Bear Nekkid Bird Sanctuary

SF Homes in Wooded Setting

When I was a new bride, I was a collector. For some reason, I felt compelled to accumulate groups of things - handcrafted things like birdhouses and hand-thrown pottery. Pretty things but not particularly useful and a pain in the ass to keep free of dust. Luckily, I have the attention span of gnat so these collections never grew to the hundreds or thousands, just enough (I thought) to make a statement.

Until recently, the birdhouses were displayed above my kitchen cabinets. Since Sparky retired, we've been doing a lot of work on the house and the yard and I've been in this "Re-use, Recycle or Dump" mode. In my zeal to de-clutter the house as we renovate,  some items have migrated outdoors.

The shade gardens in front of the house needed... something.

As you know, we New Englanders love us some yard ornaments. Yes indeedy, we do.

So rather than go the way of flamingos and Mary-on-the-halfshell, I decided to relocate the birdhouses outdoors.  We mounted the houses on some beautiful old weathered fence posts and I have to admit, I'm pretty pleased with the way they turned out.

Bird Condos -  Great Amenities, Low HOA Fees

Now, I didn't actually expect birds to use these since they're placed so close to the house.  My thought was that they would be purely decorative. The birds, however, had other ideas. Someone is currently renovating this Bait Shack directly in front of my Living Room window.

Cozy Single Family - Under Renovation

I came home one day last week and found a Chickadee about to enter the birdhouse with a bright blue string clutched in her beak.  Since I love to decorate, I decided to help her with the reno project. I pulled out my knitting bag and tied scraps of bright purple and blue yarn to various trees in the yard.

Apparently, Mistress Mother Nature is pleased because the next day, I was gifted with this:

Another single perfect bloom

Although, someone else is NOT so happy because I found the corpse of a baby bird on the top rail of my garden fence.  I felt like the guy in The Godfather who found the horse's head in his bed. I suspect it's the Subterranean Pythons...

This is war.

Into every life... a little rain

This has been one hell of a week.

On Monday, we had to replace the tank and pump on our well. To the tune of $2200. Not a big shock, we knew it was coming and had budgeted for the expense (Thank you, IRS!).

What we didn't expect was that on Tuesday night, our home would fill with fumes (much like tires burning) and when we checked the basement, we found the floor covered with water. Now our basement is blessedly water-tight so even though it was raining, we knew this was something else.

Several hours later, the repairman left us, with a bill for repairing the Hot Water Heater (the source of the leak) for $350 and another separate bill for unclogging the furnace (the source of the fumes) for $675. He also informed us that he'd have to return on Thursday to replace the pipe leading from the furnace into the chimney.

After that visit, he gifted us with an invoice for another $700.

Along with all this, we have seen torrential rains this week and a small leak in the roof has turned into a larger mess. So we tried to sleep and ignore the drip, drip, drip into the strategically placed buckets.

But...

This wasn't a totally negative week. There were some random bright spots.

I discovered that my Tinkerbell pin (roughly valued at $1.99) had fallen off my lunch bag. I was positive she most likely dropped in the parking lot and had been the victim of rain/snow/ice and tires... but no, she was found (clean, dry and undamaged) and passed on to a friend whom I happened to bump into.

And for some reason, just by chance (I was clearing out old emails), I opened an email which informed me that I needed to download the new antivirus for my new netbook because the existing trial program expired 2/25. When I looked at the date on my desktop, there it was "Thursday, 2/25."

Crap!

So... I scrambled to D/L the new program, installed, all good... and then I thought... "Wait a minute, it's Wednesday!"

The date on my netbook was off by a day - so I was able to get my antivirus all straightened out before it actually expired.

It's funny - the last time we were hit with these types of household disasters was 20 years ago. We were a young couple in our first home, with a 2 year old son. We were both laid off from our jobs in the same week and within days, the well pump and the furnace died.

My reaction at the time, was panic, "We're going to lose our house!" To which my husband replied "Yep, we probably will."

This did nothing to calm my hysteria. (Note to new husbands: If you learn nothing else, learn when it is appropriate and even expected to lie to your wife.)

20 years later, our reactions are somewhat different. Life does that to you. This time he said,"It'll be fine, don't worry."

After the third repair bill, his response was a shrug, "It is, what it is."

Then we went out to dinner.

Life has a way of taking the edge off things. I've learned not to stress about things I can't control. I try to find joy in the simple things in life. This year for Christmas, along with my netbook I asked for and received Tinkerbell floormats for my Jeep.

Not a huge thing, but I begin and end each day with a smile at the start of my hour-long commute.


The moral of this story - find what makes you smile.

For me - it's Tink.