December in the Garden

 the white floribunda rose, Iceberg, that is next to our front door, still has some blossoms hanging on. 

 The last of the Autumn leaves have left the trees.  I have not been out for about 3 weeks.  But it won't take long to clean things up when I do get out there.  We have been having quite a lot of rain.  Our river is not over full, so we obviously needed all this rain.

This is an old photo of buffalo that I have been playing with and trying to make it into the 'Impressionist Painting' kind of a photo.  If you see it large and stand well back from the photo it looks suitably sharp.  I doubt that the impressionist painters ever had buffalo in their paintings though.  Monet would astounded, to say the least.

The apocalypse is upon us -- be sure you have some clean underwear on hand.

Stormy weather

We have been having some big storms in the last two weeks with lots of rain. Last nite when we went out to dinner at the Dunlop House the wind was howling and it was raining. We had a very nice dinner with lamb the main entre.

The ferries were shut down most of the day, due to high winds and there have been more power outages. Fortunately, our power was ok.

I put on my rain jacket, took my camera and went for a walk up the block to check the water level in the Colquitz River. The river is over its banks in places, but not quite up to the level of the bridge on Loenholm. On Gerda the river is running swiftly and over its banks a bit. We are not in danger of flooding, unless we get quite a lot more rain. I have not looked for the amount of rain we have received, nor looked at the forecasts. Also, in our recent weather, there was an earthquake off the Queen Charlotte Islands a few days ago... all recorded else where.. We often get small earthquakes in this area. Of course, they predict that we are due for a big one.

At about 5:00 am I was wide awake so I used the time to finish transfering the trip information and the post card addresses into my new travel logue book. I will proably finish the space in the latest book in December if or when we go down the Oregon Coast with our friends to do the birthday celebrations. Terrible time of year to do this, we really should move the time for this trip. So, I spent the rest of my day in a very relaxing manner, after getting back to sleep at about 7:00. Life is good !

Enjoying the Garden from inside

The newest vase and the autumn leaves in the living room.

The newest vase with floral arrangement, no flash used.

my newest vase with floral arrangement using flash

I spent a few minutes yesterday, walking around my garden. I have a sprig of the Artemisia, Powis Castle, and one flower head from the sedum for the arrangement in my newest vase. I rather like how the photo of the vase in the livingroom has turned out. Our liquid amber tree that is in front of our living room window is very colorful right now. We are getting light frost over night. The leaves from the tree are beginning to fall and look lovely on the green of the grass path beneath it. I will need to get out and rake the leaves, though, as it is not good for the grass to leave the fallen leaves. :-)