The Big Freeze

It was quite a cold winter here this year; thankfully I had grown wise from last year's cold snaps, and left most of my plants in pots so that they could be carried in and out of the garage as need dictated... and in and out they went! The coldest snap was in February, and lasted for a few days - my newly-installed bird bath froze solid every night for three nights running. Of course, a week later the temperatures were in the mid-20s (Celsius) - that's Houston for you!

Bits of Christmas

Yes, I cheated with the date... my laptop has been having power issues - I think now resolved - making it hard to get to the photos stored on it, hence the long gap between posts... things should be better now. Maybe...

Another tree in winter

It continued cold here this past week - we even had snow flurries last Monday night - but I think we're on the other side of winter now. I'm both glad, and sorry - it's lovely to see the flowers blooming, and to plan for spring gardens, but the summers are so hot and seem to last for ever!

Christmas Decorations

It's a little late to be posting about Christmas, but - well - Mum's been asking, and she's my most dedicated reader, so I need to keep her happy!

If you look carefully, you can just see the God Jul
made by beautiful Johanna, hanging in the entranceway...

This branch obligingly fell down in the garden some months ago;
I liked its windswept look so kept it in the garage until I was ready to use it...

All the wooden ornaments were bought in Prague, many years ago!

The candleholder came from this year's Norwegian Christmas market;
so did the little wreath of mistletoe wound through it...
the Advent candles were made by my mother!

Our table set for Christmas dinner, which this year we shared with Anna and Dimitry
(as we'd had turkey so recently, at Thanksgiving, we broke with tradition and had a
leg of lamb... but as I was VERY busy cooking there are no photos of the meal!)

The lounge room ready for Christmas Eve guests

The house that Kat built

A couple of weeks ago, I was most excited to receive an invitation to my friend Kristina's annual Graham Cracker House building day. Having never built a graham cracker house before, I wasn't QUITE sure what to expect, but nevertheless looked forward to it... so Sunday saw us gather around the most bountiful table imaginable:


There were the sorts of things you might expect, to build a confectionery house - the graham crackers, obviously, and a bag of icing mixture for everyone to glue everything together; jelly beans and M&Ms and other sweets for decorating; marshmallows and candy corn and pretzels... but Kristina, being the creative type, had also supplied things like plastic army men, bugs and dinosaurs; feathers, scraps of fabric (see what else you can spot!).


What was fascinating was how different everyone's structures ended up:






As for me - I started conservatively enough:

- but quickly put Hansel and Gretel's witch to shame...




So much fun! (And no, I haven't been able to bring myself to eat the house yet; it's still wrapped in plastic on the kitchen table).

The road less travelled

Driving home on Friday (the snowy day), we decided to take a different, more picture-skew, road to normal, and had the promised reward for 'taking the road less travelled'... in true Houston style there was nowhere to park, or even walk, for quite a length of it, so we had to walk briskly along the road itself, and stand on a tiny inch or two of shoulder (without sliding down into the ditch) when cars passed, but it was worth it!





Less fun after-effects of the snow - quite a few of our more tender plants outside in the garden are now blackened and dead - most of the ferns, the bougainvillea, the hibiscus, the basil, other more tropical plants... we were able to zip up the little greenhouse, and the seedlings in there all survived, and we covered the lemon and it seems to have done ok, but a lot of the rest, even some quite large trees, have lost all the prettiness they had just a few days ago, which is a shame. I hope some of them will recover in the spring.

We've also had quite a bit of water get into the house, seemingly through the base of the wall, into the kitchen - the water is lying between the two layers of floor (new flooring was lazily placed over old flooring, by the people who had the house before us) so it's quite difficult to dry it out! The same thing happened, on a smaller scale, after Ike, and it got back to normal after a few weeks, so we hope to sort things out eventually.

Oh, and for those who asked about the video clip in the previous post - Rebecca made it, and sent it to us; I thought it was too funny not to share ;)