Rainy January Days

I've lived in this house for almost 11 years now, and have hated this light fixture fervently for all that time ...

Until we were cleaning the house prior to my mother-in-law's Christmas week visit, and Alex, kind soul that she is, offered to do all the light fixture cleaning so that I didn't have to get the quakes from climbing a ladder. As she was teetering trying to get the accumulated dust of 11 years off the damn thing, I mentioned to her how much I hated it.

A bit later in the evening she called me into the front room, and turned the light on. She'd replaced the white fakey candle-shaped lights with two orange and one red Christmas light.

Now I love it and it's on all the time in these dim and rainy days. Casts a warm glow around the room without being obtrusive.

There wasn't much wind today, so I felt comfortable ducking out the back door to catch droplets of water on the papyrus.

There was rain early this afternoon, then a break with sunshine ... but then the rain returned, making the afternoon very dark and chilly.

The last picture in this entry is of our bottlebrush bush. My neighbor's perennial morning glory keeps crawling through and over the fence and trying to strangle everything in my yard; I'd made up my mind to cut the bottlebrush bush down and use Brush Strength Round-Up and kill that damned invasive bastard plant. But then I saw all the sparrows and delightful warblers using the bottlebrush bush for shelter ... how can I destroy that kind of habitat?





I'm just going to have to make it a point to check on the invasive morning glory's encroachment every day. I used to check out my garden every day, I could do it again.

And keep it the hell off my trees.

I hate that plant worse than I ever did that light fixture.