You Parked Where?

By the patio, of course. See, I went to the birdseed store this morning and bought a 40 lb. bag of birdseed because the birds have turned into gluttons. I can no longer carry that on my shoulder through the garage, through the kitchen, and out onto the patio. Luckily I can drive around the house, park by the birdfeeders, and carry the bag of seed a few feet to the can that it's stored in. Much more convenient and easier on these old bones and muscles. Then I just back up, drive back around the house, and park in the garage as nature intended.

 

I filled the birdfeeders and managed to spill some seed on the patio. It didn't take long for a chipmunk to scurry up and spend time hoovering up the spilled seed. As I watched I could see its cheek pouches get bigger. At first there were two chipmunks but this one drove the other one away to hog all the seed. Evidently chipmunks aren't big on sharing.

 

I spied the female Oriole on the grape jelly dish but wasn't fast enough to take a picture. I was barely fast enough to take a picture of this male Oriole on the crook. He didn't visit the orange or the jelly and took off right after I snapped this so I didn't have a chance to try for another shot. I'm thrilled that they're still visiting.

 

The peonies have bloomed. Two on my side of the privacy fence and one on the renters' side. I love the deep pink color of the petals but miss the big ants that used to be crawling all over them when I was a kid. Wonder where the ants went.

My watercolor today was a rousing success. I saw a painting of some poppies and decided to see if I couldn't do something like that. Turns out I could. Sorry to toot my own horn but I really like the way it turned out. Why don't all my paintings turn out?

I pulled out the embossing machine and a few "plain" bookmarks and cranked them through the machine so now they're fancy bookmarks. I'm so glad that I got this new craft stuff. I'm really enjoying saving my old unsatisfactory paintings and turning them into notecards.

And today's Gratitude Journal was short and sweet.

I spent a couple hours reading over and skimming through last year's NaNoWriMo manuscript to see what I have to do to turn it into The Seaview 3. And the answer is, LOTS. It's about 40k words and there's not nearly enough Rose and Iggy in there. I can see that I'll be busy for at least the next year wrangling words and trying to convince the characters to do what I tell them to. Might be fun. Probably will be extremely frustrating at times. After today I'm not nearly as confident about it as I was yesterday.

Went to OJ's soccer game this evening. It only got up to 70 today and cooled down rapidly as the sun went down. I wore a denim shirt and wished I had a blanket and a hoodie. I made myself a mug of hot chocolate when I got home and put on that wished for hoodie. I'm finally warm. He's got another game on Wednesday when it's supposed to be in the 80s. I'm still taking a hoodie.

--Barbara