first day of winter

Lemme sum up:

Winter solstice is at 5:47 tonight.

We raked half the back yard, and netted abut 15 bags of leaves. We only managed to get 3 to the curb for our every-8-weeks leaf pickup. Oops. We also have an enormous pile of brush, and need to do another "pick up the downed branches" sweep - it's rained a lot the past couple of weeks, and the pecans she branches if you so much as look at 'em wrong.

We had our first frost about 2 weeks ago, and the tomatoes and basil and marigolds promptly died. Broccoli did fine, and we had enough for all of us for dinner one night last week.

Michael did two little home repairs yesterday, and I was too lazy to get out the camera and prove it. But I am glad that he re-attached the strip holding down the linoleum in the downstairs bathroom, and stopped up the hole in the back of one of the kitchen cabinets. The same hole that was once the source of possum entry has been the source of cold air entry these last weeks, so now that's one draft blocked.

The squirrels have been very active on the roof the last couple of days, but so far at least they are definitely ON the roof and not IN it, a vast improvement over last year. They are still quite noisy at 5am, leading to my early morning wondering whether a metal roof would amplify their noise or would be slippery enough that they'd avoid it.