One of my favourite winter pasttimes is settling down on the couch on a lazy Saturday afternoon, attempting to catch a few rays of sun from our south facing window and spending the afternoon browsing through seed catalogues, nursery stock catalogues etc, all the while dreaming of when the snow will leave and I can actually do something with all the purchases I've made.

The Internet is taking over?

One thing I've noticed in recent years is how the have diminished, in fact I get less than 1/2 what I used to get in my mailbox. I wonder if that has something to do with  the way the Internet has become a favorite shopping place?

I know it has for me. Last fall, when my old garden tiller finally broke, I knew I'd need a new one, and rather than look through catlogues such as the old Sear's catalogue, almost an institution in our house a few years ago, I found myself with the laptop on that couch one Saturday, and doing all my research online. In fact, it was not only research I was doing, I ended up purchasing one online as well. I even chronicled my purchasing criteria here at:

Why I Chose the Mantis XP 16″ Tiller/Cultivator

It was actually a fun way to do my shopping, and especially nice was having such a heavy item delivered right to my door.

Back along time ago, I figured I could finally afford a garage. After having a job where I was on the road every day, I'd spent many winters days scraping ice off my windshield, so this was going to be a real treat.

When I rented my machine this last year, the dealer included a T-Racer Wide Area Surface Cleaner attachment and said I'd never clean a driveway without one again. He was right! This attachment makes driveway cleaning, even one as big as mine, almost pleasurable. Just a gentle side to side sweeping motion and it does a beautiful job.

Highly recommended.

Living where we do "North of the 49th" it get's cold up here for about 6 months of a year.

Those of us that love to feed birds find this a bit difficult, as, as it's easy enough to keep bird seed out for them, when it comes to keeping water for them to drink it's more of a chore, as the darn stuff will freeze within a few minutes of setting it out.

And I hate to see them having to eat snow to get their water intake, as we all know it takes a lot of energy to convert snow to water, and energy is pretty precious for a sparrow when it's -30 degrees celcius!

I did some online searching recently and dug up this neat looking All Season Heated Birdbath 

We had a great vist with a client last year. Toby & Kyla had taken their motorhome away to a camp ground in Montana, and had invited us to drop by. 

Which we did. However, we sure should have phoned ahead, as we picked the same weekend as when their gson, daughter in law and grand children arrived so it was a bit busy.

However we went up to their campsite for breakfast one morning, and actually had quite a good time with their grandchildren.

Toby had purchased a couple a Bounty Hunter BHJS Junior Metal Detector to entertain the kids, and had taken the time to "seed" the treasure ground with all kinds of treasures, mostly coins, some little metal Tonka toys, even some little girls bracelets - metal of course. 

The kids had so much fun doing this "treasure hunting"! And it was so simple to set up. In fact I enjoyed it so much that think I'll be buying a couple of detectors myself, albeit they will be the full size models.

Last winter my wife and I had a great trip fown to Yuma, AZ, and we did a fair few day trips, just exploring and enjoying the nice warm weather.

On most of these days the wiife would convince me to stop at some roadside fleamarket, or souveneer stall. Come on now, just how many souveneers does one need, but she made it a daily ooccurance.

One day she did surpass herself though, as we stopped at a place that made all types of wind sculptures. She fell in love with one model - a Kinetic Copper Wind Sculpture and I have to admit she did OK that day.

The trouble was it was too big for our rental car, so we had to buy it and get them to hold it for us for a year until we can do a return trip with my 1/2 ton.

That's coming up here this fall, do you think it'll still be there? 

Update:

Well it's been a while, but we've done the trip, and returned the wind sculpture to our yard. It's great, and I've even made a post about on what has to be one of the better gardening websites, Big Granite

I recently had occasion to visit an old friend who'd moved to a neighbouring state a few years ago, 

Kelsey is a farmer and had bought a really nice place, and one that had an older, but a very nice home, set amongst a wonderfully treed yard. Gracing the driveway was a beautiful hand crafted wooded sign, with the name of their farm, as well as their family name.

We went for a yard inspection, and after viewing the nice big garden, his grandkid's playhouse, and played around setting out his walking sprinker, we ended up walking past the biggest, ygliest concrete septic tank lid that you could imagine.

Kelsey was grumbling about how ugly it was, and how he'd like to disguise it somehow.

It just so happened I'd been cruising oround on the internet recently and had come across an webpage that was an article of using artificial rock as a way to cover these ugly contraptions up. I was pretty interested in the article as I'd seen a display at a local home and garden show, where a gentleman was selling his custom built artificial rock septic covers, so I knew a little of what they were like.

We went inside to his office, jumped on a laptop, and did a Google search for "septic lid covers" and lo and behold the same website that I'd seen came up! It didn't take long to have Kelsey phoning and ordering his own artificial rock septic lid cover.

Here's one here, what do you think of them?

It's been over 30 years, and I'm still afflicted with the most hideous finger nails imaginable, as I'll often be biting them right down to the quick. To think it all stemmed from one mean old cow with some (now thankfully)  outlawed teaching methods.

Living in a small rural town as we do, we are blessed with having lots of native trees around, indeed most backyards in our neighbourhood have some native Poplar in them, along with the non native trees we all love to plant, such as Weeping Birches, Weeping Willows, Spruce etc.

Though it's great having such a lot of trees around, especially in summer, when the shade is welcome, there is a downside, that being how they harbor and give refuge to those pesky little animals; squirrels.

Squirrels are cute and all that, but they can be very destructive, especially if they're finding it very comfortable to live in your yard. Trees contribute to that comfort, but perhaps the one thing that keeps them hanging around, more than any other one thing, is a food source. In our case, that food source is coming from our bird seed that we lovingly offer to our resident wild birds every day. It seems we feed more to squirrels than we do to the birds some days, as they become really good at pilfering seed from no matter what type of feeder we put out. It's time to squirrel proof the feeders!

As well he says they're a hoot to watch as they spin and eject the little beggars. Maybe we'll get to feed the birds ALL the feed if these work as they're touted to, as I have just ordered one from Amazon.