Pretty Birds

 



I slept until almost 8 o'clock this morning.  It makes me feel like a slug, like I've wasted half the day unconscious but then I open the curtains and see this and all is forgiven.  This is a Red-bellied Woodpecker and it evidently really likes the orange-flavored suet pellets in this feeder.  It likes them so much that it flew there and stayed there when I was out topping up the birdbath.  Both males and females have red heads but the male's red goes all the way down to his beak and he has a reddish patch on his belly.  This is a male.  As you can see, he's part contortionist.  I filled that feeder once he'd eaten his fill and flown away.






I filled the feeders just before dark last night so the Bluejays were having a feast.  We read in the bird article in last week's paper (whatever day they can squeeze it in, maybe Sunday) that Bluejays stash seeds up to 2 miles away from where they get them--and remember where they've put them.  Chickadees do too.  Isn't that amazing?  One of these days when I'm not so busy doing all the stuff I do every day, I'm going to work at getting a chickadee to eat from my hand.  Also when it's above freezing outside which it wasn't this morning.



Doctor's waiting rooms are the perfect places to knit socks.  I took the Crazy Z Reds Campfire Sock along yesterday and got the heel flap knitted.  Now it's time to turn the heel which is not the part of the sock to knit in public, at least if you're me it isn't.  The heel turn is when I turn off the TV or stop listening to my audiobook so I can focus on the magic trick of making my knitting take a 90 degree turn.  I'll activate the Cone of Silence tonight after supper and get that little bit of knitting magic done.

This afternoon after my haircut I took myself off to The Attic Books & Cafe to work on my writing for a couple hours.  Things went better this week than last week, thank god, and I got quite a bit of the next chapter roughed out but ran into a roadblock when I discovered that I'd left the download cable I needed to hook my Alphasmart to my laptop at home.  See, I like to start my writing on the Alphasmart because it only displays four lines on the screen so I can't continuously reread what I've written and slow myself way down.  So I get myself rolling on there, download it to a Word doc on the laptop and keep going.  I couldn't do that so I wrote a little more and then packed up to come home.

Speaking of my haircut I walked into the salon to see the waiting area full of women, each one holding a puppy.  Puppies!  Someone came in with a wagonload of eight Weimaraner puppies, each one with blue eyes.  Holy cuteness, Batman.  So soft, so sweet, so expensive.  Only $1000 or so per puppy.  I managed to resist holding one but sat in the chair next to the wagon to pet any puppy that wriggled by.  Fortunately Francis came to tell me it was my turn.  And I don't even really like dogs.

November 8--Umberto Boccioni, Portrait of Maestro Ferruccio Busoni.  He looked like he had been pulling his own hair.  It stood up like he had yanked it enough that it was afraid to lay back down.  He had a temper, that was obvious.  His assistant, a mousy woman who might have been thirty... or fifty... scuttled behind him writing down his every word.  When he turned her way she cringed away as if she had been struck.  The other members of the company kept their distance and were very respectful and even deferential when he spoke to them.  No one denied that the Maestro produced beautiful music.

Hey, it's dark outside.  Man, I hate it when it gets dark early and stays dark late.  Maybe that's why I slept so late this morning.  Can't do that tomorrow because I've got an early morning appointment for my annual lube/oil/filter and have to remember not to eat anything for the fasting labs.  One guess who screwed that up last year...
--Barbara