Monday, late November morning

I just missed posting yesterday, the 1st Sunday in Advent and also John's daughter Julie's birthday.  I had a busy day, though, we had a very nice dinner guest, Colin Braithwaite [Gen. Sec. of John's Circuit of Churches], and I managed to complete an unusual Advent wreath beforehand which I'd started to put together on Saturday:

The bears still look a bit rough in places, but I'll tweak them when I've got more time.  The inspiration for it was this:

Isn't it gorgeous?  I couldn't remember where I'd seen it or where I'd saved it, but found it again by chance on Friday on one of my USB sticks.  So when John went shopping on Saturday morning I asked him to get the candles and some fondant icing for the bears and - hopefully - a bowl like that.  The latter he couldn't find [bought several pyrex dishes instead], but I evicted a large apple pie out of  my big flat bowl which had sat in the freezer and used that instead.  The "ice" lumps the bears are walking on are sugar candy, one of my many birthday presents from my brother Gerd!


I sent Gerd and Maria a tiny [less than 4 inches across] advent wreath with candles I had made and was pleased with how it had turned out.  G&M were delighted with it -  but how is Maria going to manage to put "flames" on the next three candles when they're due?

We had the first taste of winter this morning - ice sheets on the water buckets overnight. Until yesterday, though, the autumn has been incredibly mild, I even found enough flowers in the garden for the 8 bunches on Wednesday:

Things are going well in the ducky world here, we have the morning and evening[4 pm!] routine nicely sorted.  Since we stopped catching Hedda out of the hut I can do mornings by myself.  At the beginning I let the 10 rowdy youngsters out first because it always sounds as if they're in the process of kicking the door of the shed open, and then I found that they had arrived at the big pond raiding Hedda's tidbits bowl with the Glucosamine before Hedda could get to it.  So now I sort the bottom lot first, I can see Hedda getting her "fix", replenish all the water buckets and ~bowls, and THEN let the 10 out.  They gobble up what's in their special bowl in seconds, race flying into the frog pond, make 'whey hey hey' as much as the four girls will allow them, and then all run, half flying, to the big pond to see if the 5 have left anything to steal from Hedda's bowl.  It's all good fun .........
John nearly always does the shutting in at night, which is quite quick as the 10 come marching up to their shed as it's getting dark - they still need a special invitation to actually go IN, though!


3 photos I took this morning.  The new camera is giving me great results - hadn't noticed the two pigeons sitting on the duck hut down there [3rd photo] until I put the pictures in here: