Past Their Prime...

...or not? I'll leave that up to the observer. I always hate to throw out fresh flowers and realized that I often quite liked them even when they were past their prime. Roses can be successfully dried by hanging them upside down and leaving them until they are completely dry. They even maintain some color quite well. The other things were taken from farmers' market bouquets and our garden. 

I do enjoy arranging flowers, and even foraging for things in the garden. What I need now is containers with wider mouths. I have quite a collection of bottles with nice shapes but they only hold a few stems. My mother used to have a thing called a 'frog', a wicked looking heavy base with many spikes sticking up on which to impale stems to hold them in place. I used it for years, but it was one of those things that didn't make the cut when we moved, and now they have been replaced by florists' foam which winds up in the landfill, probably forever....

We had the full complement again for coffee. We changed the venue back to Trail House because it was 29F (-1.6C)  and even with heaters, nobody could face sitting outside .We've even managed to get Larry, back. He was one of the trio of men in our Pilates class who turned 80 the same year. John and I ran into him in the farmers' market last weekend and invited him to join our Zoom class. The teacher, Maggie, was there this morning too.

A wide range of topics was discussed including a complete critique and subsequent approval of John's new pink and blue tartan shirt, the World Cup (US plays Netherlands at 6am our time  tomorrow), Thanksgiving post mortems, the closing of several local craft beer pubs and the formidable traffic jam on our street as we passed the two dump trucks, one flatbed truck carrying an excavator, and a big rolling tool box of a truck all belonging to PG&E the power company, and two pick-ups with 'traffic control technicians'.All all apparently necessary for installing the electricity and gas lines to the 'rock house' next door. 

We feel sorry for the two traffic control guys who had to stand on the street before the sun hit it on a freezing morning. The only traffic on the street is all the trucks. They can't do anything to control them, so they don't have much to do but stand around trying to keep from freezing.

I don't even want to think about what our PG&E bill will be after this exceedingly cold weather. Our heating is natural gas so the solar panels don't help with that.