We are starting nine days of vacation today. Yippee! In doing my maternal genealogy DH & I have located about a dozen graves of my ancestors from the 17th, 18th & 19th centuries throughout New England. Many served in various military capacities. For the past 15+ years we have used Memorial Day as a time to visit the graves & do maintenance. Many are in very rural areas but located on private property. Others are in rural cemeteries that have virtually been lost to time. We cut back encroaching forest growth, straighten the stones, & plant a daylily. The oldest military grave dates to 1687. It took us 5 years to find the site. The headstone was buried halfway...we knew it HAD to be the right grave so DH started digging. We were able to get a tracing of the stone's engraving for verification. It's quite a hike off the road to reach the grave site. We notified the historical society of the location back in the early 90's so Samuel's grave now has a permanent Veteran's placque & flag. Buried near Samuel we located the graves of his second wife & 2 of their children who died in infancy. Other graves are in more prominent cemeteries & we visit just to pay our respects & leave one rose. We'll start our trip before dawn on Monday & won't be home until well after dark. All we can reach in one day are those graves in MA & NH. The rest we visit periodically to keep them maintained. Today & tomorrow we'll do some garden work & BBQ. Next week, we'll take the ferry to Orient Point & spend the day garden center hopping. Then, we'll toss a suitcase in the car & take off for a few days...location unknown as of yet. Have a safe & great long weekend, everybody! /tricia

It is also another collection. Pastors around the world were in mourning this past Christmas. When Christmas and Sunday hit on the same day they are down a collection.

Jali, when I emptied my rain gauge on Wednesday it had 1.4” in it. When I emptied it yesterday morning it had another 2.4” in it! Flood of '65, indeed! I emailed Barb last nite to let her know I had arrived safely—tense, but safe—and I mentioned the Flood of '65 to her! She's not old enough to remember it, but I am! It rained, like this time, for a week or whatever and everything was saturated—and then, like you said, it DUMPED and that was all they wrote! All the bridges in/out of Denver on the west side of town but ONE washed out, including one that was just a couple years old and had been built for a “500-year flood!” I have pics of a span of that bridge laying in the middle of the Platte! Huge sections of I-25 and the train tracks between Denver and the Springs washed out! I still have the newspapers from right after it with all the pics! But I hadn't stopped to think that this was the 50th anniversary of it!!! Cherry Creek Dam was still new back then, and there was near panic on the news that it was going to break—they were releasing water as fast as they could. I lived in an apartment about a half a block from Speer and we were listening to the radio so we'd know when to RUN—and then the power went out! I'm still here—so, no, it didn't break! And 25th anniversary of the Limon tornado! Wow! Some years to remember! Guess you remember that one well! What I remember was I was watching TV weather and all of a sudden the radar went down! Switched channels, and no radar! Switched again—nobody had radar anymore! That's when we knew it was “serious!” If the Limon radar was wiped out—what else in Limon was wiped out! Wasn't long and the channels were picking radar up from the airport, and that's when most of them switched to doppler! Memories! I've been watching Denver radar today, and the forecast, and at least it looks like this is about the end of it for right now, so, hopefully, no repeat of '65! Thinking of you all down in the lowlands--make that WETlands--right now, Skybird

A lot can change in a week, but you know, the Euro correctly forecasted the big cold spell we just had, and it forecasted it several weeks in advance because Lee gave us a really early heads-up on it. I had looked at the 6-10 day outlook yesterday and didn't like what I saw, but I was hoping it was wrong too. Hoping these forecasts and outlooks are wrong just isn't really working out for us this year...because they've been right. I'm going forward with planting too. I intend to plant at least a flat of plants every day this week. We'll see if I can stay on schedule with that. I don't especially want to have to cover up any more plants than what I did this past weekend, but I don't want to postpone planting any more either. At this point, I'd rather get plants in the ground and maybe have to cover them up later than to postpone planting any more. The tomatoes and beans that are in the ground are doing remarkably well because in general our weather has been really warm, and the raised beds have warmed up even more than the grade level soil. There's a part of me that wishes I had planted corn when I planted beans, but I didn't and it likely is just as well because that would have been a lot more square feet of space to cover up in the cold. I've been more worried about the hummingbirds than the plants because there's no way to cover up the hummingbirds. I assume they've been seeking shelter from the cold somewhere. Or, based on how often I'm refilling the 4 feeders, perhaps they're just eating nonstop to stay warm. We seem to have more hummingbirds this week than last week and I am convinced the migrating ones have stopped here to refuel and wait out the cold nights before they proceed further north. There's so many of them! They all cannot be our local ones. We have hummingbirds battling for control of the feeders all day long. Turf wars, so to speak. We do have plants they like in bloom now, so that helps as well. We didn't warm up much today---from a low of 33 to a high of 55.