1 um...it is NEVER too cold to drink G&T's

2 Hills near Pasadena? Some of the happiest years of my life were spent in Sierra Madre. And Manhattans are correct under any circumstances, though I prefer doubles to the "mini" version. ;-)

3 It's important to remember than I'm a small person; that's why I like to mix my own drinks . . .

4 I repeated this joke at a party this weekend, and some guy tried to "correct" me about what the freezing point was. I mean, let's be fair: some people have a Y chromosome and a sense of irony. But some . . . don't. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

5 Since it is well below 55 right now in MT you have my deepest sympathy... NOT. At 55 it is still golfing season but I don't have any black balls to find in the snow so I'm stuck dreaming of next spring. By the way,... I always prefered hot butter rums on days like this. They even keep the fingers warm. xy chomobaby

6 So you're telling me that when you go outside you don't simply put a flannel shirt over your T-shirt to wear as a light jacket? Next you'll be telling me there aren't any palm trees around, and houses are available for under a million dollars. How gullible do you think I am?

7 Pretty gulliable, today I left my house sitting on 30 acres (considerably less then 1 mil) dressed in only my "T" shirt. The thermometer read about 25 F but there was no wind. And the trees around here have needles on them. The rest used to have leaves but the leaves are all on the ground. Do palm trees every lose their leaves?

8 Please note; I meant I was not wearing any jacket when I said 'only wearing my "T" shirt'. I did have pants and shoes too.

9 Wow. It sound beautiful; I almost wish I could see it, but I'm actually a bit of a weather wimp. I'm sure you hadn't guessed that. Palm trees are a little like evergreens (which we actually have a few of on our property). They're never without some covering, but when the wind kicks up--especially out here, where the air is so dry--the "fans" dry up, detach themselves from the trees, and blow around in the streets. (Keep in mind that SoCal is a desert with a thin veneer of real soil. We steal water from Northern California and Arizona to keep our cities going.) My mother once made a Christmas tree out of some old palm fronds: she attached several to the wall, decoreated them, and placed a train set below. It was a fun Christmas tree.

10 If we get some real snow here I'll send you a picture. It is pretty,.... till you have to start shoveling it off the walkway. The palm Christmas tree sounds interesting, still prefer the pine and the smell, espesially in the fireplace. By the way, you are on my blog list, the name is what got me.

11 The only thing I love about snow is looking at pictures of it. California, famously, has lots of Washingtonias - gorgeous tall palms that actually don't shed their fronds once they're dead. They can make a skirt of rustly dead fronds all the way to the ground even when they're 50 feet tall. Here we got a lot of hurricane pruning with Wilma - the wind rips all the fronds off sometimes. But the palms don't seem to mind. The plants themselves bend with the wind so well they almost never snap in half. When they do it's a scary sight, something that gives us the willies just to see. I defronded my 20-foot queen palm when we were still undecided about whether to try to raise her back up. She came down in the hurricane and landed on the orchid tree and then the roof. We came so close to chainsawing my pretty queenie. But we hoisted her back up instead with my guy's Kenworth big rig. She's already growing new fronds. AND!!! Mr. Jack, we have deciduous evergreens here! Bald cypress and pond cypress actually drop their needles for the winter. But never fear! we also have odd shaped pines called slash pines and longleaf and loblolly, who never make a cone shape but are well-behaved in the Keep your Needles field. We make Christmas wreaths from pine branches wound around with lots of Spanish moss.

12 Whoops, forgot the most important part: The temperature right now is 70 degrees. The high will be right around 80 today. It'll do that for a week or so then drop about 5 degrees when we get this cold front coming through. :p