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It’s beginning to get colder here in Toronto and soon .. the snow that falls will stay on the ground for days or a week at a time, or perhaps like last year it might stay for months! As I was just saying on my gardening blog, my plants have finally realized that winter is just about here and have reluctantly gone into dormancy.

There are still a few roses clinging stubbornly to their stems, but they are dead … unlike the rose below which was very much alive and happily blooming in August.

Chicago Peace produced such lovely roses all summer. It’s a shame that I won’t see another rose from this plant until next May or June … but it’s worth the wait.

I think that as a Northern gardener I appreciate my garden all the more in the spring, summer and early fall because I know there will be several months during the winter when all I’ll see will be the white of snow, gray skies … no green leaves or grasses, no colorful flowers, no scent of rose perfume, lavender, beebalm or jasmine … no garden to sit in with my laptop or a good book.

I’m resigned to winter’s arrival, but secretly I’m already longing for spring.

If I’m feeling well enough tomorrow Chris and I were thinking about officially starting our holiday shopping.

We still aren’t sure what kind of gifts we’re going to buy all the kids in the family! Perhaps tomorrow outing will just be a trip out to get some ideas. Most of the kids, nephews and nieces, are teens and I think those are the hardest people to buy for each year!

I had mentioned in another post that I was thinking of getting some of them newly released movies and or gift certificates to their favorite stores, but if you have any ideas for gifts for teens I’d love to hear them. Especially gifts that don’t break the budget! I haven’t been making much money lately so we don’t have much to spare to buy gifts this year.

My only brother that lives in the area has invited us over to his house for an early Christmas get together next weekend. His wife, my sister, her twins and their girlfriend and boyfriend, and my brothers daughter, her husband and their new baby will be there. It’s just a small gathering, but one that we try to do each year.

My brothers and sister and I usually don’t exchange gifts anymore. As I said in an earlier post we decided a while back just to buy gifts for the kids. This year I might get my brother a gift though. I found some fantastic silk ties and I know how much he loves his ties. So I might surprise him with a small gift. The gift would be a thank you for the Tom Cochrane and Red Rider concert passes that he got us in the summer.

Have you started shopping for the holidays yet? I’ll bet that some of you started today consider that it’s Black Friday! Did you put yourself on a budget this year? Cut down on the number of gifts that you’re going to buy?

I always find Christmas the most expensive time of the year. I’m still trying to figure out how we are going to manage to buy all the gifts we need to purchase this year on almost no money.

Over the past two years a lot of new social media sites have started up and if you are like me, you kind of feel like you need to join quite a few of them in order to keep up with all of your blogging friends. Some of the social media sites are not only good places to connect with other bloggers and old friends, but they also offer ways to promote your own websites and or blogs.

If you look at my About page you can see a list of some of the social media sites that I use. It’s not a complete list as I get invites every week from blogging friends to join new sites! It’s hard to keep up!

Some time ago I came across a site called Second Brain. I didn’t join it when I first came across the site, but I decided to sign up a few days ago when I realized that I could connect most of my social media accounts to Second Brain.

There are a few other social media sites where you can connect quite a few of your other accounts, but I liked the look and feel of Second Brain.

Not only can you bookmark favorite sites in your Second Brain account (or use their Bookmarklet tool in your browser), but you can import your bookmarks from sites such as Delicious, Faves, Digg, GoogleReader, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Reddit and Mr. Wong.

You can also import feeds from your Blogger, Wordpress, Metaweblog, RSSBlog and tumblr accounts. If that’s not enough you can also connect your Second Brain account to your accounts at GoogleDocs, MindMeister, ZohoDocs, Slideshare, Box, Scribd, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Revver, Vimeo, Qik, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Behance, Diigo, and GoodReads.

One thing that I discovered recently is that you can upload files from your computer to Second Brain. I don’t think you can do this on many of the other Social Media sites. I’m not sure what kind of files one might want to upload - perhaps articles - but it’s an interesting feature to have.

Anyway, I know that a lot of you already have accounts at many of the Social media sites that I’ve listed above, I get enough friend invites each week to know that, LOL … so why not join Second Brain too? It’s free to join!

Remember to add me as a friend if you do start an account there!

Wordless Wednesday

This is a nice enough looking house … maybe a little small, but I think it’s just a little too close to the water. Don’t you?

The owner must have really wanted a house on the beach!

I’m still not feeling very well so I’m trying to catch up on the television shows that I’ve missed in the last week (due to visiting our friend in the hospital so many times).

I’m so thankful that we have a PVR. It’s like Tivo. We pretty much record all the shows we like to watch even though we try to watch several of the shows we like on the same night that they are on tv. This way though we can watch them without commercials and of course watch them whenever we want.

It’s definitely a good way to pass the time when you aren’t feeling well!

Is it my imagination or is just about every actor/actress on TV these days just a little too thin? What happened to shows with actors that looked like real people? I mean it’s like most of the characters on the shows I like are taking diet supplements like Ephedrasil hardcore or something. They’re just too thin, too muscular, too perfect …

Do you find that when you watch TV the people just don’t look like your neighbors, co-workers or people that you’d see in your city or town? I guess most of the stories aren’t much like real life either for that matter! LOL