Crazy Weather!

Hasn't the weather been crazy?! It was quite a storm last Friday night. I stood out in our field and watched the lightning off in the distance as the storm was coming our way. It was pretty impressive....lots of cloud to cloud lightning that continued on for a long time after the storm had passed. We got some rain, but not much wind. Our trash can didn't even blow over. Who knew that just a mile away toward town, they were having a tremendous storm which took down many, many trees and caused our electricity to be off for about 25 hours....and we were lucky.....in toward town they were out for 2 1/2 days!

The other day as I was making my morning coffee I glanced out the kitchen window, and there in our backyard were 4 (!) tom turkeys "strutting their stuff", showing their tail feathers for just one lucky lady turkey. I'm enjoying having the hummindbirds around again. There are at least two coming to my feeders regularly.

I knew there was a good reason why I love flowers so much. I was reading an article in the Rutgers magazine that researchers have offered convincing evidence that flowers may be potent mood elevators. People who were given the gift of flowers for what they thought was a reward for participating in a study on mood were feeling happier days later than people who had been given either a decorative candle or a fruit basket. Happiness was measured by a special type of heartfelt smile that neither the candle nor the fruit basket elicited. One researcher called flowers "the pets of the plant world" in that, like a pet, flowers help reduce stress by making us feel good. Works for me!