squirrels who scold and sort of cold!

Although we weren't in the path of the...polar vortex?  Ice cyclone?...that hammered the northeast and midwest, temperatures here still dropped into the teens at night.  Unbelievably, our pond was actually skimmed over with ice!  A rare sight indeed.

The unfrozen side was crowded with geese every morning.  I counted over 50 at a time!

Squirrels were busy padding out their nests and digging up nuts.

The turkeys, of course, seemed unfazed by the cold.

However, these overnight lows were much too cold for cats.  Todd found a deep impression in a leaf pile by our house in the front.  Sure enough, I checked that night and it was occupied:

So Clotilde has officially been overnighting it in our garage.  It's unheated, but still much warmer than the outside.  We've started a pleasant routine.  I bring her in around 9 p.m. and take her back outside once the temperature is above freezing.  She stretches her legs, watches the birds at our feeders...

...and relaxes in the sun.  Late afternoon, I see this through the glass:

I feed her again and she sleeps on our deck until bedtime.  Bosewichte notices, but is generally laid-back and has no real reaction.

Tabitha, never having been an outdoor cat, is mostly blissfully unaware.

Now that the weather is cooler, we've got lots of birds around.  We've got our "old faithfuls," but I love to see two of my favorites:  woodpeckers...

...and blue jays.

We get outside as much as we can...even if it's just for the normal maintenance jobs!

Inside, when not working, I've been slow to move forward on my quilting.  A neck injury has made it difficult to push and pull the heavy quilt through the narrow throat of my machine.  Instead, I finished off a huge project that I've needed to do for a long time.  I had a massive pile of fabric scraps.  Anything less than 6" was cut into smaller scraps and stored in the size-appropriate box.  Anything above 6" and less than 3/4 of a yard or so was folded and stacked into a series of long, narrow boxes.  In rainbow order, of course!

It was so satisfying to complete this task.  Now I'm really ready for the next scrap quilt project!

Have a great week!