Last Austell restoration

[glennab]

Margie, I'll have the Boyland restoration completed tomorrow and back to you.  I'm going to choose another image immediately, but I want to know if you'd prefer that I complete the Austell group or grab something from another gallery  I'll be glad to take the little girl remaining from Austell.  Shouldn't take long to get her back to you.  Let me know, or just put her in my gallery.

Cheers, crabby Clara (I was just called a crab, too, so we make a good pair)!

GK

[Hannie]

Hi CC,

The last of the Austell gallery was already spoken for so go ahead and pick from one of the other galleries!

Thanks,

:)

Hannie

[glennab]

Hi Margie

Okay, I've chosen my next one.  Please shoot me.

I also just uploaded the BoylandJ final restoration.  I'm amazed that it turned out as well as it did.  It was a terrible mess (oh we are so surprised!).  Actually, though, either I've been doing this WAY too long or I'm finally getting the hang of it, because I didn't have to struggle with it too much.

Hope your weekend's going well.  We're having ungodly winds.  It's warm, but I wonder if we'll still be in Florida when the blow dies down!

Hugs!

GK aka CCII

[Mhayes]

Hi CCII,

Thanks! Hannie and Tess are manning the ship right now until I can get caught up. Hmmmmmm, when might that be.  >:D

Weather here is better than it has been. Did Florida loose their citrus crop?

Margie

[glennab]

Margie, I haven't heard anything specific about the citrus other than that people who have the fruit in their yards have had most of it ruined.  Usually what happens is that the citrus is immediately harvested and taken to the processing plants to make concentrate.  Once frozen, that's all they're good for. (That's according to Iron Man, whose family owned acres of citrus groves and who worked in them when he was a kid.)

Lon pruned our tree late this year, so we didn't have any lemons to lose.  We sure lost everything else! Yesterday we had hellacious winds all day - up to 40mph, and now everything is totally bare, even bushes and trees we thought might have survived.  Makes me cry!

GK

[Mhayes]

GK, sorry to hear about your loss. I was thinking it wasn't just the crop that was lost, but the whole orchard. The weather here got really cold--below zero--and even though I have a bubblier in our koi pond that is 3 ft deep; I lost one of my koi that I had for about 15 years.

Margie

[glennab]

Margie, thanks for your concern about our loss of flora.  The hard thing is that we can't cut anything back or really assess the damage until March when danger of frost is over.  Amazingly, some trees and shrubs will survive underground, and once pruned might come back but not if we cut too soon.  Our avocado tree did that a few years ago.  We'd chopped it to the ground and Lon was going to dig out the roots, and something told me to leave the remains.  In about a year, we had a new tree come from the root that was about house tall when this frost hit.  We don't know if it made it or not this year.  It had a companion (they have to be paired - a male and a female to yield fruit) that also looks pretty sad.  The whole yard looks as if someone took a flame thrower to it.

Do your koi normally winter okay outside?  That's amazing, but I'm sad that you lost your 15-year-old.  I had no idea they lived that long.

I'm finding our different climates more and more interesting as we discuss them, especially the winters.  Right now we're totally overrun with "snowbirds" and people from around the world expecting our usual gorgeous winter.  I feel for them, because it's not been a usual one this year.  We've all frozen our butts off.  Note that this is the first year in about 30 that I've had a coat, and I bought it before we had any idea about the freezes, etc.  I told Lon I had a feeling...

Better shut up and get ready for work.  If I'm on facebook in the morning, my Souwest Florida pub manager pops up on the chat area and tells me to "get my ass to work!"  So when he does that, I tell everyone to say that I hadn't made it in until around 10 that morning. He freaks.  Love it!

Later!

GK

[Atlantis]

Our winter started on december 16th with lots of snow, more than usual, followed by frost. We still have some frozen snow left, it did not have time to melt before the new frost came in. And there is more to be expected according to the weatherforcasts.

My last restore for Austell is almost ready. I planned to finish it two weeks ago but got interupted by collegues getting ill and needing temporary replacement, a daughter moving out, a husband changing projects (from close to home to 2 hours driving away), a reunion, etc.
aka the usual distractions from normal life   ;)

edited to add : done & uploaded - I reached that moment when doing more would make it worse