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Saturday, January 27, 2007

Where is the chimney in the picture?

And today's picture puzzle is: find the chimney. A chimney is larger than a bird, duh. Even so, my chimney is almost as hard to see these days as it is to see the birds that blend into their surroundings, when I try to photograph them. I have a working fireplace or I did last winter but this winter I've been afraid to find out if the carolina jasmine and miniature fig vine have created a block which will send the smoke back into my house. Last winter, and so far this winter, we have had so many warm days interspersed with cold ones that the fig vine in particular hasn't died in the winter like it used to. It's quite cold now and a fire would be cozy but I'm not sure if I want to risk it. The acuba bush in the second picture is sentimental for me. My parents had several in front of their house and my bushes were started from cuttings that rooted in center pieces and I brought home to my house and planted after they had a good supply of roots. I have variegated ivy that was started the same way, beginning as part of arrangements at my parent's house. I am finally taking a day off. The trade off to working from home, and having some slack periods, is I feel obligated to work evenings and weekends from time to time. After three solid weeks without a day off I am ready to laze around which is what I'm going to do. I know how lucky I am. I think about people I've gotten to know who have advanced melanoma that aren't able to work or who are caring for small children while fighting horrendous battles and still find the time to reach out and support others. They are a remarkable group of people. I truly feel priviledged to know them, some I'll never meet in person but know only through an internet support group; some I've been able to meet face to face which was fun. The last photograph in this entry will be my help yourself photo. I think I've posted it before but it makes me laugh every time I think of it. I used to do year round bird feeding until I realized that the birds were turning up the opportunity to eat what I was growing in favor of the feeding stations. I occasionaly put food out for the birds, when it's in scarce supply and the weather is bad, but for the most part I eased into letting them share the bounty from my garden and stopped filling numerous feeders. My help yourself photo is of a large sunflower that the birds ignored until I finally removed the seeds for them and put them into a feeder. I'll leave it here with my funny photo.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The sunflower is a really cool idea...got any ideas to keep the deer out of my front lawn? They even ate the rosemary!
Funny how Bambi never munches on a weed. Think I'll just plant some pretty weeds.
Hope you get your fire going soon!
Love, Kim