Yay!

Look at what showed up this morning. A Red-bellied Woodpecker male! You can tell it's a male because the red on his head goes all down to the beak. It landed on the square green feeder but found a peanut right away and flew away. I was so happy when he came back for a peck at the suet nuggets AND he landed on the side so I could see the bird. Hooray!

 

I spent a lot of the day going over a folder full of short-ish stories I wrote back in 2009 when the members of my writing group and I were submitting stories to a journal called The First Line. As the name implies, they gave you the first line and you had to write a story from there. I've got about five of them that are polished enough to get in line to be posted on Substack. I thought I had more stories but it turned out I had, like, six versions of one story with different names. Just did an online search and the literary journal is still going strong so I turned the title into a link to the website in case you want to try your hand at submitting. Hurry, though. The next submission deadline is November 1.

 

And the squirrel was back today. It catapulted itself from the patio chair to the square green feeder and managed to knock the cover of it cockeyed again. I'm waiting for it to figure out a way to move the cover and get inside to really chow down. We'll see.

 

Tonight at Friday Night Knitting I worked on the first Llama Mitten and got to the end of the hand but didn't have a scissors or tapestry needle handy to finish the top so I could start on the thumb. So I switched to the Iron Pyrite sock and knitted an inch or so on the foot. I've got about another inch to knit before starting the toe decreases.

 

The lawn mowers came today. I was wondering if they were coming this week because they're usually here long before Friday. He started with the regular mower and then switched to the one with the collection bins on the back to suck up the leaves with the grass clippings. I was wondering if they were just going to mow over the leaves or how they were going to deal with them. I didn't take a picture.

And I forgot to draw or paint today. I got so wrapped up in The First Line stories to the exclusion of anything else except remembering to drain the borax water off the sheets (which I started soaking on Tuesday) and run them through a regular wash cycle with detergent and bleach and more borax. I am determined to make them white again. I even remembered to put them in the dryer. It'll be a while before I go down there to fold them, though. I'm in no hurry to do that.

--Barbara