Thank you, and a happy Thanksgiving to you and all the others.

happy T-day!

And happy Thanksgiving to ya'll as well. Hmmm. I wonder what people will prepare for Thanksgiving that came out of their garden or off their own farm... When my dad comes we will cook a brisket with homemade rub with some homegrown ingredients in it. And maybe a chard salad of some sort.

Thank you, Sorie, and a Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family too. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone else as well!

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Happy Thanksgiving, sorie6!! Scott, we're having sweet potatoes that we grew! And to all - I'm thankful for this group. Happy Turkey Day and gobble 'til you wobble!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone as well, hope it is a good one!

Thank you and a Happy Thanksgiving to all of you.

Good Morning, Y'all, We ended up staying up instead of driving 3 hours to visit family in Texas. It was not necessarily a voluntary choice---some of the Texas family members came down with a wicked stomach virus yesterday, so the family gathering was cancelled early this morning, and it should have been----no one wants to give or receive a stomach virus as part of the Thanksgiving festivities.

After we ran to Wal-Mart and bought steaks to cook on the grill instead of trying to throw together a traditional turkey dinner at the last minute, we then were invited to another family member's home in Texas, but opted to stay home and grill those steaks instead. Of course we'll miss being with family, but we have three different family Christmas gatherings planned, so we will be seeing all of them soon.

I feel kind of relieved we won't be traveling in heavy rainfall. We wouldn't have had it driving south this morning, but surely would have had it when driving back north this evening.

If you aren't watching the weather, check it out. The NWS issued four Flood (River) Warnings this morning. The Red River near us is included in one of them. It currently is at 7.8' and is expected to crest on Saturday around 28'. It is much the same for the Blue River in SE OK and the Washita River near Dickson, OK, which I think is expected to rise a bit more than the Red River. It is crazy to contemplate rivers rising 20-22' in around 48 hours. I expect some of us that have low-lying roads around us will see some flash flooding of roadways before the rivers reach flood stage. I believe the fourth river warning was for the LIttle River near Tecumseh.

For all of you in central OK, I am feeling uneasy about how much that freezing rain is creeping towards y'all. Bedlam may be an icy experience this year. Poor NW and much of western OK seem destined to have freezing rain or a wintery mix. I hope it isn't enough to knock down the power lines and poles.

I still have autumn sage in bloom in the garden, and the Laura Bush petunia plants still are green although the recent freeze knocked the flowers off of them. Brugmansias and lantanas are in bloom in the greenhouse. Our red oaks are about at their peak red color today after taking forever to color up, so it does finally look like autumn outside, but many of the oaks in our creek hollow (protected from the wind so always slow to lose their leaves every year) are fully leafed out still and we just hope they finally lose their leaves before ice in any form arrives here.

Happy, Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Dawn

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Dawn, I came down with some kind of virus too. I spent most of yesterday and today in bed. I tried to go up to the dinner this morning to at least supervise, but they kicked me out (as they should have!) and sent me home. So I crawled right back in bed.

Sorry you're sick, Lisa! Happy Thanksgiving to you all. Be safe.

Neighbor boys have that bug. Get to feeling better, Lisa!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Sure hope all are as "stuffed" as DH and I....

Dawn, we are expected to have 1/2" of ice accumulate tonight. It has rained lightly/misted all day today. Really am glad I don't do Black Friday (smile).

Lisa, I'm sorry to hear you have caught the stomach bug. I hope a couple of days in bed taking it easy helps you recover quickly. Drink lots of fluids!

It was kind of a relief to not spend about 6 hours on the road in the pouring rain, although of course we missed seeing everyone. On the other hand, we missed seeing people who had a stomach virus, and that's what I'd call a "good" miss.

gmatx, I think we are overstuffed! That's our own fault, though, for having to have one more little bit of this and that long after we should have stopped eating.

I hope y'all luck out and the ice misses you, Mary. I don't do Black Friday either. My sister and I did it for a lot of years when our kids were small and we were chasing certain toy bargains, but back then, the stores all were closed on Thanksgiving, and didn't open until 7 or 8 a.m. on Friday. My dad thought we were nuts for going shopping at 7 or 8 a.m. He wouldn't believe how early some stores open now, and of course, a lot of them don't wait until Friday. Now it is all out of control, with people lining up outside some stores on Thanksgiving Day or earlier. Really? When did shopping become so important? It makes me crazy. We completely avoid all stores on the Friday-Saturday-Sunday after Thanksgiving. There is nothing that we want badly enough to fight the traffic and the crowds of people. Sometimes I do some online shopping, which has become my favorite way to shop.

The weather here has been so awful today. It has rained and rained and rained. Mostly it has been just a steady rain with an occasional and brief heavier shower imbedded in the larger area of moderate rain. At our house, I think rain began to fall in earnest around 1:30 or 2:00 p.m. and we are at a little over 2.3" so far. Because about a foot of rain has fallen in the last two months, the ground is already heavily saturated, so water began ponding and puddling on the ground very soon after it started raining. The ground cannot hold any more water, and that is worrisome with a lot of rain expected over the next few days. Our yard and our gravel driveway are lakes already.

Several roads in our area already are flooded. Even our little country road, which sits higher than nearby roads that are closer to the river, already has some areas with minor flooding and quite a lot more rain is expected.

This morning the Red River was a little under 8' deep. It now is expected to crest near 34' in the next couple of days. That is crazy. I feel sorry for folks downstream from Lake Texoma because water will be flowing into the lake from the Red, the Washita, etc., and then all that water will flow out of Texoma and downstream, so the River Flood Warnings will last for a few days. My garden is under water, of co

urse, as each raised bed serves as a dam to hold water in the pathways, so post-freeze garden clean-up will have to wait a while. I am grateful all we're getting is rain, and not freezing rain, sleet, snow or all of them mixed together.

Here's the latest QPF. If you are in south-central or, particularly, southeastern OK, you can read it and weep.

7-Day QPF

Remember all the rain that we didn't get in July and August? It is here now and more is coming. You can blame Hurricane Sandra (off the southern coast of Mexico) for some of this rain and she is sending lots of moisture our way. Sandra attained Cat 4 status earlier today but now is expected to rapidly weaken before making landfall. We still would have had major rainfall even without the moisture from Sandra. At the time I am linking the 7-Day QPF, the max amount it is showing for OK is 10.5" over the next 7 days. That amount may be different when you click on the link as it updates regularly.

It is just as well that the busy holiday season is underway now because it looks like it will be too wet to work outdoors for a while. So, garden work ceases for a while, but garden dreaming and planning (and ordering seeds and such) can continue.

I hope those of you with ice in your forecast get less than expected and that the trees remain upright and the power stays on.

Dawn

Dawn good choice to stay home. My 4 hour drive turned into 6 because of heavy rain. My little car likes to walk a little so slow was best finally arriving in denton at midnight. It was supposed to freeze at home so I opted to get out.

Kim, That was a long drive. I hope the ice in west Texas doesn't make it terribly hard for you to make it back home again.

I enjoyed a quiet, lazy day around the house, and being all nice and dry inside while the rain came down outside.It was a very relaxing Thanksgiving, though I missed seeing my family members. We'll be together a lot in December though, health and weather permitting.

I might work on my Tomato Grow List today, although it may be challenging since the dogs and cats are bored and underfoot since they're stuck indoors and their solution is to come and try to sit in my lap, which makes it hard for me to use my laptop computer. There's only so much that a woman can hold on her lap at one time, and my limit appears to be 1 laptop computer and 1 purring cat who keeps trying to sit on top of the computer.

I think things are looking up for us. They had raised the Red River flood projections a lot yesterday afternoon and evening, and now they have scaled them way, way back. At one point they thought the Red River would crest at the Gainesville Bridge at 34' or so, and now they are way down to 27' or 28'. That's nothing compared to what we had in May and June, so we're happy about that.

Only 3" of rain here so far, but there's up to 5" more expected for our area. I'd be perfectly happy if no more rain fell, but it is so widespread that I don't think it all will miss us. None of it appears to be soaking in though, so there's tons of standing water everywhere, including some large puddling on some rural roadways. It doesn't look as bad this morning as it did yesterday when the rain was falling, so at least some of it has run off into the creeks and maybe that will keep the roads more clear of water during the next bands of heavy rain.

It is a good day to stay home and stay indoors. After I fed the chickens, I let them out because they are used to free-ranging and get antsy if they cannot roam. I'm hoping they'll get their free-ranging out of their system and go back into their coops before the next band of rain arrives. Probably they will sit on the porch railing and stay mostly dry like they did yesterday. Having a porch rail filled with chickens certainly adds to the rural flavor around here.

I am watching The Weather Channel as I type this and just saw the news of a high water rescue in Tarrant County around 3 a.m. They managed to find and save a deputy who was swept away while trying to rescue someone, but haven't yet found the person she was trying to save. I didn't realize how high the water had gotten down there just one county south of where you are---it looked worse there than it looks here. I think they said that was happening around 3 a.m. so perhaps they got a lot of rain overnight. Our rain tapered off overnight and we only got 0.75" so our rainfall total didn't climb significantly. They also showed a road under water in Grayson County, and it was under several feet of water. See there? More confirmation it is a great day to be indoors. Had I bothered going out shopping on Black Friday, which I haven't done in several years now, I likely would have gone to Sherman----the flooding was in a rural area, but who knows what it looks like there around the shopping centers.

I can either go online and finish my Christmas shopping or work on my grow list for 2016 or both. Or, I have a stack of seed catalogs to look through.

I am increasingly concerned about how much the ice storm conditions seem to be creeping ever further into central OK. It doesn't take a lot of ice to make a big mess of things. I cannot believe we are having to even have a conversation about snow, sleet, freezing rain and a wintery mix of all the above in November. It makes you wonder what's coming in December.

Since we don't know when the El Nino water faucet will turn off in spring, I'll probably select 3 to 6 tomato varieties bred specifically for disease tolerance this year, which means hybrids. I am not overly fond of hybrids, preferring the flavor and texture of heirlooms, but in order to ensure the plants produce enough tomatoes to fulfill my canning needs, I think the 2016 tomato grow list has to be a mix of both. Since I am cutting back on how many plants I plant/grow, I need for at least some of them to be as bulletproof as possible. A rainy spring will mean a lot of disease, and I dread that.

Dawn

A belated Happy Thanksgiving to all. We ate our turkey a day early on Wednesday evening with my parents and a cousin. Our daughter was down with that stomach bug that so many have had around here--and on here--so they didn't come.

I fixed green beans, sweet potatoes, winter radishes and made cornbread dressing with the homegrown corn that George gave us the seed of a couple years ago, all from our garden. Sunday the extended family will have another dinner and I will take freshly pulled turnips, steamed with butter and salt. I don't like these rainy days, but since I am a "put-it-off-til-a-rainy-day" housekeeper if there is ANYTHING to be done outside where I would rather be, I WILL do housework and sort paperwork today as I did yesterday.

I haven't started my 2016 grow list yet, but I will definitely add in some hybrids too for freezing.

Dorothy

Happy Thanksgiving!

Andria

Dorothy, I am a put-it-off-til-a-rainy-day housekeeper too. If there is anything I can do outdoors in nice weather, I'd rather be outside doing it than cleaning house inside....any and every day of the week.

We still are getting slow, steady rain but I am beginning to think the flooding will miss us. The NWS has cancelled the Red River Flood Warning issued previously. It seems like parts of TX that are flooding and have had high water rescues may have gotten a lot of the rain that had been expected to fall here.

We still are under 4" of rain for this event so far, so we aren't even close to the projected 6-8" totals. Of course, it is supposed to rain the rest of today, overnight, and tomorrow as well so I guess we may end up with a lot more rain than we need anyhow. Our year-to-date rainfall is approaching 70" which is something I thought we'd never, ever see here. It might make it to 70" for 2015 before this rainfall event ends on Sunday.

Things are looking bad for central OK as several counties there have had their Winter Weather Advisory replaced, beginning at 6 pm, with an Ice Storm Warning.

Andria, Hope your Turkey-Day was wonderful!

Dawn

Glad your daughter got to come home and you lost internet, that's a blessing for us, sometimes. That happened to us, earlier, and our family had a blast. Of course, we have a wood stove and a lantern.

I hate to hear about you losing your tomatoes to rats. Rats are becoming a problem for me with my tomatoes that are not staked. We acquired pet rats for my daughter and we are in love with these little gentlemen. I cannot bring myself to think of killing rats any more. If I were hungry enough, tho.... One of my dog loves killing things so, maybe ..

I wish I would lose internet when my son and his wife visits. They are both even more addicted than I am and spent more times on their phones than visiting while they were at my house. One day in desperation, I said, "We're taking a trip today." No good, they brought their phones. I can't complain too much though because he bought and set up a hot spot at my house so I could get off dial up.

George, Rodents are such a big issue this last couple of years! We've been trapping them in the garage like crazy these last few months (I think we are winning the war), and the cats are doing their best to get them in the garden and yard. I even had field mice get into the greenhouse this past spring (in all the rain, I guess it wasn't a huge surprise they were wanting to get inside) and the potting shed too. We haven't seen many rats (thankfully) but we have voles and field mice everywhere, and every now and then a gopher or mole shows up, and the cats get hyper-excited and pursue it relentlessly. Sadly, the cats don't chase down the squirrels, but then....the dogs do.

Dorothy, The phones and internet are both a curse and a blessing, aren't they? I do think they are addictive, and I don't know what the solution is either.

Dawn