Chilly Times Call for Warming Measures...

As everyone not in a tropical part of the US is experiencing, there is yet another cold front moving from the East Coast across the US. As much as you just think that the cold weather is a northern latitude thing, it's not. Down here in warm Texas, it's supposed to get below freezing over the next couple days. To people living in places like Colorado, this is not a big deal, but for Southern Texas, it is. Here the plants grow year round. There are fresh oranges on people's trees. We're still mowing our lawns because they're still growing.

Anyway, I got up the motivation to transfer to flowering plants from their pots to the ground this weekend. I'm not a great gardener and when I finally manage to have a plant that thrives,  I get very attached. I got so attached to my plants, that we packed three potted plants into our car along with ourselves, clothes, 100 lb dog, and a dog crate when we moved. So, the plants have already survived a lot.

With such great plants, you can't just let them freeze to death days after planting. So, after a little internet research, I figured out that I needed to cover them with some kind of thick cover, but make sure that the cover is not actually touching the plants. This keeps the ambient heat around the plants and their roots and by making the cover not touch them, it keeps the temperature difference from wilting the leaves/flowers. With few supplies and no store run, I managed to rig up my own plant cover.
I used:
1 Air Force Academy issued comforter
8 metal skewers
1 metal lawn ornament

I pushed some of the cloth through the wholes in the skewers and then put the skewers in the ground. That way, there's no holes in the comforter and it still stays down. To keep the blanket from touching the plants, I put our metal road runner in the middle and it made a plant tent.  We'll see if it survives the crazy wind we get here in the coast!

Plant cover!

Run For the Bling of It - Race #1

Well, today was the day of my first Run for the Bling of It race. For more information on Run for the Bling of It, go here. I participated in the Corpus Christi Roadrunner Running Club's January Fun Run. It ended up being a 4 mile run at West Guth Park in Corpus Christi.

When I work up today, I thought to myself as I looked outside, "I thought I live in Texas..." At the park, there was frost on the ground and trees and a major nip to the air. It was probably the coldest run I've done in awhile. I'm really hoping my beach 5k next Saturday is warmer!

This was the longest race I've done to date. The flier said it was 3-4 miles. I thought I'd get the option to run either distance, but I was wrong. So, I set a personal best for distance (I know it's not very far) and I'm willing to guess my time was a personal best also, so all in all a good run.
I did it in 39 minutes!!!!

The bling wasn't excessive since it was a running club run, but it was still pretty sweet!