Hard to believe it was so warm on Friday that I felt forced to put the air conditioner on and today it has not even climbed out of the 40s, with cloudy skies and raw wind. Of course it feels like about twelve hours from Friday afternoon until now. I'm not sure where all the time goes on the weekends, but it flies like a falcon in the midst of a stoop.

We did finally get the taxes done on Saturday night. Something has come up ever since we bought the software, but of course the deadline is tomorrow and that proverbial balloon was going up. I was quite annoyed with myself when I opened the envelope in which we keep all the tax documents and found I had kept two copies of the receipt for my car taxes instead of one of mine and one for James' truck. Last year his truck was $30 more than mine, so I used that figure to calculate his total. Once that was done and submitted I could concentrate discussing with Mike on chat what kind of a new computer he needs!

James also tried to change out the two HVAC filters on Sunday with little success because what we thought was a four-pack of 16x25x1 filters was actually one 16x25x4 filter! Luckily I still have the receipt. We had less luck that day trying to return the IDE to SATA adapter card and my dead wireless mouse at Fry's since they were over their 30-day return limit. Fry's is over an hour's drive from our house and we don't like to go out there too often. I at least asked if they would dispose of the broken mouse properly and to my surprise, I was told no. Fry's is a California company and so many of them are on the forefront of responsible recycling that I couldn't believe they don't offer this service, especially since I was fresh from the Green Purchasing class on Friday. Of course I shouldn't be so surprised since the only place to safely recycle broken compact fluorescents involves a trip down to Ikea!

In the meantime I spent Friday and Saturday attracting books: not only did I pick up the three volumes at the used bookstore on Clairmont Road, but my Hamilton book shipment came in—four books including Grandmere, the Eleanor Roosevelt bio I've wanted for so long—and Saturday I found one book about web typography at MicroCenter and two books at Borders, including Cesar Millan's (the "dog whisperer"). The latter specifically had instances of helping dogs who are afraid of other dogs, like Willow.

Sunday I also bit the bullet and did a "big cleaning" of Schuyler's cage. Since she's not hand-tame I have been merely doing spot cleaning, but the bottom was looking increasingly grubby and I knew frightening her as minimally as possible was better than risking her health. James helped me and we did it, setting the remainder of her cage on newspaper on the dining room table while I scrubbed out the bottom. She took it quite well, actually. I also replaced the swing she sleeps in with a new one I had bought some weeks ago. When she's bored with playing with her toys or banging the St. Francis token that's fastened to the bottom of the cage, she sits in her "bed" and gnaws upon the wooden portion. (She has a wooden toy that is made for birds to gnaw on in her cage already, but obviously the swing is so much more appealing!) She stared at it suspiciously for a couple of hours, but was sleeping in it by evening, when we were watching The Right Stuff (we followed our marathon viewing of From the Earth to the Moon with Apollo 13 on Saturday night and then TRS last night).

Labels: birds, DVDs, movies, shopping, taxes, weather

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 2:58:00 PM

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