A Dangling Squirrel

Now that the peanut wreath is empty and the cob corn is gone, the squirrels are back to squabbling over the suet pellets.  One with a scrawny tail likes the suet cakes best but this one has dibs on the suet pellets.  When another squirrel comes along this one swings up on top of the crook, twitches its tail, and makes a threatening grunt until the interloper runs off.

The Cardinal came back to the feeder this morning while the sun was shining.  The House Finches tolerated sharing the feeder, probably because the Cardinal is bigger than both of them put together.

It was a glorious sunny day today so I took a drive up the highway a few miles.  I didn't stop anywhere I just went north until I found a nice off-and-on set of ramps and came back.  I probably went about 15 miles, just because.  Then I got to meet DS at St. Norbert's College, where he dropped off DIL1's car, to give him a ride home so I got to take another drive and with a passenger.  It was great to spend a few minutes visiting with him.  Masked, of course.

I added a couple inches onto the sock leg this afternoon...

... and got to the decreases on the cast sock at Friday Night Knitting.  I'll probably finish it tomorrow.

 

 

 

29 January--Barbara Malcolm, The Seaview.

At the end of the day I was very pleased with an idea of mine.  When the paint stripes came to a doorway, one of the colors would wrap around the door frame and become the color of the wainscoting of that room.  The place that color had occupied on the way up would become a white space in the spectrum as the colors continued on.  We also decided that one of the bathrooms would have the trim painted the “bathroom” color of sea green with white walls and the other would have sea green walls with white trim.  That way all of the towels would go with both bathrooms, although I also planned to sew a strip of each of the bedroom colors on two sets of towels so that guests would be able to identify theirs in case they got left behind. 

Finally I heard ‘Nando Gomez’ voice out back and went out to greet him.  He was just as pressed and polished as he had been on the first day we met and just as officious and purse-lipped too. 

I had, foolishly it turned out, hoped that he would unbend when it came to the second cargo container since I hadn’t tried to put one over on him the first time, but I swear he redoubled his efforts with this load. 

“I am not about to relax my vigilance, Mrs. Rose,” he said when I hinted that things would go  faster if he just glanced into boxes and assumed that what was on the list was in the box.  He waggled a finger at me.  “That is what you would like, is it?  That only tells me that you have something to hide.” 

The fire in his eyes made me wish I could jerk my tongue off its roller.  Why couldn’t I have kept my mouth shut?  Now it would take twice as long to empty this container as it had the last one.  I was walking back into the hotel when I had an idea. 

“Marie,” I called. 

“I’m up here,” she answered.  I climbed the stairs and found her out on the gallery porch rearranging the order of the shutters so that the colors were the way she liked. 

“Marie, honey, I need a favor.” 

She turned to face me.  “What?” 

I linked my arm in hers and drew her indoors.  “Would you please go down to the cargo container and see if you can’t charm Mr. Hernando Gomez, Iggy calls him ‘Nando by the way, into working a little faster so that we can get the furnishings out a bit quicker?  I asked him and now he thinks that I am trying to smuggle in something or avoid paying the duty.” 

“Are you?” she said. 

“No, I’m not.  I’m just anxious to get it all unloaded and into place while I have three extra pairs of hands I don’t have to pay.”  I drew my arm out of hers and pushed her toward the kitchen.  “Go turn on your charm, honey, please?” 

She smoothed her hair and tucked her pencil behind her ear; she grabbed up her Smartphone and tapped the screen. 

“What are you doing?” I asked. 

“I am guessing your Mr. Gomez is a geek, or a geek wannabe, so I’m calling up an app for organizing things, kind of a spreadsheet.  It’ll dazzle him much more than tousled hair and cleavage…” she unbuttoned one more shirt button, “but a little more cleavage could not hurt.” 

Leaving her to her task, I went upstairs with my broom and started cleaning up the sawdust and the big pieces of construction trash.  I wanted to have it all ready so that when Mr. Gomez cleared things there would be places to put them.  It made sense to me.  I had finished sweeping out the back bedrooms and moved into the front ones when it hit me that meant that I could move in.

Today's toss was Durwood's collection of swizzle sticks.  Some are from hotels, some are from now-defunct airlines.  I don't drink anymore so I have no need of them.

The prompt today said to put a pin in a map and write a short horror story set there.  I got the setting all written and didn't really get to the horror but then I'm not much for horror stories.

--Barbara