.
But if they’re trimmed regularly, they don’t flower as much, and they look better. We’re not sure if we’re going to let them grow back or not, but we’ll figure it out over time.
At least the county transfer station now takes them in the “weeds” pile, which gets composted, rather than requiring you to throw the chamisa in the trash.
