Best Friends on a Fall Day

Hold a true friend with both your hands. ~Nigerian Proverb

What better way to spend a day than with your friend? So what if you have to haul leaves to make a pile on the lawn to play in?





And then, later, use your friend as a pillow and read to her:



I think it's love....

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Here's a picture of my woodpecker that I mentioned yesterday, right before she flew away:



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So, life as usual at our house! Mondays are the best days.

TGIM

If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience. ~Robert Fulghum

Monday, how I love you! Back to routine, back to normal... all is right with the world.

*sigh*

My cat, Breeann, is being interviewed over at Mean Kitty's blog, Writer & Cat, today. As of my typing this, the interview isn't up yet, but it should be soon.

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It was a long, busy weekend -- especially yesterday. DH decreed we should have a barbecue for lunch (at 10 a.m.), so it was off to the store for DD and me. We took Dakota, who LOVES going for rides and made a stop at the pets supply store near the grocery store to get her a pressed rawhide bone.

On the way out, a woodpecker slammed into the store window and then lay on the ground, wings out, fluttering around weakly. Dakota went NUTS, so I had DD move her away and I checked out the bird. After I picked it up and folded her wings down, it stopped fluttering, but her little heart was pounding and she was gasping for air, beak wide open (and that was one impressive beak!).

I handed her to DD (because I knew she was dying to hold it) and told her to cover the bird's head to keep it calm. We'd put it into the box in the back of the Pea and, if it was recovered by the time we got home, we'd release it out back.

After a race through the store for BBQ supplies, we hurried home. The woodpecker was more than recovered, it was trying to peck a hole through the box! LOL... We carrying the box out back and released it, so glad it hadn't suffered long term problems from whacking the window.

All the rest of the day, if there was a female downy woodpecker on our suet, DD would say, "Look, our woodpecker is back!".

In between making potato salad, cooking lunch, cleaning that up and doing four loads of laundry, I helped DD stack wood.

We had the second pile done when we realized the first pile was REALLY leaning. So, we decided to pull down the top third of that pile and restack, which would have gone fine except the end collapsed when we took off the wood in the middle, causing the entire pile to fall. And then DH decided pile number two was crooked, too, and used the maul to whack at the wood and straighten it out which would have been dandy except the end fell.... and you get the idea.

DD burst into tears and proclaimed it all "her fault" because she'd helped build the ends (in reality, I had done most of the end building) and that she'd done the stacks crooked. When I couldn't calm her down, I sent her inside and then told DH he could do the ends (he was trying to give me a lesson on doing them correctly -- so I told him that, since he was so good at it, it was his job), then I cleared out some gardens to settle down ... we had a frost the night before, so most of my annuals were dead and then I went inside to deal with DD.

We had a long talk about her continual self-degradation (I'm stupid, I'm ugly, I'm fat, I'm useless, I can't remember anything, I'm no help, it's ALL MY FAULT -- is this a girl thing, or does my DD have self-confidence issues?) and I said that I wasn't going to allow that kind of talk anymore. That she was smart and worked hard and was a GOOD GIRL, but that she was also only ten y.o. and couldn't be expected to know how to do everything.

And so the three of us rebuilt the piles. We have three and a half now, and DH has to split the rest, but we're about 2/3 of the way through what we have for the winter.

We won't talk about the huge purple bruise I have on my right foot from dropping a log on it, no we won't...

How was your weekend? Tell me it was great and why, and let me live vicariously.

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You Are a Blackberry

You are one of those super hard working, cellphone to your hip types. You like gadgets that do what they're supposed to do, especially when they keep you super connected to the world. You prefer function over flash, so things like a long battery life and easy features appeal to you. You may not look as cool as all of the iPhone kids, but you're probably being more productive than all of them!

Are You An iPhone or a Blackberry?

Blogthings: We'll Tell You The Truth... Someone Has To!

Yep, that's about right...

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