Winter Wonderland

I had every good intention of cleaning the old stewdio (formerly my mother's apartment downstairs) today. Instead, I've spent most of the day getting all the Christmas cards addressed and ready to be mailed tomorrow (if we can get out). The reason? Alas, we were woken at 4:30 this morning with our automatic generator starting up, which means only one thing in Kansas this time of year: no power. For once, the weather guessers had it right, and the rain, sleet, and freezing stuff started right on time yesterday afternoon and kept going through the night. It's still coming down now, and if the temperatures stay where they are, we won't get much more than rain. All it will take is one or two degrees lower and we'll have a bigger icy mess than this morning. By the way, the power to the neighborhood grid came back on around 1PM, so they won't be calling us to camp out tonight, I guess:)

Here's what it looked like outside at my bird feeders. Poor babies! You can click on the pictures for close ups if you'd like. And don' t those poor cardinals look cold?

This is my husband's attempt at keeping the squirrels out of the premium food. If you look closely in the platform feeder, you'll see that the squirrel is smarter than hubby thinks he is. We had 11 cardinals at the feeder at one time today plus all the other birds of winter: woodpeckers, nuthatches, juncos, wrens, and chickadees.

All the white stuff on the ground is ice, not snow - and here's how thick the ice was at about 2 PM today. This is the view to my right as I sit at the computer.
And as I looked out while waiting for the pictures to load, this is what I saw. I guess we have a day crew AND a night crew at the feeders:


I thought you might like to see the transformation in my stewdio . I've put away the sewing machines, the books and the fabrics away for now, and I've replaced them with our snow village, the tree and some other decorations. All this has to be done, including the downstairs organization before this Sunday when we have our big Open House. We've decided to do all the food ourselves, too - what were we thinking? All these photos were taken without flash so you can see the details a bit better. More decorations another time.

The Christmas tree

The snow village - the snowflakes on the window glow in the dark!

This is the first Christmas wall hanging I ever made.