A little bit of deadpan......

The expressions come later. Right now they are passing through a serious stage.... It's hard to communicate at 3 weeks old!

My way of handling the cold

Well, as everybody knows, Ike passed right over our humble abode a few months back and knocked down an enormous amount of old stately trees. He seemed to pass by a lot of the smaller ones and the sickly ones and target the tall and strong, Well, one of my thoughts was that there would be firewood galore here in Houston this year and those fellas that sell small stacks on FM 1960 would go broke this year. They often grossly overcharge the city folk for junk wood.

My one request for lumberjack Miguel, that came to do our tree- was to leave the wood small enough for firewood. I figured we should have enough wood for the next ten years!
Well, Miguel finished and left and to my dismay, he must have been an avid reader of John Bunyan. The fire logs would have worked fine for the giant bonfire they used to have every year at Texas A&M. Well, to my dismay, I had a lot of trouble moving any one of them. Worse yet, I began to see furry little creatures scurrying about and I really cringe when the rats are hanging out around our property. I feel like a mass murderer when I put out the poison and would prefer if they just by pass out house.
Well, despite Global warming- Houston still gets cold. It even snowed for 2 days! I had to have a fire!I employed the assistance of a big metal pole and used all my granny strength to move aside the major logs, freeing my pecan wood from last year. We had a little pile we picked up from a guy that was giving away wood last year but the Ike logs got dumped on top. That was my winter survival supply. So, we are at least fine for a few fires.
Does anyone out there like Chile beans? I make an amazing pot every week- usually attracting a number of fans from around town. We get a lot of visitors that just happen to be hungry. It only comes 2nd to my famous chicken soup. Well, you are more than welcome to drop by.
Is there a fee??????Yes, just muscle and a chain saw and a willingness to reduce the Ike logs to usable size and to recover the rest of my buried pecan logs from last year. In a pinch, we have iron wedges and you can bring an axe and sledge hammer and just split the smaller stuff. I'm not kidding, the Chile really is great! I make it to order. IT's about all I make anymore however.....
Happy and warm......January! Y'all come visit now, y'hear?

An Unusual 25th and a Happy New Year too!

We were almost packed up, all set ( and eager) to jump in the Van to go for our yearly Christmas dinner at Denise's. It was to be our last as their house has been sold to make way for a mansion and Ron and Denise are moving to Costa Rica. Well, Teresa came down with the stomach at just that moment. A sudden change of plans and I stayed home to take care of her. We took a few minutes to change our menu and we sipped on ice cold Sprite together. Teri took off for bed and slept on and on.....

Tim had just stopped by earlier, on his way to Oklahoma. He was hoping I would babysit Ed, his undercover poodle. I will have to post a picture of Ed as he looks like a perfect English Sheepdog but with an aire of Royalty. He's handsome- just a poor traveler.

Anyway, as I sat in the middle of the couch and stared at the Christmas tree-I thought of how it was a most unusual Dec. 25th. It was too quiet, the air was absolutely still except for the hum of Teresa's fish tank motor and the occasional rattle of windows as the jets took off from Bush airport.
So, I determined to just enjoy the moment anyhow.
I did, but I do have to admit that I missed you all a LOT.
After all my"enjoying", I was so relieved to hear someone at the door 5 hours later! Lolli was back with her blinking colored necklace, an armful of presents and salted plums and lemons. She always fills up a room with her laughter and chatter. The house came alive again! Everyone arrived home shortly after.

I love you all and pray you will have a really wonderful NEW YEAR. I have a feeling that we will all be needed and appreciated more than ever. One of the things I was thinking of when I was staring at the Christmas tree, was how very proud I am of all or you and even if we weren't together in Houston, I felt so close to you and so much thankfulness that you were all in good places, happy and busy at "making a difference".

Hey I don't have a lot of time to write about this one, but I wanted to say thus; I made the first snow-man EVER at our house.
That is, the first snow-man ever made AT our house.
I took pictures of Maurice (the snow-man) and will post them presently.

Bunny babies!

Today, or rather this morning I woke up and went to feed my rabbits. (For those of you who haven't guessed, or the exceptionally slow readers, this is Teri writing, and yes I did get permission.) And the fur in Honey's (my female rabbit) nest box was moving. At first I was taken aback and shocked at the sudden appearance of movement; but due to the fact I was freezing my rear end off I recovered enough to drag myself inside. By the time I had gone through the door my wits were fully repossesed (or as much as they ever were. Some of the less scrupulous members of our proud wells family will tell you many discouraging things about my wits, much to my dismay of course.) and I ran throughout the house yelling for my mother to come quickly. The rabbit had had a litter!
She was a grandmother again!
Now I figure I'm boring you with my story, but let me say one last thing; I took pictures of these 7 little beasties for you, but the lighting wasn't the best so we'll have to cope.
(I took pictures for Kiona, whom I had promised them to.)
Here goes:

There's them lying comfortably in their nest.
Don't the look warm?














Here's the best individual picture I got.
Yes, they're pink, hairless and rather ugly.
(Naturally, they run a close second in ugliness to none other than my immediate precedent sibling.)











Aw, well unfortunately those are the only two good pictures I have. The rest make them look too much like the aliens they are.
As they get older though, maybe when they're a week or so, I'll take more pictures and post them.

ever seen a Golden Doodle?

This is one of my little boys. He is just about 5 months old- barely. He evidently loves to swim at Galveston. With our weather of late, he might be doing search and rescue in Galveston before too long.
His new family live down that way. It looks like he is rapidly becoming a English sheepdog. When you start making hybirds- no telling what you might come up with!

Christmas Parties

Ah yes,we had a tough time finding a place to have our Christmas partythis year. After some late night intense searching...we finally found a place, thanks to Father Christmas! The Taqueria Arandas promised us their entire bar area for a few hours and we sure had plans to fill it up! But alas- it snowed the day of the party! It was all day and quite heavy in places, that is by Houston standards. Even the weather men were shaking their heads as no one anticipated this one. We were a bit dismayed at first as no one here is very good at driving in snow. We were wondering if our little home would be eating fajitas and stacks of tortillas for breakfast, lunch and dinner for weeks on end!
As it turned out, most people came. The snow had a drawing allure and so many people were out and about, thankfully, in our direction.
We felt the full effect of a white Christmas. We had a great turnout. a few people shy of 100. 40 were guests and the rest our wonderful co-workers in faith. Of course, the wonderful promise of a fajita meal at the famed Taqueria Arandas, was pretty hard not to brave a blizzard to get to.

Andrew and team filled the entertainment bill. Even the waitresses were stopping work to pull out their cameras and snap pictures. It was so well done.
Our resident Italian chefette- Teresa. copped out and deprived us of her usual fare of scrumptious baked goods and settled for making cute little packages of Keebler's cookies,Christmas cookies and candy canes for all the kids. They were quite happy about that anyway. She exhausted herself at Thanksgiving with an amazing array of pies.( Photos coming at a later post.)

All in all- we had a great Activated Party and the common comment was- Hey let's do this again soon.....








Our friends, an wonderful group from all over Houston, filled up the bar area. It is always so unique to see the variety of people that come together- we even had great Security and 2 of our visitors were retired policemen. Walt, a scientist friend, can never pass up a chance to teach and Teresa went away from the evening with something pretty cool on a napkin. It was some kind of formula. I hope it was the one to turn our vehicles into hydrogen running cars.