Hi Anne, I thought that you Northerners were so use to snow that you just ignored it and went about doing what y'all do. :o) If it is any help to ya, we are starting to get into the 60's and 70's down here in Central Alabama and my water lilies are getting pads, my dwarf cattails are shooting up out of their pot, Frogsbit and Water Hyacinths are coming back, and all the water irises and Sweetflag are filling their pots. Also, the pennywort, lizardtail, parrot feather, and yellow floating heart are all coming out of dormancy. :o) Happy ponding, Scott

I found out the hard way, even tho I knew it was changing last night. My clock/alarm/radio, doesn't automatically reset, so it went off as usual this morning. I got up, hit the toidy, then staggered to the kitchen to put of the coffee. I then came to my chair to take my morning mess of meds, and happened to look at the cable box......5 AM !! Then came the hard decision....stay up or go back to bed. I decided to do the latter. The coffee will still be there in an hour.

That is why your lawn tractor has head lights ;-) I always "Loved" to go to work in the dark and come home in the dark. I was "great" for my mood. I remember one year when we were living in Indianapolis, I had to raking leaves in the dark. The good thing was that the limited light from the house allowed me to better see how the leaves reacted in the air stream from the blower. Knowing this I became more efficient in blowing leaves.

Nancy, Gold is better than plain brown. Honestly, anything is better than plain brown. Around Thursday or so I noticed green leaves falling from some trees---they didn't even turn brown first. I think our trees are confused. Why wouldn't they be? Every week they are exposed to lows in the 30s and highs in the 90s. How they even know what season we are in at this point is beyond me. Currently it is 90 degrees at our Mesonet station and 89 at our house. There's reports of haziness and smoke in the air, but none of us are spotting any plumes of smoke, so I think that, as the rumored cold front moves across the state, it may be pushing smoke, fog, haze, smog, dust or whatever ahead of it. There was a 1,700 acre wildfire in the county west of us yesterday and it looked like smoke was hanging over the river this morning, so maybe it is that. Our gold foliage peaked around Thursday or Friday and is going to a dull golden brown today. I believe the hard freeze we had a few days ago has really impacted the tree foliage. Further south in Texas where the freeze didn't happen or at least was not as prolonged as it was here, they have better foliage color than we do right now. At least 3 or 4 of the red oaks in the yeard near our house have some red, and our big red oak near the road, which is my favorite tree, is beginning to show some red. It probably will peak next week though it is hard to tell in this weather. We turned back the clocks at bedtime last night so at least we'd be in sync with the rest of the area when we woke up today. It didn't matter what time the clock was showing---I woke up at the same time I do every single day, even if the clock showed it was an hour earlier. My body clock gets pretty firmly set on a time and doesn't really care what the clock says. It takes me at least a month to adjust to a time change and then before you know it, we're springing forward or falling back all over again. Jennifer, I'm glad you feel a little better today and hope you didn't cough your way through making the announcement at church. Hot and windy, hot and windy, hot and windy. It feels more like earliest September than early November. Chris sent me a text about a half-hour ago---a shooting at a church in Sutherland Springs, near San Antonio, TX. Word is several people were shot, including children, before police arrived and took out the shooter. He said he had heard 15 people were down, but I haven't seen any firm number on any media yet, and often early report are erroneous. It just seems to me like the world has gone mad---it is sad when people are not safe in church. And, in a state like Texas with open carry, it is unfortunate someone in that church wasn't armed because perhaps they could have stopped the shooter. It seems wrong to carry a gun to church, but we cannot kid ourselves---these shootings can happen anywhere any more. I'd like to be working in the garden, but all the swarms are still out there---Asian lady bugs, wasps, bees, yellow jackets....so I'm indoors. Oh, and the fire ants and harvester ants all are out and scurrying around. I guess maybe they are busy storing up provisions for winter. Dawn