Feeding the Birds vs. Flipping the Bird

It's a dangerous act, but we've taken to feeding the birds in our yard this summer. Those of you who have been following this blog understand what a reckless--dare I say foolhardy?--act this is, given the attack on our humble abode by the Cedar Waxwings back in April.

This is a thistle feeder. . . and it's been attracting little gold finches to our yard. (Nice little finches; not murderous Cedar Waxwings with rage in their hearts (and beaks.) By the way, last weekend a flock of 25 to 30 Cedar Waxwings sauntered into my friend, Sheila's, backyard. And one flew at and into her window! I'm prepared to whisk her to a safe-house if necessary.



Feeding the bird should not be confused with flipping the bird. For the first time in my life, I "flipped the bird"! It was just one of those things. My husband and I were driving down the street, competently, I might add. And some wild ones decided to swoop in front of us, and the passenger gave us the finger. We were baffled as to the reason, and why oh why didn't I pull out my camera and snap a shot? But I did manage to return the gesture in (un)kind. We felt like we had suddenly been dumped into a certain class of drivers poking along at tractor speed. . . but we weren't. Odd how sometimes drivers have this sense of "violated rights" once they get behind the wheel.

First Step toward Recovery: ShamWow! & a Sippy Cup

ShamWow! really did come to the rescue yesterday, sopping up wine out of my printer, around all of my papers, across my book shelf with my digiscrapped albums. (ShamWow! seems to be suspiciously enthusiastic about its mission when it comes to wine; you may recall it's earlier distinction in absorbing the broken glass and wine when my husband forgot he'd bought a bottle and it rolled out the side door of the van onto the garage floor. Maybe ShamWow! is over-compensating for it's sense of Shame about Vince.)

It could have been much worse. Much, much worse. A few inches to the left and the trajectory of the WineTsunami would have hit my laptop, and my external hard drive sitting on the floor. Today, I assessed the damage further, and bizarrely, my printer is still printing! It's just as crappy as it has been, but no worse.

The good news is that only about 16 of the digiscrapped pages look wine-dipped. I managed to find the .psd files of 15 of them, and will do the necessary conversions and send the pages out to be printed (especially since I also drenched all my blank photo paper.)

So, the first step, after admitting there is a problem, is ShamWow! to sop up the mess, and then Sharon's brilliant suggestion of a Sippy Cup! Of course! If first I'm spilling coffee, then the next day wine, all over my printer/computer/expensive stuff, this is the perfect solution!

And look how well ShamWow! blots up those tears! One would wonder (if one was you, not me)if I'm crying over the scrapbook pages, or about life having come to this: drinking Zinfandel from a Sippy Cup.







My husband is a tad horrified that this same person who went on a wine-tasting tour in Napa Valley last September would sink to this. Hey! I didn't SAY I'd be bringing it wine-tasting, if we ever do that again!

Red Wine and a Colossal Mess

"Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It's been 30 (give or take a few) years since my last confession. The only sin I want to confess is my blogging addiction. Not that there aren't more. Many more."

I love to blog! I love that you read my blog and sometimes laugh at my lame jokes! (Read the genuinely funny, by the way, comments that many of YOU submitted for the last photo, if you haven't had the chance to do so.) So when an opportunity came up to take an 8 week journaling workshop at a local coffee shop, I signed up.

Lest you think I have an alcohol addiction, let me tell you that I often drink a glass of wine with dinner. As a fairly anal person, I've literally marked with a Sharpie marker where 5 oz comes on the glass so that this is the amount I drink. (But how can I be SO messy???? Or maybe that's what anal actually means. . . )

Tonight was the first meeting, and I was rushing to eat dinner and get there in time. And given that I was a little anxious about this workshop, I didn't mind having a glass of wine with dinner.

Yesterday it was a spilled cup of coffee, all over my printer paper. Today it was the glass of wine, horribly spilled directly into my awful-anyway printer (which already turns everything pink).

. . . but also spilled all over some very cherished scrapbooks with digital pages. And that's what the photo above is showing, with pages separated by Kleenex--pages that took hour upon hours to make. I don't think it's really salvageable. . . .but, what do you think? Do you think red wine would meet the standards of being acid-free for archival purposes?

*sigh* . . . and of course I was late for the journaling workshop. And I smelled like a brewery (although my sweet husband pointed out that I actually smelled like a winery, so who is it who's really the anal one, after all?)

What's in YOUR refrigerator?

You know how you can really like your job, but some days are long and hard?

And then you happen to open the building break-room refrigerator, and you just never know what you'll find.

And sometimes, it can be a very entertaining find indeed!

Perhaps more teeth really should be put in the "No Smoking" messages!

Captions, anyone?

PS: My husband suggested I head off to the local meat market, and purchase a hunk of tongue and. . . .

Stinking, Rotten North Dakota Weather. In JUNE!

You'd whine too, if in JUNE your clothes dryer broke, and you hung your clothes out to dry. And the HIGH temperature of stinking rotten North Dakota only got to 54 degrees! Did I mention in JUNE!!!! And it seems like it's going to be our "perma-weather" for the next week or two.

It may LOOK beautiful out in my yard, in JUNE . . . with bleeding hearts. . . .

and Lupines. . . .

. . . and Lilacs. . . .

. . . luring us out there into the stinking, rotten, North Dakota weather, of only 54 degrees, in JUNE!

(I didn't whine much this past winter about the weather. But ENOUGH is ENOUGH!!!!!)

More of the "Fam"

Even the "little folk" were mesmerized by the photo slideshow that John (next photo, David's brother) and Maria (David's mom) put together for David's graduation.

Mary Ann's Little Gang

Did you ever read the children's book, "When the Relatives Came"? I loved reading this book to my kids when they were little. It showed a picture of a car piled high with people and luggage flying everywhere, crossing the country, to go visit the relatives. For years,Doug and I used to take our children off to Chicago at Christmas, and stay with Mary Ann and Bill.

And then we started getting stuck in snowstorms, my kids grew up and couldn't be torn away from their peer groups/school/work, and we stopped visiting. The book showed a visit that seemed like an "invasion", generating chaos and exhaustion, but cherished. Mary Ann and Bill always made us feel cherished. . . and Mary Ann would promptly mail back to Grand Forks all the stuff that my kids would forget and leave at their house.

Now, Doug and I can visit them, without kids, and are discovering the delights of playing with little kids that aren't your own. Here's Andy demonstrating self-protection while sliding down the steps.



And here's Joy, turning into an incredibly gorgeous little beauty.

My sweet, sweet sister. (Sorry, Mary Ann, about the flash going off in your face.)

And this is Bill, who has mastered photo-bombing with aplomb!

And as an aside. I can't believe I finally figured this out! I've been grousing about how much better my photos look in Bridge, than when I post them. Finally, I realized that something I read in a book about CS3 is just not the truth! The book said that CS3 automatically converted to sRGB in the save for web process. IT DOES NOT!!! So at least one of my miseries re: color angst has been solved! Today's photos are the first in months and months that are correctly in sRGB instead of RGB.

The House that Out-Disneys Disney

When we traveled to the Chicago area, a couple of weeks ago, we stayed with my sister, Mary Ann. Staying with her is always such a treat. This is one fun-loving family! They remodeled their house, and made it look like. . . well. . . Disney World!



Couldn't you just live forever on the porch alone, with the ceiling fans, and surrounded by Bill's own carefully tended palm trees? These are palm trees in Chicago, mind you!



And part of the fun is little Mr. Andy. Here he challenged Doug to a cut-throat basketball game! Later, he demolished Doug in a game of Halo. Again, note the palm trees in the background.



We had time for a picnic, but no luck in tracking down a picnic table. Given the miles you could travel in ND without stumbling upon another human being, this always amazes me. So we had a car picnic.

How we packed all of this in one day is one of those life mysteries. This is the day of the graduation party at Maria's house as well. We drove to Chicago, spent the day, and drove the 12 hours back to Grand Forks on Monday. . . in time for work on Tuesday.





Bill couldn't resist "laying hands" on his son. Note how un-fazed Andy is. He's so used to his dad's shenanigans!



These kids are such sweet hearts! For awhile, I was walking along with Andy, who told me with such abundant, gushing, feeling, how much he loved his big sister and missed seeing her now that she's in middle school and he isn't!


And my delightful, charming, niece, Joyce, who has the ability to communicate the most detailed saga of the Halo history, and trying to do it in a way that her aunt (me) could make sense of this complicated soap opera of the video-gaming world.


Bobbi made a comment yesterday on my blogthat just really cracked me up!
She asked how my family would handle it if someone were to bring a Canon into the fold! And the truth is that my son, Brian, is considering a Canon as he tries to figure out what video-capable DSLR would suit his needs in his school program, starting in July. He has to have such a camera, and I am shocked at how much I prefer he get a Nikon! I'm sure either brand will end up working just fine. . . but I have a definite preference! There's something viral about Nikon going on in my swarm's midst!

It's All Mary Ann's Fault! Dueling Nikon D40s

Really, it's all Mary Ann's fault. She was the first one to bring the Nikon D40 into our lives. We suspected nothing at the time. But then, one by one, first me, then Robert, Rina and Laurie all fell under the spell. Only Lee and Ronnie have remained untainted. But there is no vaccine.

My Litter Mates

"Litter Mates" probably isn't the right word. "Kin?" "Siblings?" "Beloved Brothers & Sisters?" "Clan?"

Silly us. Look how we "lined up." We haven't been together since my mother's funeral in 2000, and this is only 6 of the 7 of us. Ronnie, our oldest brother, (our "captain"), couldnt' make it to this graduation party. So in our excitement, we didn't exactly compose ourselves into a nice group shot; we simply lined up in our well-understood youngest-to-oldest arrangement.

Incredibly, these same 6 people once piled into one wretched Chevy Impala, with our mother and father, and took The Vacation, the One Big Trip, from Chicago to a Wisconsin cabin, in the '60s. You haven't lived until you've sat for several hot, sticky, hours in the back seat of an Impala, in two layers, arguing over which child with diapers was most leak-proof and/or squirmy, and was going to be on YOUR lap for the duration.