What a beautiful day! Not a cloud in the sky, which was like a bright blue bowl overhead, and only in the high 60s. On days like this I feel like reaching out and hugging the air. The sun did get a bit much during midafternoon, but there was a good breeze to make up for it.

I was a bit "high" this morning because I finally finished up a package I was sending to a friend in New Jersey :-) with a purchase and hurried home to wrap the rest of the gifts and bring everything to the post awful before they closed. The folks standing behind me helped me pick out the appropriately-sized box and very soon everything was off. I've been looking forward to sending the things for ages.

Threw in the towel because the porch decorations looked incomplete, so I bought a Hallowe'en flag with a Michaels coupon. I also found the most beautiful fall-ornamented plaque at Love Street:

"Having a place to go is called Home,
Having someone to love is Family;
Having both is a Blessing."

In addition, finally gave up on the lighthouse-themed towels in the hall bath. They are actually large dishtowels because there were no lighthouse-themed hand towels for a bath, but they have been getting sadly worn. Since the bath theme is lighthouse/seaside, I stopped at Linens'n'Things with my coupons and got a pair of towels that are sand-colored. I would have gotten sea blue, but was afraid they'd be confused with the same color towels in the master bath.

When I got home I had to complete an odious task: I realized early in the week the reason I couldn't tell if the bird feeder was full or empty was because the combination of two rainy days and the cayenne pepper we have to put into the feeder to deter the squirrels had created a thick moldy film on the lucite sides. The hot pepper suet had also molded. Ugh. So I scraped the wet gunk from the feeder, washed the lucite panels, and refilled it, then swapped out the moldy suit for fresh. Then I scrubbed my hands (I wore gloves, but...ugh) and brought the trash from the operation outside, bringing Willow with me for a walk. The moment I walked into the back yard, I heard an excited chirp and saw the white-breasted nuthatch perch, upside-down, of course, on the suit and call again, to be echoed by the same call from the trees. Another white-breasted nuthatch came flying down, a brown-headed nuthatch following, and also a chickadee. They must have been monitoring that feeder because I've been hearing them cheeping and chipping outside ever since!

I caught the series Travels and Traditions With Burt Woolf and wished I'd known it was on earlier so I could have recorded it: he did Christmas in Austria, from the Christkindlmarkets to dinner at a swanky Vienna restaurant to Christmas trees and crechés.

The only sour spot in the day was going out this morning and seeing pumpkin seeds and some rind strewn on the street. Our neighbors had two big pumpkins on their front porch steps and evidently last night some hoodlums came by to destroy them. I remember even back in the 1960s my dad would never buy pumpkins for the front steps because the boys would always come by and bust them open. But we were on the corner of a main street and near the junior high school—it was a fact of life that the boys would destroy things left out, steal the Christmas bulbs, and jump our fence. We live on a dead-end street and this means someone deliberately had to come through to smash the pumpkins. :-(

Labels: annoyances, birds, decorating, gifts, weather

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 5:53:00 PM

Comments:

Your "friend in New Jersey" thanks you...and her new bear pal Miles does, too! ;)

# posted by  Emma : 5:22:00 PM

 

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