A Month of Thankfulness: Day Seven

I am thankful for Indian Summer. Indian Summer in North America is generally defined as a period of warm (at least 70 degrees F.) weather in the period of mid-October to end of November following a killing frost and preceding the first snow fall. I thought we might not make it to 70 degrees but we're already there today and tomorrow's forecast is looking quite similar. I'm especially grateful that this Indian Summer waited until most of the leaves have fallen and been raked up. That way we could (and did!) enjoy our long Charlie-walk without any feelings of guilt about unraked leaves. And it came on a weekend too! If we can squeeze it in, we might even take the canoe out this afternoon! Oh, thank you, God!

I wonder what everyone else is thankful for today. Rebecca is hosting our month of thankfulness and its been such fun and increases my own thankfulness to see what everyone else is thanking God for each day. Go on over and check it out!

Sprayed and so thankful!

A wonderful thing happened this morning! Besides being our 32nd wedding anniversary that is...and thank you all for the kind words and warm wishes on that.

But the thing I'm referring to now as wonderful is much more mundane. Our neighborhood was sprayed for mosquitoes at 4:30 this morning! It has been a terrible week for the little blood suckers. Well, actually, its been a good week for them. A terrible week for us as far as being in the same vicinity as them. After a fairly cool and pleasant spring, it got warm and humid quite quickly and...you all know about the rain in the Midwest, right? Perfect mosquito weather! I no longer cared how bad those weeds got, I was on strike from feeding mosquitoes! I was only going out the minimal amount with Charlie and that with a very bad attitude. But today is a lovely, low humidity, sunshiny, slightly breezy day with, most importantly, very few mosquitoes! Thank you, God!

Bad Weather

Remember I said the weather was ugly this morning and I wasn't going for a walk? Well, I did go out in the garage and open the overhead door to see what I could snap from the relative safety in there and this is what I got. When I looked at it on the little screen of my camera this morning, I thought it was just not much of anything but tonight, when I was downloading other pictures onto the computer, I thought it looked rather intriguing! So here it is, the weather in Crystal Lake, IL at 8 o'clock this morning! Those white spots are actually drops of rain!

Winter Beauty--Icicles in the Morning Light

Basking in the Warmth

We have an atomic clock in our bedroom that also has an indoor/outdoor thermometer. This morning when we got up at 5 AM, the outside temperature reading was 18 degrees F! Now that may seem kind of chilly to some of you but we were delighted with it! There was some actual warming and rain last Sunday but since then...oh, this week has been cold! Only single digit mornings and some of them negative. Not very windy but somewhat breezy and let me tell you, in those temperatures even a little breeze does more than freeze your nose hairs. (Those in the northern climes know exactly what I mean by that.) Poor Charlie has had a tough time with those trips outside this week but this morning, he was downright dawdling out there! Just basking in the warmth. I'll never get him to come in this afternoon when it gets to 24 degrees and sunny! But then again, maybe I'll be doing some dawdling of my own.