Odds and Ends

After my initial excitement over having a rain gauge to measure the rainfall from what was left of Hurricane Sandy, I gradually forgot about the rain gauge completely in the past couple of weeks until last night.  We've had a few days of unsettled, rainy weather as a series of disturbances has passed through, and we'll see even more rain tomorrow and especially tomorrow night.  I went out to check the gauge today, and it had collected 1.15" of rain over the last couple of weeks, most of which fell this past week, and particularly in the past few days.  The creek has again risen to near the base of the dock, but this seems to be something the dock can withstand with no problem, so I felt completely safe scrambling down onto the dock today. 

It was again nice and mild today despite abundant cloud cover and occasional showers, topping out at about 49 degrees at both the Ithaca airport and the Cornell weather station.  The relatively nice weather encourages me to get outside and collect stuff for the blog, and I never know exactly what I'll find in the yard or think to write about while I'm out there.  By the way, I hope to get a nice weather station of my own to install in the garden at some point...knowing me, it will ideally having a logging function so I don't have to stay of top of it every day.

I'm also in the process of installing Christmas lights in the front windows.  I'd hoped to get it all done today, but I have to pick up some rubbing alcohol during my grocery store run this weekend to properly clean the windowsill before sticking adhesive to it, so I'll get to the other window tonight or tomorrow.  I'll try to post a picture tomorrow night.

One thing that has struck me since moving here and doing the blog is that I tend to notice some of the simple beauty of nature more often.   This evening, this was evident in the subtle gradient in sky color
from light gray in the foreground to a darker gray nearer the horizon.  This time of year, the sun tends to set towards the left of the picture, so if anything, I would expect the horizon to perhaps be a bit brighter.  But it could be an optical effect of the distance of the clouds, or it could be that the clouds in that direction were a bit thicker, letting less light through.  I think this is the first picture that I've posted to the blog showing most of the backyard.  It looks from out of my living room window in the back of the house toward the creek.  The garden sits to the left of the picture in the foreground...you can see some of the garden fringe's dirt on the lower left.