Dorothy, From watching how the jetstream, I think it has persistently come close enough to your end of Oklahoma that you get the gray, gloomy clouds on the edge of the cold fronts that are dropping snow and ice north of you. Way down here in southern OK we've had more sun than last year, but in the last week or so, the sun has become increasingly rare. Keith, You're welcome. I'm getting pretty concerned about y'all up there in central OK. This is the driest I remember seeing your part of the state in winter in several years. I understand exactly what you did and why. I'd probably do exactly the same thing if I was a dry as you are. When my soil gets so dry in drought periods that rainfall or sprinkler irrigation rolls downhill on the surface of the ground and isn't even absorbed, I know I've waited too late to start watering. I think it is always better, even (maybe especially) in winter to water the dry ground. If it gets too, too dry and planting time is approaching, it can be hard to keep the soil moist enough for seeds to sprout. The big mistake I made in one dry spring (may have been 2003 or 2005) is that I planted and watered sparingly waiting for rain to fall to give the seeds and plants more water. Well, rain never fell and by the time I realized that I should have been watering more heavily to get them off to a good start, the were pretty stunted and pathetic. It was a hard lesson to learn, but it made me a better gardener in succeeding dry years. Don't even mention those photos of those big old black clouds. They are fascinating but in a horrifying and very scarey type of way. I hope and pray we've learned enough about conservation and no-till commercial farming that we never put ourselves in that predicament again. Can you imagine the mass hysteria, especially on the part of the media with its 24-hour-news-cycle nowadays if we had something like that occurring? If you haven't read the book about the Dust Bowl days that I've linked below, I highly recommend it. I reread it once every 2 or 3 years to remind myself of how bad it was and what all those folks went through. We throw the word "diaster" and "catastophe" around pretty loosely nowadays, but those people who endured the Dust Bowl years really lived through a catastrophe and it lasted for years. Some of the old-timers here have told me stories about what it was like here in our county, and it wasn't pretty. One of them lived on land adjacent to ours and she tried to explain what it was like to have the big clouds of dust ruin the laundry you'd just washed, or blow through the cracks in walls, etc. into the house and cover everything with a fine layer of dust. She was a very small child then so I'm not sure how much she remembers directly and how much she remembers from hearing her folks talk about it later on their lives. I just can't imagine what it was like to endure 8 long years of catastrophe. My dad did tell me about the pure agony of watching crops fail over and over, which was a disaster for folks who essentially raised all their own food. So, if couldn't grow a crop, you couldn't eat. One thing that sticks in my memory from photos of those days is just how painfully thin everybody was. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: The Worst Hard Time

I know. For our part of southern OK, the fire season started very early--in Aug. or Sept. instead of in Feb. or Mar. and it has been a very long ordeal. Someone near Lake Murray lost a home to wildfire in Sept. and someone in western Love County lost a metal building they used as a shop and a classic car they'd been restoring for a long time. In the first case, it was arson and, in the second case, I believe the resident was burning illegally during a burn ban so caused their own loss of their own beloved restored classic car. All I can say is that burn bans exist for a reason! Most of our grassfires and wildfires have resulted only in the loss of pasture grass, brush, trees, fences, etc. In some cases, though, some ranchers have lost a significant number of hay bales--and usually when "someone else's fire" moved onto their property. I hate to see that happen. We have had several thousand acres burn here in the last 6 months. (sigh) And, every now and then someone has lost a tractor or other expensive farm equipment, which is unfortunate. I feel really bad for the folks you mentioned, Kathi. I bet they were just sick when they hard about what had happened. The folks who make me crazy are the ones who stand next to a smoking burn barrel or burn pit from which the fire OBVIOUSLY originated and then spread outward and insist that no, they were not burning anything and don't know how it happened. Well, the rest of us know how it happened. Y'all be careful. It seems like almost every time we have a fire weather watch, we have a bad fire day around here. And, having seen video of this weekend's wildfires in Australia, I am just so grateful that we've never had that kind of way-out-of-control wildfire here in OK. Dawn

Hi Dawn, Amber took bronze in floor, gold in bars, beam, and the All Round. The team brought home the 1st place trophy. They won by about 4 points. In gymnastics scoring, that would qualify as total domination. Each girl that went took brought home a Gold, Solver, or Bronze in the All Round. Here are a few pics stitched together from around Colorado Springs. Too much snow on the highway going into to the mountains for us prairie dwellers. I am so ready for spring. When we left Oklahoma Friday it was spitting a little snow. When we left Denver yesterday afternoon it was spitting snow. Get up this morning it's raining and cold. It sounded like it rained off and on here after midnight. Hope you get some. randy

Well, I'm shocked. I thought if anyone was going to get frost out of this, it would be me, sitting up here almost in KS. Sunday night I covered all that I could and hosed down the trees. Thankfully on Monday morning the temperature gauge in my back yard said 40 and everything looked fine, even the things I didn't remember to cover. I have planted the last of the tomatoes I started from seed last January and a few of the plants I had set out 'way too early have just started to 'come out of it'. So if I lose these, I will have to start over with seed I have left. One of the Black Krims, that was reduced down to just its main stem -- no leaves -- had started making new leaves. I was so happy to see that since I had sold all the Black Krims I had left. My peach, plum and apple trees are full of baby fruit. I, too, am getting just plain annoyed at this stupid weather! I've got stuff to plant! I did notice one interesting thing, though, that I might pass on. I set my tomato plants out two different ways. One row I just dug the hole as deep as I could get it and popped my newspaper potted plant in, watered and covered. Another row I tried digging a trench, laying the plant down in the trench, watered, and covered all but about the top 6" of the plant with earth. It was this group that didn't make it past that first frost. Was it because the trench was not as deep as the hole that I dug for the ones that went in straight up? Was it because there was less of the main stem exposed afterwards to set more leaves? Or was it simply that they were planted in different raised beds, and the trench-planted tomatoes were planted the day after the standing tomatoes were? I'd be interested to know if anyone has tried the trench method and what they thought of it. I only tried it this year because my plants had gotten so big. Monday night was a little warmer than Sunday night had been so I didn't cover anything. I guess I lucked out on this one. I hope this is the end of the frosts, I don't get any fruit off my trees two years out of three and I've really got my heart set on doing some major canning this summer. Now that I've retired, we're living without the income I brought in, and so we've tightened our belts somewhat. Someone once said people would be surprised to know how little money they actually needed to live on, if they did it the right way. I'm having a little trouble with that, but it's coming along. Since I don't work, I hardly use my little Rendezvous and am thinking of selling it. That will reduce our insurance bill. We try to "batch" our trips in order to cut down on our gasoline consumption. And there are a lot of little ways we are trying to reduce our consumption of utilities. I am really counting on a good yield from my garden this year to help out with the grocery bills, and I'll be having another plant sale in a couple of weeks to help defray the cost of the seeds and garden stuff I bought this spring. Nobody has figured out a way to tax us for NOT spending money -- Uncle Sam and the state taxes us on money we earn, then our city and state taxes us on money we spend. But ol' Mother Nature can sure throw a monkey wrench in the best of plans, both with gardens and utility consumption -- oh, and damage costs when she throws her 'temper tantrums'.