Seems Like Spring Lately

Birds are swarming around the feeders. This trio of Starlings chased other birds away from the suet nuggets this morning. I think of them as the neighborhood brats who bully the other birds and swoop down to gobble up the goodies.

 

This House Finch's pink color is much more vivid than it has been. Usually there's a pair of them but today this guy was on his own.

 

And a Downy Woodpecker female landed on the adirondack chair, then moved to the platform feeder, finally settling on the suet nuggets for a snack. It's about two months too early for it to really be spring around here. We can have a whale of a blizzard in April and have even had snow at the beginning of May. I'm not putting my boots away just yet. I remember the first year we lived in Green Bay, Mom washed our snowpants and put all of the winter stuff away when it turned warm at the end of March. The other neighborhood ladies just laughed because there was plenty of winter left to endure. She learned her lesson.

 

Today's watercolor is a couple wreaths. They're really just circles of leaves with some berries and little sprigs of dots that I don't know what they're supposed to represent. I have another video class by the same artist that I'll dig into next. At least I have all of the stuff she recommends.

 

Oh! The coolest thing happened this afternoon. After two dentist appointments in one day (ugh) I drove out to my friend KW's apartment to deliver her Girl Scout cookies. She was sitting by the concierge desk in the lobby of the building and she asked me when my next book would be published. The concierge, a woman of a certain age, asked about my books so I gave her and the other lady there a bookmark. The concierge looked at it, I described each one, and she said, "I'll take one of each." !!! So I toddled out to the car, got one of each title out of the box, and carried them back in to pick up my check. Holy moly! And she ordered 3 boxes of Girl Scout cookies that I'll deliver tomorrow. That is totally worth the gas to go back out there!

 

Once my head settled back on my neck from somewhere up in the clouds I spent the rest of the afternoon working on a list of keywords for Spies Don't Retire. It makes sense for me to do this work ahead of time, not wait until I'm publishing the book before figuring them out. The yellow highlighted ones are the ones I picked to use first. I looked up categories too but didn't have as much luck with them. There just don't seem to be many categories that my books fit into. It's frustrating.

 

After supper I drew a gratitude journal page for today. I've slacked off drawing pages so this morning I did one for yesterday and one for today in the evening.

 

One of my dental appointments today was a regular cleaning but the first one was to see about an adjustment to my sleep apnea appliance. For a few weeks after I got it, it seemed to be just fine and worked like a charm, but then a couple weeks ago my right jaw muscles started to hurt. They didn't only hurt when I was wearing it but when I wasn't wearing it too. I did everything the dentist said to do, wore my AM aligner that was supposed to put things back in place but that didn't help. So I went in today, he adjusted the appliance, and made something that looks like a retainer that I'm supposed to wear at night for two weeks and then start wearing the appliance again and call him a week after that. I'll just be glad when I can sleep all night without jaw pain waking me up. I found out that my regular dentist also makes sleep apnea appliances but his name isn't on the list I got from the sleep center. He said he thought he'd try to get on the list. I told him I thought that was a good idea.

Between dental appointments I went to Fleet Farm for a 25# bag of mixed cracked corn and birdseed. Then afterward I went to Family Pet Center for a 40# bag of their fancier birdseed. Happily all of the snow has melted and the ground is hard so I could drive around to the patio and didn't have to haul those heavy bags through the house to the cans on the patio. So much easier!

--Barbara