Let the snow begin!

There is just enough snow to get me in the Christmas spirit...and to give Husband a practice run with his new John Deere riding snowblower. We fired our regular snowplow guy so that Husband could play with his new toy.

Start practicing mister, my Irish Siri is predicting 18" just before Christmas!

With a lot of help from my Christmas elves, I got the tree up and the lights on. Monkey was the only one who didn't help. 

I still need to decorate the tree, buy some wreaths, and write all the cards.

Mother Nature has taken care of decorating the outdoors. Thank you, Mother.

Sun and moon

Autumn started late and ended early, at least it seemed that way. The warm weather hung on longer than usual, and it left us pretty quickly with just the cold and frosty stuff.

It is not officially winter, but picking up the Christmas cards and Christmas tree yesterday definitely put me in winter mode. And I finally retrieved all my winter clothes from the cedar chest that Grandma gave me back in the 1990s. It still smells like mothballs even though I left it out on the porch opened up for several weeks before I dared put any clothes in there.

Winter is just fine with me, especially on the sunny days like today. Clouds in the sky with the full moon at night are just as pretty.

They told us we would hate the winters up here. 12 years in and I still love them.

All snug in their bed and jingle bells

These 2 are becoming quite the comedy team. When they are not attached at the hip wandering the house, they can often be found snuggling together in the Cadillac dog bed. They have come a long way from when the brave kitten first came down the stairs and was pawed to the floor by a curious WoodMan.

Now that The Husband finally came through with our Christmas card concept, I guess it's time to start thinking about the upcoming holidays. Later this week (I hope) we will make our annual visit to Edmeston to pick up the cards and our tree from Salo's Tree Farm.

To improve my Christmas spirit, Tara invited me to the Fenimore Chamber Orchestra's Festive Strings concert yesterday at the very pretty Christ Church in Cooperstown. Conductor Maciej Żółtowski followed some of the more serious pieces with an encore of Christmas carols, including the one with those jingle bells he was ringing all the way...

A bird obsession: Part 1—The American Goldfinch

I have already talked about the Bird Buddy feeder/camera that I got in October. It forces you to obsess about the visitors you get, because it reminds you every time it takes a pic, or 10.

I think the most frequent visitor currently, is the house finch. I have 253 house finch pics in the gallery, and that's not counting the similar amount that I deleted. After that it is probably the cardinal. 

The blue jay might have been the second most frequent, but someone suggested adding safflower seed to the sunflower seeds, and that did the trick. The blue jays still come by now and then, but they are disappointed when they see the safflower is still in there. They throw them on the ground and carefully pick out the sunflower seeds.

Today's feature is the American Goldfinch. According to the Bird Buddy, they are day fliers, involved parents, and loyal lovebirds. It says they don't like the cold, so will be flying south soon, unless the food supply is tempting enough. I don't think either of these seeds will be enough to keep them through an Upstate winter.

For now we only have a dusting of snow and it's not all that cold. We'll see how long they stick around.