Flowering

Sorry for the radio silence, dear reader.  I was on vacation in Florida (oh there will be blog posts and pictures, don't you worry), and then when I came back, I jumped right into helping with flood stuff from the Halloween flood.  And today is the first day I've had off since I've come back.  This storm event is the flood of record for Onion Creek watershed and I'm guessing that we'll be talking about it 15 years from now, much the same way we talk about the Memorial Day floods.  I'll probably end up writing more about it as time goes on, but not now...not now.

I still need to update my "rain page," but we got around 4" while on vacation and then another 2" right after returning home.  Sadly, hardly any of this rain has made a dent in the drought because all of it keeps falling in locations where it won't end up behind Mansfield dam. 

The morning was spent getting the garden ready for the winter - there's a soft freeze coming our way on Tuesday/Wednesday so I decided I should dig up plants that I want to try to keep alive over the winter and pull off all of the peppers and eggplants.  I'm leaving the tomatoes on in the hope that we won't really freeze and that I'll be able to let them keep ripening.

The insects, birds and squirrels can also tell that winter is coming.  There's a feeling of a mad frenzy and all of the animals are going about trying to prepare as best they can.  I always watch the animals and think of Robert Burns's poem "To a Mouse"