December is here!

All volunteer RV's are sporting their Christmas finery.  Ours has a decorated and lit lampost and colored lights inside.  The door has one candle in the window and a very small wreath and colored lights in the front windshield.  I have borrowed a sewing machine and made covers for the seats (mine needed it desperately) and time has flown.  We have gone to dinner with the other volunteers here, attended a Christmas Concert starring Paul, the bookstore manager, and I am sick with a crude probably produced by the unusual cold weather here.  It has been rainy, damp, windy and in the 35-48 degrees. We bought another electric heater and both are going.  We use our propane only in the AM for one hour to warm us up. (propane is not provided)


This is a common sight along the roadways.  Horses are tied out to eat along the side of the road.  This horse is just feet from a busy roadway.

This is the only finished watercolor I did in 3 months.  It is of Liz, another volunteer releasing a perigrine falcon on South Padre Island.  I gave her this painting for Christmas.

John and I went to Hildalgo, where there was a spectacular display of lights.  We went on the tour of this small town that felt like it was in Mexico.  These children do not speak English but did the most spectacular Christmas concert.  They were just fantistic!  

We went on a dolphin watch on another volunteer's boat seeing lots of wildlife including many, many dolphins.  It was a great morning with fog lifting off the Laguna Madre.  We saw the Brownville Ship Channel and Port Isabel from the water! I went back on the boat a week later with the ladies for the Christmas Bird Count.  That morning it was very windy, slight driving rain and cold.  We went out to lunch afterwards both times.  It was great fun to be on the laguna, even in the fog, wind and rain counting birds.  Now we are thinking of packing to head to Arizona, our next volunteer position.

We were close to shore but saw an amazing number of dophins but no pictures of them

John is looking at something???

Dregging the intercoastal waterway on the laguna