What's outside of your picture window today?

@pstut, and all...How adorable! I bet she does enjoy watching them. squirrels I do admit are fun to watch, but those little buggers have destroyed all my hanging baskets with blooms, spread sunflower and other seeds all over the patio and into all the plants, eat me out of seeds for the birds, and generally create havoc. But, they are fun to watch if I can stop being mad at them destroying my peace.

So sorry your mom has lung cancer. It's so good for you to have some time together and laughing, giggling at the chipmunks will make wonderful memories. Bless you and your mom...elizabeth

@auntieoakley, and all...I'm 'down south' and today this week it's been in the '60s and '70s. lovely days with no humidity, just beauty everywhere. We're still and will stay green and have some flowering plants, still have our own kind of color. Tho, not like our northern friends enjoy. Enjoy, be blessed, and enjoy your days. elizabeth

@joyces and all...You poor baby! That's horrible for you. Can't the state or private companies or timber companies replant? Do you folks do controlled burns in the Northwest? Do they help? Our timber folks in Florida replant and keep the pines growing and they keep making money. I have friends who own land in Nothern Florida where I live and on the Fla west coast and make a pretty darn good multigenerational income from pine timber. I know it's not the same as your area, but isn't there something that can be done? I saw recently how wonderful the giant Sequoia trees are, with bark that actually insulates the tree and protects it from burns. Somehow the bark protects the tree....but that's not protecting all of them from the fires. We're still losing some. Breaks my heart...

Your experience sounds a lot like mine during hurricane season, during a hurricane. I keep a small wet vac to help when I have flooded into my den/kitchen/storage. It can happen with a heavy day or two of rain. Always with a hurricane; And, if it's high tide when we have heavy rains, the entire back of the property with 5 condo buildings backing up to a creek floods about 4' deep. We just installed new and larger drainage pipes and cleared all the drains. Hopefully, this will keep the floods to a minimum for them. I still have flooding even tho I'm at the front of the property, no creek. A bit of a berm will solve my issue if I can get the association to do it before I die!

Off to bed to rest. It's late....stay dry and keep your wet-vac close. blessings, elizabeth

Elizabeth, oh my goodness, how are you not getting messages from Connect? That’s like being cut off from oxygen! We are all family here so it’s important we stay, well, “connected”!
I’m happy to hear you’re feeling stronger each day after the past year you’ve had. It’s about time you get a break!

Don’t fret, once the birds discover the safflower seeds, they’ll be regulars! My cardinals loved ‘em! Someone in our condo building up a few floors must feed the birds from their balcony. Everything morning I have to close my patio door because we have little birds come calling! They fly right into my living room to the coffee table and the right back out! They’re not afraid so I’m assuming they think this is pretty familiar!! 😵‍💫

I hope you have a delightful day!! Sending a huge hug.

@ess77. Hey, Elizabeth, we're all still here for you. Please don't feel sad. 😔
I've been working like a fiend with downsizing my apartment to fit into my one tiny room at Long Term Care. Not much time for posting to Connect! I read my Digest religiously every morning though, "Like" what I can, and respond to a few that tug at my heartstrings at the time.
I'm so glad you're feeling stronger lately and getting downstairs to your critter feeders. You're so fortunate to see all that wildlife.
My province of British Columbia in Canada is in a state of emergency right now. Up to 200 mm of rain in 24 hours in many areas, flooding, all major highways closed due to landslides, thousands of farm animals have drowned, over 15,000 chickens gone, farm fields have turned into lakes, with breakers. So far, one human death and four people missing. Over 300 stranded people heli-rescued. Where I live on Vancouver Island we're completely cut off from the rest of Canada because all highways are washed out. We're so fortunate in my town because although we've had an awful downpour of rain, and some basements and crawl spaces flooded, no major roads out, etc. BC has had more rain in 30 hours than we usually get for all of November. which is our wettest month. Tragedy everywhere. Homes lost, farms lost.
Gotta go for now, Elizabeth. Keep on that good progressive road you're on. Take care. Laurie ❤

Elizabeth: Here, the main forest tree is Doug fir, which takes 80 years to be old enough to be called "mature" without laughing. The trees that were cut down above our place were all old growth spruce, hundreds of years old. That's the NW coastal problem: the trees that are native to our very hilly country are all slow-growing, but industrial forestry companies want to provide a steady income for stockholders, so they clear cut on short rotations of 40, even 35 years, when the trees are very small. We see log trucks with big piles of tiny trees, headed for pressboard factories. Because young trees require lots of water, all the coastal towns fail to have enough water every summer: most rivers have zero stream flow at some point, which is bad for fish. All rivers are far, far more warmer and lower than they used to be, a lethal combination of climate change and clear cutting. The young trees aren't large enough to soak up winter storm water, but they rob rivers of summer flows as they grow.

The cutting done above our place was yet another attempt to develop the extremely steep 200+ acres east of us. In this case, the developer got permission from the City to extend a major road, cutting a swath roughly 300' wide by a half-mile long...without any provision for runoff. The City's engineer was "surprised" that this has resulted in flooding every winter since the road was extended in 2008. "Surprised," indeed! The developer, like the seven before him, went bankrupt; the City now owns all that acreage and, yes, they can be sued for trespass of their water flooding our house and driveway. The one house closer to the ocean is flooded every winter, and they, too, can sue for trespass, which appears to be the only way to get anything done.

When I bought this place 60 years ago it was because of the pretty little creek that bubbled through a line of alder trees. Due to developers having illegally channelized the creek, illegally extended our road due west instead of following the north bank of the creek (i.e., no culvert required), etc. we've lost a half-acre of yard to the ever-growing marsh. Every winter, we look out, not on the pretty little creek, but on a huge mudflat. We do have a proposal to stop the growth of the marsh and increase drainage out to the ocean, but even that, expensive though it is, will not restore the creek to what it used to be. I refer to it as "The Death of Logan Creek."

I can feel your pain, Joyce, for the Death of Logan Creek and your glorious surroundings. As a proud treehugger we’re facing clear cutting in the state forest surrounding two sides of our home. It’s gut wrenching as this is all for money. Our former governor opened up forests for logging again and instead of selecting the trees by variety or use potential they just come in an clear cut these 100+ year red and white pines. And everything else in their path. Leaving just the slash to lie and rot. This is supposed to be forest management? The fire potential grows with all this dried underbrush and dead pine boughs.

My husband spent his childhood in Oregon so we’ve made many trips back to his beloved state. The devastation of these special rain forests just breaks our heart. The Douglas Firs are most impressive… I’m surprised the developer was able to get permission to cut that road without provisions for runoff!! Shaking my head…

Our very small town is run in amazingly strange ways. First, property taxes here are TWICE what they are in the metro Portland area, which offers far more services than our little town. How does all that money get spent? For one, the City Engineer isn't an engineer, so the City hired a consulting firm to determine what needs to be done to lessen the flooding and growth of marsh; two fellows worked two weeks, from dawn to dusk every day, last March. Rumor is that the cost was $30,000. Great, I thought, something finally will be done. Hah--the City has done nothing, and most of the stakes, markers, flagging, etc. has been knocked down, dug up by the City's road grader, or destroyed by weather. There's supposedly written backup to all the on-the-ground work the consultants did, but, without all the flagging and markers, I'm sure that much of the surveying will need to be redone...if the City ever follows through.

When the eighth developer of the land both upstream and downstream of our place went bankers, the CITY bought those hundreds of acres, in the mistaken belief that they could become developers while supervising development within the City. Of course, that idea was shot down quickly, but, still, even though the City was offered more than the $2.8 mil they had paid by a real developer, they turned down his offer. Our town is now 24% VRDs (vacation rental dwellings, most "managed" by companies that siphon off most of the exhoribitant rent. A 4BR house is rented to 8-10 carloads of tourists, packed into every available space. Neighbors (remember a quarter of the houses are VRDs) are treated to cars parked in their driveways or blocking them, excess garbage overflowing bins, people partying most of the night, etc. The supposed management companies never have enough staff to deal with problems--but the City gleans the TRT (transient room tax), a multi-million-dollar bonanza.

The people who make tourism possible by doing the hard work of cleaning, working in restaurants, etc. can't afford to live in town, both due to the high taxes and to the fact that there simply are almost no affordable rental homes. They live outside the City north of town...the very area of manufactured homes that was hit by a forest fire last year. The City Mayor's reaction? "THOSE people don't live in the City, so they're not our problem." I volunteer for Backpacks for Kids (to feed low-income kids in the hope that they do better in school and better than their parents); our pantry is in City Hall. Over a week after the fire, I was hauling totes of bread out to my car to deliver to the places offering fire relief, and, in less than 10 minutes, I was approached by three women, all of them still living in their cars, wearing whatever they had on when the fire came at their homes. City Hall offered nothing, was closed due to Covid but didn't have any info posted about where to go for help. I went home and printed a stack of flyers; first place I posted them was on all the doors of City Hall. I was ashamed to live in a town whose leader had such a bad attitude about the very people that make this town function and earn all that lovely money from tourism! Don't get me wrong...the people who live in the City for the most part volunteered time, effort, and money to help the nearly 300 families left homeless. People here are extremely generous...except for our ex-Mayor.

@loribmt
I read that 10-14,000 giant sequoia trees were lost due to wildfires in the last two years here in California.
Jake

That’s incredibly sad.