To The Surbiton Manor Born

Princess Poppyseed Watson enjoys reclining on the mantlepiece on cold winter days. She will probably be sitting up there regularly until June. We received about six inches of snow over this Thanksgiving weekend.  I was waiting for the strawberry plants to die back to brown. They were still green when the flakes began falling, so I did not get a chance to cut them back this year. I did bury them in straw before the snow came too hard. Hopefully they will be alright in the spring. I had forgotten what a pain in the neck the electric snowblower is to handle. Perhaps in windless conditions it would be easy. There are almost never windless conditions in Minnesota. There's always snow flying into your glasses, drifting over to the neighbors' clean driveway or blowing onto parts of it that you already cleaned. With a large driveway, the blower is really a necessity. It could be done with a shovel, but we are not spring chickens. Everything just gets harder in the winter. I discovered ...

This is the sky that I was shaking my fist at last weekend. While they don't show up in the phot, little snowflakes were falling (no accumulation).  All of the leaves are now gathered. At least those that I gathered. There's a school of thought that says "leave the leaves." I pick up the leaves for the most part, because I don't think that letting them get matted on the lawn will be helpful. But the last bits I mulch so there's a light leaf cover.  Today marked the day when I was planning to bring the leaves to the leaf dump. Showed up 10 minutes after they opened. On a Sunday. Bad move.  There was a line a mile long, and Kiki & I abandoned it. The van is sitting in the garage, stuffed to the gills, and ready to go tomorrow when it will hopefully be possible to approach the leaf dump. Not Plan A.  Another little piece of learning: It turns out that you want to clean your solar panels periodically. There's a miracle solution that is specifically designe...