Three Years Ago Today

Three years ago today, Max and I arrived in South Englishtown Belize, a permanent move for us.  We left Rochester, Minnesota and in fact we left Dennis there to tidy up some loose ends.  He joined us in Belize 10 days later on Christmas Eve, 2012.

The beautiful home where Dennis and I lived for 20 years (and have since sold) - beautiful in the spring and summer.

View from our neighbor's perspective.

The flowers at their peak.

Looking from our garden across our neighbors' manicured lawns to the farm fields and wooded hills across the road.  Hard to beat this view. 

Another hard to beat view.

Our shaded patio and back garden.

But too often, the views included snow.

Rosy dawn after overnight snowfall.

Pretty sure I took this shot in late March; there are some disappointed daffodil leaves in that flower bed at the lower right.  Way too much snow and cold for 5 months of the year.

Max in the sunroom on a winter's day, trying to stay warm.  Her strategy was to insulate with fat!  She is much slimmer in her new home.

Fed up with cold weather - just look at Max's face in the photo above - we needed to live where the weather suits our clothes (click to listen to Harry) while you see why we made the move.

Happy Max, looking out over the sea in her new home.

Our first photo (scanned in from a 35mm negative) of the property we ended up purchasing in 2004.  It starts waaaaay down the beach just after the palm that is leaning over the sea in the center of the photo and goes for 430 feet.

Rosy dawn over smooth sea.  Way better than over snowy field.

Look at how the sunlight hopscotches along the undersides of the clouds.

Black Creek in our new backyard.

Our new view to the south.

The vacation cabana before we expanded the veranda and started the addition.

Racing home against the rain.

A fine day for a sail.

Another sunrise - happens every day.

Backyard birds - adult and juvenile little blue herons.

Hey look - the sun came up again!

Local caterpillar.

Local veg for roasting.

Neighborhood birds - brown pelicans.

Kiskadee vs tiger snake.  Kiskadee wins.  This time.

Mellow Max.

Basilisk lizard.

Nutmeg fruiting

Peppercorns.

Tropical color.

A glimpse of what brought us here 3 years ago.  More to come in part 2.

Experiment with mobile blogging

My post yesterday may have been a little premature if I can get this test of mobile blogging to my satisfaction.  I am using my new Samsung Galaxy Note II.  It has a decent camera so I took a couple of quick shots of the snowfall from dry warmth of our house.

The first one is the view toward the side garden.  The second is the fern inside the dining room window looking toward the front garden.  The snow looks lovely on the blue spruce.  Last is the young flowering crab apple just outside the living room window.  Just this short post now as a test.  I hope there will be more later.

Note to self - the photos are in reverse order. 

Warm February in Minnesota

This time last year I was in Belize, getting help to celebrate my birthday from our friends Chris, Sue, and Martha from Monkey River, Belize, plus help from other friends of Chris and Sue's in Belize - Wil Maheia and Mary Cariddi.  They helped me celebrate while poor Dennis stayed in Minnesota.  This year I am in Minnesota with Dennis.  It is not as warm as in Belize, but it is by far the warmest birthday I have had in Minnesota.  I took some photos around the house today showing the relative lack of snow.  It reached the low 40sF today, well above freezing.

In the woods behind our house looking toward the Zumbro River valley.

 Snow in patches that are shady during part of the day. 

The secret garden still has a good depth of snow, as does part of the roof that is shaded.

Looking up to the woods from the patio.  Even though the snow is mostly gone, there are no daffodil leaves poking up along the edge of the woods.  That is the area that I planted  in fall of 2010.

The only snow of any significant depth is in our hidden garden along the north side of the house.  I can almost imagine the grass has a little green tinge to it in the shot above.  ;-)


Happy Birthday to Andrew, whose birthday is also today.  I have never meet anyone with the same birthday before, except Edgar Allen Poe, and I don't think he counts!  


Dennis took me out to a lovely restaurant for birthday dinner, which we enjoyed very much.  A nice day to have a birthday.

Minnesota Winter Dawn

This winter season here in southern Minnesota has been unusually warm, punctuated by only a couple of super cold spells and not very much snow.  We figure nature is trying to make up for last year's brutal winter.  Today is the last day of a short cold snap that started Friday.  This morning the temp was 6F (-14C) at 7:00am.  It has warmed up to 13F (-11C); we'll make up to the 20s before the day is done.  Oddly, we have very little snow on the ground because most of what we did have melted during the warm weather at the beginning of February.  Below are some views of a beautiful dawn from the front of our house taken Jan. 31 when there was still snow on the ground.






As lovely as that dawn was, this dragonfly is what we would prefer to see when look out the front door.

Dragonfly on dead hibiscus stem, South Englishtown, Toledo District, Belize.

We are now one step closer to that reality; Dennis has officially declared his date of retirement - November 30, 2012.  I added a retirement countdown widget to the blog.  As of today, he has 291 days to go ...

November Snow

The English House Sparrows think so.

"What is this stuff?"

A very wet female English House Sparrow.

A bird's got to eat.

So do the grey squirrels.

Not only wet, a few patches of fur are missing from this guy's back.

the house finches and the goldfinches

Look how much smaller the gold finch is than the female house finch.

Didn't know the house finch was a wader. ;-)

If you look cloesly, you can see the drops being slung off by the female house finch.

The little goldfinch seems to shed water a bit better than the house finches and sparrows.

and the cardinals.

A little rain doesn't make the female cardinal any less lovely.

Even the American crows agree that it is a cold, wet day.

The crows were a little subdued. This one even looks a little pensive.

The snow is still on the ground with more to come. :-(

But what did we expect, it is November after all.