Those lilies are pretty much done, but i have some decent pictures that i'll place where the lilies were. My red, yellow and red-and-yellow lilies will still be blooming on Sunday - thank goodness! Of the daylilies, only Silent Sentry is blooming so far, but some of the others may open by then. Centrefold is just starting to open now, as are some of the Orienpets (i thought the fasciated ones were Orienpets, but they weren't), and there are a couple more that are going to open this week. Lots of yarrow is blooming, and some veronica spicata, as well as hollyhocks, delphiniums (may be touch-and-go), filipendula and a few campanula. There are lots of cosmos and poppies too, nicotiana, impatiens and morning glories. And i got started on the weed whacking this morning - it's too hot again, so i'm here inside until it cools down. Have to laugh - i've been keeping track of the WeatherNetwork's predictions for Sunday ever since it came on to the two-week trend. Here are the predictions for each day: Sunday July 9th - cloudy, 28° Monday July 10th - partly cloudy, 29° Tuesday July 11th - rain, 33° Wednesday July 12th - cloudy, 23° Thursday July 13th - no data Friday July 14th - mix of sun and cloud, 21° Saturday July 15th - mostly sunny, 25° Sunday July 16th - cloudy, 26° Monday July 17th - sun and cloud, 29° Tuesday July 18th - a few showers, 29° Anal? No - it gives me a good laugh! LOL I love weather predictions!

Congrats on the fledging and the second nesting. I am very anxious for the fledging of our nestlings, because it will be our first successful fledging. I'm also bummed that we will most likely be on vacation when they fledge: we are leaving for a week starting on the 11th, and today is their 8th or 9th day. I have no idea if they will stick around or not...hopefully I can atleast see them once when we get back just to be sure that they made it and are safe. Maybe mine will fledge late so I get to see them, however it is very doubtful since it is late in the season and I'm providing mealworms; I'm really just hoping for healthy fledglings. I think my TRES will be fledging today or tomorrow. I have been seeing heads poking out and hearing a lot of wing-flapping.

Our only experience is with plumbers. The first was a friend recommendation. We actually had them come out twice. First for a water leak where our primary wate pipe had siding nailed into it. They fixed the 3" pipe that had. Racked all the way down into the slab. Then told us our 1 1/2" pipe from the kitchen sink wasn't to code and put in 2" pipe outside the wall, inside the cabinet. Called them again when we had a gas leak where the PO had copper run under the patio slab then into the house. Settling happened and the joint completely separated. They came out and ran new copper pipe strapped to the foundation. Fast forward to our kitchen remodel. Called one that was recommended on the Next Door app. They were stunned at the length of copper run outside and said there's no way that will pass inspection. The sink drain pipe that was supposedly not to code would have been fine. The new plumbers did a reasonable job with running the new gas line in the ceiling. I'm not happy with where they drilled the holes through the ceiling joists, but that seems to be fairly common with plumbers.

I hope that everyone had a Happy Thanksgiving. Jennifer, Plumbing problems seem so common at this time of the year. I hope y'all are able to get that slow drain running properly without calling a plumber. Those fires were so bad. I hate seeing evacuation warnings when there's wildfires like that. I don't worry about the people at home---they usually have at least enough notice to hop in their cars or trucks and go. I worry about all the animals at home whose people might be at work and who cannot get home to make sure the animals are evacuated or otherwise sheltered (cattle or horses standing in a farm pond, for example, as the flames go around them). We were lucky here. Earlier in the day when our dewpoint and relative humidity were very low, we didn't have the strong wind, and then our dewpoint and Rh values went back up. THEN the cold front came through and then dewpoints and relative humidity values fell sharply but by the time fires started, the wind had moved on through already, so we never had all the components for really bad fires in place at the same exact time. Still, there was a series of fires---arson fires---set east of Marietta towards Lake Texoma in late evening. The somewhat surprising thing about this was that it occurred either 1 or 2 days after another arsonist had been arrested setting multiple fires along I-35 in broad daylight. You'd think one arson arrest like that would deter a copycat, but apparently not. Rebecca, So far, every tomato variety I've tried with so-called EB resistance or tolerance has been a total dud and the plants got Early Blight anyway, and at the same time other surrounding plants got it. So, I have found limited value in any of those. They might show some form of resistance or tolerance if planted in an area that does not have a recurring problem with Early Blight, but in an area where EB is a persistent problem, I haven't found them to be any better than plants with no known tolerance of or resistance to EB. I used to love the Totally Tomatoes catalog, but haven't had much luck with any of their exclusive varieties the last 10-15 years, so I'm sort of over them too. This year I had much better luck with tomato plants in containers in an area of the yard where we hadn't had tomatoes in recent years. Those plants survived the whole summer and produced well and stayed 95% EB free (it is windborne, so I never expect plants to be 100% free of it). The plants out back in containers did much better than the tomatoes in the ground in the front garden where I've grown a plethora of all nightshades (potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, etc.) every year since we moved here. I'm going to leave the whole front garden free of night-shade veggies for the next few years to give the EB a chance to clear the soil there. This is one form of crop rotation since there's no bed in the front garden that hasn't had nightshades in it at some point over the last 3 years. I'm just rotating to a whole new area instead of rotating to new beds in the existing area. okmulgeeboy, I hate the Persephone days but just stay busy with indoor plants, grandkids, the holidays, etc. and before I know it, we have made it through the Persephone days and things are looking up. Amy, Y'all had more wind that we had. I think our max gusts were either in the upper 30s or lower 40s and were of short duration, for which we were grateful. I love, love, love decorating for Christmas. Every inch of our house gets holiday decorations, and we like to joke that our living room is just two Christmas trees, three wreaths and a little pine garland short of being a Hallmark Christmas movie living room. If you've ever seen all the over-the-top Christmas décor in the Hallmark Christmas movies....well, we do not measure up to that by any means, but we do have a lot of Christmas décor. I haven't even finished decorating yet---only the downstairs is complete, but I'll do the staircase and the upstairs next week. The girls are coming over in a couple of hours and we'll have them all weekend, so I'm sure we'll be busy with other stuff that does not include breakable Christmas ornaments. This year for Thanksgiving, we had three Amaryllis plants in full bloom---one Minerva and two Red Lions, and one of the Red Lions had two stalks up with 4 blossoms each on them. That one was especially spectacular. They all bloomed earlier than normal, but I am not going to complain. I have four more taking their pokey old sweet time that probably won't bloom until Christmas itself, so we'll have more then. These three amaryllis plants that are in bloom were grouped on one end table and looked so spectacular that Chris stopped and stared at them when he walked in the door and said something like "I know they are real, but they are so perfect this year that they look fake". lol. He was right! I was worried about the safety of the Christmas tree with Jesse and the new kittens, but Jesse is too busy with his basket of dog toys to even give the Christmas tree a second glance. He just runs by it on his way to get a toy out of his basket and doesn't even stop and look at the tree. Having said that, we don't leave him unattended in the living room with the tree because we fear what might happen if one of us isn't right there in the living room with him. The kittens are too little to care---they still are perfectly happy playing with each other, their scratching post and their cat toys and don't seem to have noticed the tree either. They play near it, but not on it or directly underneath it. So far, so good. Of course, it isn't even December yet and they still have lots of time to discover it and destroy it. Larry, I think the quail restoration project sounds awesome. I do know we hear and see a lot fewer quail here around us than we used to. There used to be a guy up the road who raised and released them, but he no longer is with us and I don't know of anyone else local who has taken on that task. All we have had the last couple of days is rain, mist, drizzle, fog, clouds, cool weather, and mud, mud, mud. I've over it already and we have another half a day or so of this November gloom to go before sunshine returns. Perhaps somewhat ironically, we go straight from today's/tonight's rain to tomorrow's return to high fire danger in the afternoon. Since everything has frozen repeatedly, none of the dead or dormant plants will hold moisture any length of time at all after the rain stops falling, so we face having dry vegetation in bad fire conditions tomorrow (and possibly Sunday as well) while the ground is muddy enough to slow down and even stop firefighters trying to fight wildland fires. It is a bad combination. Some of our worst wild fires historically have occurred on the weekend after Thanksgiving, and we find ourselves at that same point in the calendar again. It has been about a decade, maybe 11 or 12 years, since we had horrific wildfires on the Sunday after Thanksgiving and had to fight hard to keep those fires from burning through the town of Thackerville from two directions (west and east) simultaneously. We don't need a day like that ever again! We had our Thanksgiving at our house on Wednesday with Jana, Chris, the girls and us since Chris had to work on Thanksgiving. Then, on Thanksgiving Day we went down to Texas for Thanksgiving at my sister's house with siblings, their spouses, our adult nieces and nephews and their partners/spouses, kids and grandkids. Oh, and an assortment of friends. So, we had a mob of people and it was fun, and three of us siblings were together for the first time since Mom's funeral (with 4 of us kids, it seems like we always can get about 3 of us together at once, but hardly ever all 4 at once because there's always someone who's gone out of town to visit in-laws or kids/grandkids in another state, or whatever). It was a lot of fun, but I have to confess that I looked around the table and missed all our grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and several cousins who no longer are with us. We had such huge, fun, family gatherings when we were children, and I am sure none of us ever looked down the road to the point in time decades ahead of us when all the ones who were the "older ones" back then would be gone and we kids would find ourselves in the strange role of being the older ones now, with children, grandchildren and one great-grandchild gathered around the kids' table where we once sat. Time marches on rather relentlessly. I enjoy sitting at the adults table, but also think it would be fun to be an innocent child one more time, sitting at the kids' table laughing and eating while wondering when we finally would be old enough to graduate to the adult table. Somehow that happened a few decades ago and, being busy with life, we really didn't even notice it. We still try to fix the same dishes we remember in the same way our grandmother, mother, and aunts made them, but at the same time, nothing tastes quite the same way as we remember it from our childhood. Have a good weekend everyone. Just think---tomorrow is the last day of November! Dawn