I so much love not being a slave to the alarm clock. It was exquisite being able to sleep until we woke up this morning, and then have leisure to eat breakfast and not hurry.

When we did go out, we at first made a brief stop at Hobby Lobby. I was thinking of buying another water reservoir for use with my watercolor pencils, since the one I bought has vanished, but bought eraser pencils instead. I'm managing with a plain old paintbrush. Looked thoughtfully at a collection of 50 watercolor pencils (my set is only 24), but didn't buy it.

Then we went to Lowes. I wanted some small nails (not brads; I'm up to my eyeballs in brads, I want nails with heads), a new banner flag (our formerly pretty spring flag with the birds and flowers is shredding from the Georgia sun), and an outdoor timer. The finding the last was a lot harder than it looked. We have floodlights on the side of the house at the back, but they're aimed at the side yard and at one obscure corner of the back yard. The remainder of the yard is as dark as pitch at night. My idea was to take a string of big bulb (C-9) clear Christmas lights (bought at Hobby Lobby after the holidays at a discount) and hang them between the uprights on the deck, so it will light the deck and the back yard as well. We tried this previously, back when James used to take Willow out in the yard at night, but I had gotten lazy and just hung the lights in swags on two sides of the deck using floral wire. It was surprisingly bright (175 watts for all 25 lights) and it made enough light for James to see quite well. We had, during Christmas, bought a switch to plug the lights in that operated on a remote. But the remote was tiny and we kept losing it, and finally the lights wouldn't come on. We thought it was the string, replaced it, and it worked for a while, and then it quit working again. Once the stupid squirrel chewed it in half, that was the end of it.

Last year I brought a new string of lights. Friday I stripped the old string down, and plugged the new one in directly to the plug. And it didn't work. Turns out the ground-fault interrupter had popped. Once I did, they lit fine. But the timer didn't seem to work, so I went online and found out that Lowes had one that operated either on/off, or for set hours, or dusk to dawn. I looked up what aisle it was in at our closest store.

And it wasn't there. We finally had to get an employee (who didn't seem to understand the concept of "outdoor timer" and "remote control") to track it down; it was located in a box at the very top of the shelves two aisles away from where the website said it was. Will have to hitch it up soon to see how it works. Anyway, got the nails, and two more 3-foot extension cords (we never seem to have enough), but the banner search was a bust. I'll have to look online. [I ordered one off Amazon with a lighthouse and a sailboat on it.]

We were going to come home by Sprouts and Publix, but I found chicken and dumplings in Sprouts and at that point it was after three and we were hungry. So we went home to eat the chicken and dumplings, then went out about five to visit both Publix and Kroger to finish up the shopping, including a steak to grill at the Spiveys tomorrow.

Finally supper at Uncle Maddio's and finally home, where I walked Tucker (the night, after the heat of the day, was actually quite pleasant, so I walked longer than usual, to Tucker's dismay, since someone is popping fireworks in the distance) and finally could sit down to relax. Put on Wild Britain With Ray Mears and saw lovely things: the Cairngorms in Scotland and the Flow north of them (bogland), and out in Norfolk and Suffolk, and also islands off the coast of Wales. Lots of birds—hen harriers, barn owls, gannets, swans and cygnets, plovers, ptarmigan, golden eagles, plus the adorable puffins who look like rubber ducks as they bob in the ocean—plus a water vole which looks like a beaver without the flat tail, a Chinese water deer that has fangs instead of antlers, a spider that lives on the water, and a rabbit just changing from his winter white coat. Oh, and hazelnuts buried in peat from thousands of years ago.

Labels: animals, crafts, decorations, food, nature, shopping, television

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:59:00 PM

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