And... Finished!

 First thing this morning I gathered the ingredients of the final recipe in this bout of Investment Cooking and made Salisbury Steak.  I had to make a tiny bit more rice to put with it but it all worked out in the end.  That means I now have 46 suppers in the freezer--5 recipes of 6 servings each and 2 recipes of 8 servings each--so I don't have to cook supper, except for heating it up in the microwave, until almost Christmas.  Yippee!

The little Downy Woodpecker swooped over to the birdbath for a drink this morning.  I'm fascinated by them, they're so natty and precise in their movements.  And there's a little Sparrow you can barely see on the other side of the rock.

I went to my usual pet food store because all of the birdseed is on sale in November so I got a 40lb. bag of cob corn, a 12-pack of suet cakes, and a 50lb. bag of peanuts in the shell.  I didn't ask the prices because I've gotten them in the past but nearly dropped my teeth when she told me that my bill was $91!  Talk about sticker shock.  By then I'd handed her my card so I went through with the transaction.  When I got to the car and looked at the sales receipt I saw that the corn and suet were each $12 and the peanuts were $58.  Holy smokes!  It's a good thing that they'll last at least a year.  It's also a good thing that I can drive around to the patio so that I don't have to haul those heavy bags very far.  I filled the peanut wreath and, lo and behold, one of the chipmunks decided to scale that crook and share in the bounty, the little stinker.  I was hoping for Bluejays and all I got was the chippie and an occasional squirrel.

After my trip to the store I spent the rest of the afternoon drawing.  I flipped back in the Draw Squad book and did the timed drawings at the ends of the lessons, which I have been skipping.  I thought that maybe doing some speed drawing will make my hand a bit more confident when it comes to drawing my #%$&* left hand.  I'm still not happy with that.  The speed drawings aren't very interesting so I did the drawings in one of the lessons too.

I also drew another face.  This time I took a snapshot from an album and tried my hand at it.  This doesn't look anything like the picture but, all in all, it isn't a bad face.

 

Once I put my drawing things away I watched TV and knitted a few rows on the pink bib.  Now it's starting to look like something other than a piece of raw bacon.

Today I tossed a couple old cellphone cases and an iPod.

The prompt today said to write a short story starting with "Once upon a time..."  So I wrote the story of an old lady who wanted to learn to draw and was frustrated by her inability to draw her hand.  She wondered if her paper was bad or if her pencil was broken but decided that she just needed more practice so she went to the craft store and bought three more sketchpads.  The End.

I hope you remember to set your clocks back an hour before you go to bed tonight. Stupid Daylight Savings Time.  At least at this end of the thing we get that hour of sleep back.

--Barbara