The fall colors are so pretty this year, although they are starting to fade with the rain we’ve had off and on this week.  I love the look of leaves with the sun coming through them from the back.  Somehow the pictures never quite look as good as I think they should, but I did like this one.

Sunsets are another subject matter I struggle with, but that doesn’t stop me from trying.  That’s the beauty of the digital camera — shoot, shoot, shoot, followed by delete, delete, delete.  This is from our deck across our small pond.

For this photo, I zoomed in on the “hottest” part of the sunset.  The color was so incredible on this day.  Looking at these pictures, I can almost feel the heat!

Here is DH Jim.  Last year he made a Murphy bed for our guest room/excercise room.  I wanted to put a queen-sized bed in there, but then the exercise equipment would have to go.  Since the guest bed is probably only used a couple of times during the year, this was a great solution.  And didn’t he do a nice job?  (The pattern for the quilt on the bed is “Mama’s Scrap Quilt” by Tara Lynn Darr.  It’s such a happy quilt, I always smile when I see it. 

And this is me!  I love this picture.  Years ago I used to dress up as a witch to answer the door on Halloween.  (Where we live now, NOBODY comes to the door except my friend Jean and her family.)  Every year my witch disguise (yes, this is a disguise — it isn’t natural) got weirder and more disgusting looking.  It was wonderful!  I’ve told my DH that this is my favorite picture of me and I would like it displayed at my funeral.  He said no.  Some people just have no class.

Sue

Okay, we really aren’t that cold in Minnesota (yet), but the nights have definitely turned chilly.  Last night I put an extra quilt on the bed.  Normally I love the coolness of the sheets as I slide into bed, but last night it was just too darned cold!  Ahh, the joys of being a quilter.  Another layer on the bed was no problem. 

This is one of my favorite photos out my kitchen window (where the hummingbird was, a few posts back).  We see all sorts of birds in this crab tree, but not this snowy/icy day late in December 2006.  Which leads me to the real subject of this post.  We don’t stay in Minnesota for the entire winter.  It’s a wonderfully diverse state, with fun, caring people, great art and cultural events.  It just gets too cold.  And now that we don’t have “regular day jobs”, we can do something about it.  We will eventually pack a bag and spend a little time in Texas.

We didn’t ever plan that Texas would be our winter getaway, but our first retired winter we spent some time in Port Aransas on Mustang Island (close to Corpus Christi).  Even though DH and I have been City Folks our entire adult lives, we both started out on farms, nowhere even close to a city.  Small-town farm kids.  And Port Aransas has a homey, small-town feel to it — at least in the winter when there are mostly Northerners in all those condos.  (Spring break is another story.)  I have a sewing machine I leave down there, along with all the other necessary sewing items, but what I really love to do in Texas is bird watch.  Me, a bird watcher?  I was surprised too!  It turns out that the coast of Texas, and particularly the barrier islands, is a major migratory path for all kinds of birds.  Some of my favorite pictures:  (okay, all my pictures are my “favorites”; if they weren’t, they would be deleted by now)

Forster’s Terns.  Aren’t they funny?  But they make such a cute couple. 

I love this guy.  He’s a Cinnamon Teal.  And there’s no question about how he got his name, although he also looks like the rich red-brown of cocoa powder, the expensive kind.

This pair of Northern Shovelers was doing some kind of a dance (probably of the mating variety).  Very graceful looking, don’t you think? 

And of all my favorite pictures, this is one of my favorite-est!  A pair of Black-Bellied Whistling Ducks.  I love their pink legs.  I must have taken 50 pictures of this pair, and they posed and posed for me.  Some day I will do a photo album of just the whistling ducks.

There is a frost advisory out tonight for part of northern Minnesota.  Our forecast low for tonight is 37 degrees, with a high of 59 predicted for tomorrow.  We are definitely in October, and this shift in weather has made me start looking forward to our migration south, just like our feathered friends.  We Midwesterners will be traveling south, mostly in pairs, and we’ll try to not leave a mess along the way like these birds do!

–Sue

(By the way, they don’t call us Snowbirds in Texas; we’re Winter Texans.)

(And I need to make a correction.  According to my bird book, this is a FEMALE Ruby-Throated Hummingbird.  Looked like a boy bird to me!)

The bees have found our hummingbird feeder.  Again.  When we refilled and cleaned it last (yesterday), we made extra sure the outside was clean, and we didn’t put it back up right away.  The bees went away.  This morning the bees are back.  I was wondering if Mr. Hummer was going to stop by, because sometimes when he sees the bees, he keeps going, and sometimes he picks a part of the feeder where there aren’t any bees.  He must have been feeling his oats this morning.

He picked the same spot where the bees were!  Ewww!  Then he popped his head up — and I always feel like he’s looking straight at me — and he zipped around to the “good” side of the feeder.

He took a few more sips, then turned to fly away.  They are such precious little birds.  (You can click on the photos above for a bigger picture.  Especially the one with his back to the camera, you can see the little green feathers better.)  I will get way more done when they fly south and I quit sitting by my kitchen window, camera in hand.  On the other hand, it’s a nice way to start the day.

This little fellow was in our crab tree out our kitchen window today.  I thinik it’s some kind of warbler, and maybe a female or a young one.  I was waiting for the hummingbird to come by again, and he didn’t!  It’s like they know when I’m lying in wait.  I read that the hummingbirds are only flying 20% of the time, and they spend the other 80% of the time perching on a branch.  It’s because flying, and especially hovering, uses so much energy.  Well, I think he was perching extra time today!  But this little bird was worth watching.  I like the effect of the crab tree out of focus behind him.  It makes it look sort of watercolor-ish.

Sue

It’s been a while since I’ve had an “Out My Window” post, but once the trees are all leafed out, you just can’t see as much wildlife.  We just put up a hummingbird feeder yesterday, and today we spotted this little guy having a little late-evening refreshment.  They’re so pretty and so little, it’s a treat to get to see them up close.

Happy Day to all the Moms out there!  I should have a nice, sweet, warm-fuzzy-feeling type of photo for today, but instead I’ll post the woodchuck that we spotted up in a tree behind our house.

Today Tony & Lynn, and Rob will be coming over for dinner.  My third puppy, Dave, lives too far away (Virginia) to make it home for Mother’s Day, so we will miss him.  :>(  Hopefully we will get to see him this summer or fall.  Whether you’re a mom or not, enjoy the blessings of this beautiful day (and try to stay out of trees — that definitely doesn’t look comfortable).  Spring days go by too quickly, so I’m going to try and sneak in a little sewing this afternoon.

Sue

Well, I have my fabric pretty well lined up for Judy Laquidara’s Quilt for an Hour project, which starts May 19th.  You can view her blog via the link to Patchworktimes to the right.  I am going with a light yellow and deeper gold for the background fabrics.  I bought these two fabrics a couple of weeks ago at half price, just because I loved them.  Well, and because of the afore-mentioned half price!  (All the colors are off a little in the photo, washed out by the flash.)  My twelve other fabrics I’m pulling from stash (YEA!!!), and will be an assortment of browns, rusts, greens.  The rosy fabric towards the right has to go!!!

I finished June’s quilt, and I have been working on a wedding gift quilt — an Irish Chain in pale and rich turquoises, with some yummy chocolate brown.  Here is a photo of the blocks laid out together, but not sewn together.  And there will be borders yet to come.

Now for the birds.  Nephew Bill can’t understand what all this quilt stuff is doing in a site about the birds, so don’t tell him this is really a quilt site.  These pesky birds just keep sneaking in!  During this migratory time, I’m spending way too much looking out the windowws, but I am occasionally rewarded.  Below is what I think is a Catbird.  He’s not as small as the warblers, and spends his time looking for food on the ground.  We have an especially good view of the birds that would normally be in the tall grass/weeds behind us.  That is, until all the plant material grows back from the controlled burn of a week or two ago.

Today we watched this robin work and work at picking up a dried-up crab apple left over from last year.  He would pick it up by the stem, flip it around, and pick it up again.  He finally did eat it, but I think he had to get the stem off first.

While we were getting ready for dinner, a pair of Cedar Wax Wings decided to visit the neighbor’s crab tree.  They are competing with the robins for these leftovers from last year.  And, as we all know, sometimes leftovers are better the second or third time around!

Sue

What a beautiful day today was.  Wonderful weather:  perfect temperature, slight breeze, mostly sunny.  And the birds were out enjoying it as well.  We spotted what we thought was a woodpecker, but after checking the big book of birds, it looks more like a Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker.  You can see in the photo where he’s already pecked his way through a lot of bark.  The sap from trees like this will not only feed the sapsucker, but warblers and hummingbirds will come and feed off the sap as well.

The little yellow-rumped warblers have been fun to watch, and today we saw another kind of warbler.  He has a rust-colored cap.  It looks like it’s probably a Palm Warbler.  I couldn’t get a very good photo.  They don’t sit still AT ALL!  By the time I find him in the view finder and get focused, he’s gone!  And did I mention they are tiny???  But my best effort today:

Sue

We’ve had a new neighbor in our backyard the last couple of days.  He’s this little bird that flits, flits, flits — making him hard to identify.  All we could tell at first was it was blue-gray and white with a yellow patch on its head.  Finally, today he sat still long enough for us to identify him.  He’s a Yellow-Rumped Warbler.  Of the yellow-rumped warblers, there are two types:  Audubon and myrtle.  Our guy is a myrtle.  Myrtle is a tiny little bird, 4-5″ long, weighing less than an ounce.  Although they summer in the northern part of Minnesota, I don’t think I have ever seen one before.  I’d like to introduce you to Myrtle:

Usually we spend our time watching the birds out our windows, but the last couple of days have been another story.  Yesterday we woke to the sounds of a helicopter — very close!  Turns out, it was a small one-man helicopter with chemical tanks on each side, buzzing back and forth over our pond (Featherstone Lake) getting rid of some of those pesky mosquitos that are just waiting to hatch and visit us.

Today, we looked out the window, and we saw the association was having a controlled burn done of the wildflowers/weedy area between us and the park land behind us.

The workers did a great job of controlling the fire, but it’s still pretty unsettling to see fire that close to your house.  After today, it will be nice to go back to watching the birds!