I've noticed some strange things with the look and format of some pages here lately, too. Then we had phone issues here at our house, so no dial-up yesterday. Glad you made it back, Karen! Maybe we should all start using the buddy system. :D Brenda

I'm so sorry to hear about your foot GGG. I had foot surgery a couple of years ago in December. Our weather turned nice shortly afterwards. Talk about hard to stay off the feet! It was torture. Pameliap, sounds like you are having whacky temps like we are. 18 by morning but 60's by Monday. Go figure. GGG, I hope you are feeling better. Don't worry, you still have plenty of time to winter sow.

The rain that missed us the last two days has caused problems all over. THE MIRACLE RESCUE: When the powerful storms hit near New Braunfels in central Texas and dumped up to a foot of rain, one family was swept away from their campsite by a huge wall of water that came from somewhere upstream and seemed to come out of nowhere. The mother held on to a tree for a couple of hours before being resuced, the 11-year-old daughter put on a lifevest/floatation device that came floating by (believe in miracles?), and was in the water for over 2 hours before a retired firefighter from Colorado rescued her.The father, himself currently a Fort Worth firefighter, was swept 32 MILES downstream by the waters before he was rescued. It was several hours before each family member learned the others had survived and they were eventually reunited. Yesterday the flooding continued just south and east of Dallas, including in the Hillsboro area where flash floods closed some highways and one county announded the entire county was underwater and travel was impossible. Imagine that! Now that same storm has moved across Arkansas where I understand it has hit another campground like the one in New Braunfels. I don't know if they've found everyone yet. I was so frustrated when the rain missed us, but then horribly relieved we didn't have the very heavy rains here and all the problems that come with it. I hope they find all the folks from the Arkansas campground. Moni, I caught tons and tons of rain (about 600 gallons) from the last big rainstorm here in mid-May, using my one rain barrel, 5-gallon buckets, tons of cat litter buckets that I've save for years, Rubbermaid roughneck totes....anything I could find and set out to catch the water. I thought that 600 gallons would last forever, but with three weeks of no rain and a couple of acres of plants to water, it didn't last long at all. My poor old rain barrel has been empty for so long now. Our granddaughter doesn't understand why the ground is 'broken' (cracking clay) and offered to fix it by pouring dirt, water and birdseed down it. I told her that I thought we should just wait for rain to come and fix things. The question is, when is that rain going to come? We have fairly good subsoil moisture from rain earlier in the year, but the top 6" or so are drying out pretty quickly. No matter how much I water, just a day or two later you can't even tell I watered because the ground is as dry as a bone. I am sure this dryness is going to result in reduced yields from the veggie garden. At least the trees and shrubs shouldn't suffer because we have great deep, deep moisture from last year's near-record rainfall. That's how it is here for us with rainfall---feast or famine. Already, some of the gardeners here that we know are saying they won't water....if rain doesn't fall, their gardens will die. Water is so expensive and it takes so much to keep clay well-watered (once it is dry, water just rolls off of it like it is concrete) that they feel like they'd spend more money on water than their garden produce would be worth. I have hit that point before, and sometimes as early as mid-June if the drought began in winter, but I'm going to try to keep watering as long as possible...at least until mid-July. That's assuming no watering restrictions. Some folks who water with well water are having trouble maintaining enough water pressure to water. That's not good. A lot of Oklahoma is getting rain, but we aren't, and it doesn't seem likely to improve. Ironically, I've decided I don't want for any rain to fall here until after I harvest the peach crop at mid-month. If a heavy rain falls now, it will water down the peach flavor and make the peaches and plums split. Since I don't 'need' or want rain this week, watch it show up now.

We had a hot dry summer but making up for it, we have been having a beautiful fall that started earlier than some years with very little freezing. We have had only two nights drop a bit below freezing. I'm not surprised at how well things are doing. My entire yard has been a mass of color and still is. People who don't live here would think going by some of the things said that Oklahoma is an unending natural disaster area. Its not. We have predominantly more nice days than bad days each year and we nearly always have a great fall. Seems like the bad days get all the attention lately. I love this time of year. The trees are gorgeous here in the city and the weather has been stupendous. Most plants have snapped back nicely except some that prefer cooler climates that couldn't take the hot summer. You couldn't ask for a nicer place to garden than in Oklahoma in the fall and we have had many good summers, not every single year, but more good ones than bad in my memory. We are used to comparatively mild winters and at worst, have a couple bad spells or the temperature drops down in the single digits or less a few days. I can think of a lot of places much worse than Oklahoma to live in winter. I once lived in North Carolina and I really missed the Oklahoma wind the whole time I lived there. The wind never blew there. I prefer the Great Plains and I think the good outweighs the bad.