February - Spring is on the Way - Phil says!

Hi everyone!

Yes, as promised I'm trying to blog once a month and I'm on track finally.
I've tried to think of things of interest to blog about, and it's not always easy, but I think for February I've done pretty good.

We started out the month with Groundhog Day and Phil didn't see his shadow, so spring is on the way.  The only down side to that is when you live in NW PA spring never comes before April or May!  We've had inches of snow in April although it usually doesn't last long.

I began by decorating for Valentine's Day.  If you know me at all, you know that I embrace each and every holiday regardless of what it is.  Here are some of my decorations this year.

Who remembers Stick-ees?  I've had these vinyl clings for so many years now.
This, obviously, is my Valentine design of cupid shooting his arrow into an "I Love U" heart!  You can see the snow outside our back deck.

Wreath that I made several years ago and I still think it looks great!

I also had a finish for the month of February.  Here is my new quilted valentine's day runner.  I found this pattern and loved it except that once I began I saw that each heart consisted of several 2" squares and each one had to be joined together.  Yes, it took me a while to get it done, but I love the result!

Valentines Day Quilted Runner 2020







Next I was following this blog and they suggest keeping up a tree and decorate it year-round.  I've done this before having never put it in the living room though.  This year I decided to keep up one of my primitive trees and put it beside the fireplace.  I put this in an old apple basket that was a deep red and added some check fabric and just decorated it with Valentine's Day items.


There are some cardinals, red snowflakes, red hearts that I crocheted, some red ribbon and red Christmas balls that came on a plant that Bryan and Jess bought me a few years ago.  Also, there are two fabric heart squares that were made for me by my sister-in-law, Donna, several years ago.  I threw a couple pine cones on there from Bernie's Dad since I'm so into pine cones and pine trees!  So next month, it will be transformed into a St. Patty's Day tree.

Since there isn't much of anything to do here in the winter except enjoy the peace and quiet since we live in an otherwise resort area and the spring and summers are laden with tourists, campers, vacationers, etc., who make more noise than you can stand at times. 

We heard on TV of the 2020 Auto Show coming to the Bayfront Convention Center in Erie.  We drove up there on opening day and saw quite a few cars on display, actually they were mostly crossovers, or SUV's.  Some pickup trucks and the interesting thing I thought is that they put the American cars in one section of the building and the foreign in the back section.  We looked at every American vehicle there, sitting in most of them, and only walked through the foreign cars to get to the section that had the American classics and muscle cars.  There was a nice display of those.  The one car that caught my eye was this one........

This was a leftover 2019 Dodge Charger.  It was a good thing that this car was Red and not Green or I would have owned it!!  Inside was spacious and there was ample room in the backseat.  It was front-wheel drive and the truck had plenty of room in there for luggage or whatever.  This would have definitely been a cross-country car for me!  I love my Dodges, Jeeps, and AMC's for sure!

Next was this 1912 Cadillac.  It was so nice.  Everything was original on this from the wooden wheels to the convertible top and squeeky horn. 

The best part of the entire car show was the price!  $5.00 each to get in!  Free parking too and we were right on Lake Erie which of course was freezing cold as the breeze penetrated our eyes and I looked like I had been crying when I came through those doors.   It was a fun afternoon!



Next we had some rain that turned into ice last week.  This was not fun at all.  Everything was a sheet of ice from our sidewalks to our driveway to our trees!
Yes, you heard me right.  Our pine trees were covered in ice.  They were actually crunchy.  I'm assuming they will be fine, but their boughs were hanging down so low and the bottom ones were touching the frozen icy ground.  Here are some photos of our Norwegian Pine tree and our long-needled White Pine.

White Long-Needled Pine

So after all this icing came, we got snow on top of that to the tune of 8".

Here is what that looked like.  It was beautiful, but I am tired of winter and long for the sunshine of a warmer day.   This is how it looked yesterday.  Last night it snowed and then it rained so a lot of the snow is gone now and it is downright foggy outside right now.

We did have one warm day last Monday!  It was in the 50's and so I decided to take a walk down our blacktop road as the side dirt road was muddy.  As I walked down by the pig farm, yes, I did say pig farm, hey!!  we live in rural America!  Ha Ha!  I looked down and saw about 30 lottery tickets thrown on the ground.  Apparently someone didn't win and decided to just toss them out their vehicle window!  My thinking is whoever did this should just join the pigs down on the farm.  I hate litterers!   So, I decided to go down in the ditch and gather them up and dispose of them, but I had an ulterior motive.  I saw that a few of them were Valentine tics and I knew that even though they were scratched as losers, I could still enter them into the second chance drawing.  As I walked home with my garbage tics, I realized that two had been thrown away and not scratched.  Two $5 tickets no less.  I scratched one on the walk back home and it was a dud, but when I got home I scratched the second one and won $5.00.  Granted it wasn't a great score, but it was $5 more than when I went for the walk and I made my 10,000 steps for the day.  I entered the remaining Valentine's Day loser tickets and got 20 or so entries into the second chance drawing coming up after Valentine's Day and I double-checked all the other tickets only to throw those away as non-winners.  I helped clean up the environment and it only cost me to mud up my jeans as I slipped coming up the hill from picking up the tics and ended up having to wash them.  They say that one man's trash is another man's treasure.  So I guess I had found my treasure for the day.

So, that has been my February thus far and we are only into it by 10 days! 

Thanks everyone for reading my blog and I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have had fun writing it.

I'd like to send out prayers for all my readers and their families and friends. We all need prayers to get through our days.

Til Next Time (TNT) Extra day this month, Leap Day!! 

Hugs,
Debbie