More color on white

With all the snow, the cats just don't make it to the house anymore. Here's as close as they got one day awhile back... the backyard. It's Mama (the calico) and her sons from last spring... "baby kitties", as Courtney still likes to call them.

They don't look too happy, do they?

"When is all this white stuff gonna GO AWAY?"

Actually, it is starting to go away... slowly but surely. And that's the best way for it to go. If it melted too fast, we'd have a bigger mess (mud and slush) than we do now... there'd be flooding in some areas. There still probably will be... time (and temperature) will tell as to how bad it gets. It's been in the low 30's to around 40° the past week or so. I guess spring is on its way. Just so we don't get the 30-40" of snow that someone said the Old Farmer's Almanac has predicted!

I've acquired another cat outside. I don't know where she came from, she just appeared one day and stayed. She's quite tame, black with white paws, kinda like the brother to the orange guys above who just disappeared last summer. I told Courtney we ought to name the cats, and she said the black one should be called Blackie. I then asked her what we should name one of the orange ones, and she said Orangey. So I asked her what the other orange one should be called. "Orangey." :-) Of course Mama is already Mama, so that simplified the multi-color identification problem. And the other calico out there just doesn't have a name yet. We'll work on it.

Flower power

The last of my amaryllises is blooming now. Here's my ever-eager little assistant taking a sniff of it. She's also giving you a comparison so you can see how big the flowers are.

I like the flowers embroidered on her jeans, too!

Sliding on the snow was sooooo fun

How fun was it? It was so fun that afterwards she had to watch herself doing it over and over again on the computer! :-)

Wow... look how long that hair is! And it's even longer when the curls are straightened out when it's wet!

Boy, did we have fun today!

Remember the "amphitheater" I posted about here? Well, Courtney and I discovered that it made a great sliding hill! Watch!!

(Who needs a sled, anyway?!)

And Grandpa happened along just in time to get in on the action. Here's how the process went:

Courtney's most-used words of the day were "AGAIN!" and "Just one more time!" Over and over and over and.... I wonder who got the most tired. Courtney sure took a good nap, anyway!

SNOW IS GREAT!! Well, if it's deep enough and packed hard enough to slide on... and you're three years old!!

I found another one!

Can you see it? Hanging from the tree near the center of the photo.

Here's a closer look.

Yep, it's another oriole nest! I'd noticed it a couple weeks ago, but I couldn't get near enough to it to take a decent picture, because I'd have sunk over my knees into the snow. But this morning I noticed that the snow has gotten hard enough that I can walk on top of most of it, so I headed back to the house and grabbed the camera. I could get right up underneath the nest!

Just look at the intricacy of that work! Here are several different views.

It looked to be mostly made of "threads" from plastic twine that's used to wrap hay bales. The salmony orange and turquoise make a nice color combination, don't you think? What a lot of work those birds did!

I had found a stick that I thought I could hook the branch with and pull it down far enough to cut the branch and get the nest for even closer examination. (I even had a little pruner in my pocket to cut it off with.)

(Click any photo to enlarge.)

Unfortunately, when I got it far enough down that I could jump up and grab the tips of the longest branches, they broke off in my fingers. So the pic above is the best I could do. But just look at how that twine is wrapped around those branches! Wow! I would love to watch them doing all that!

And don't miss that AWESOME blue sky!!!! It was just so gorgeous out this morning! I took many more photos, so be expecting to see them in the days ahead.