random thoughts

It's been a little while. I don't like how infrequently I've been on here. I feel like I've been neglecting my blog. Sad.

Well, I'll start off with the garden. That's the thing that's freshest in my mind. The garden has been ravaged by the neighbor's cat and they couldn't care less. When I told them that I had a "critter problem" and needed to take care of it, she asked what I was going to do. I told her traps or poison (which I have very little intention of doing...it IS a pet, after all) and instead of thinking "oh, how can I keep my cat inside", her reaction was, literally, "Oh no, I'm going to lose my cat." It shocks me that it doesn't even occur to her to keep her house pet...in the house. Anyway, this cat has eaten a row of green beans (about a dozen plants), about thirty sugar snap pea plants, and four lima bean plants which it literally dug out of the ground to eat. Grrrr. That's quite a bit of damage. I might end up with three lima bean plants out of the three dozen or so seeds that I put in there.

Anyway, so I figured that I had to do something. I read that ammonia would keep a cat away. Nope. Not at all. That's the night the digging occurred. So then I read that there's a product called Shakeaway that is made with predator urine that triggers fear in the cat. And not just something small but, like, coyotes, fox, and bobcats are used for this stuff. I also figured that the best way to keep a cat out of the garden is to make it uncomfortable or even painful to be in the garden. So I sprinkled nails on the ground. Not to hurt it but to make it difficult or impossible for the cat to walk in there. It's only been just under 48 hours but so far so good.

Next, my camera died last week. Oh, I was bummed. I really loved my camera. Mike got it for me for Christmas last year and I really loved my camera. The biggest drawback to it was that the recovery time (the time it took to write the picture on the disc) was soooo long. So, we went looking for a camera. I had to borrow from the trip money and I'm going to put it back with interest but we found a camera that normally sells for $329 on sale for $199. I could not pass this up. It is a Nikon Coolpix and I love it. I was playing with it and that's where all these pictures came from. If I can remember, I want to upload all of them to Photobucket. You have to see the pictures of her cartwheels and of her 'backflip'. The camera takes something like 7 pictures per second and is super cool. I love it.

Lastly, our second batch of baby birds has hatched. We had four eggs in the nest and we might actually have four birds but it is really hard to tell. They are an ugly mass of paleness, baldness, patchy feathers, and naked bird so there could be four in there. There's also a picture of our very unimpressed Momma who happens to also be unimpressed with our desire to actually be in our own yard. She's set up a nest here for five years, people. You would think that by now she would know that we're no threat. Well, unless you consider two very nosy kids peering through the deck at your nest as a threat. And yes. I DO know that it isn't the same bird that's returned every year. But since these birds seem to build in exactly the same spot and will reuse existing nests if I don't remove them fast enough, I assume that they know this spot of there and thus deduce that they are at least related. Yeah, I know better but this is what I'm telling myself. But at least the birds this year aren't swooping at our heads while we're in the yard. That was an issue last year.

At least the robins are smarter than the sparrows, though. Those birds were trying everything they could think of to build a nest in the light fixture right outside our front door. Um, that bulb gets hot enough to literally and truly bake any eggs laid in there. Dumb sparrows. It took me three days of pulling the nest apart several times each day to finally convince them that their real estate agent was trying to sell them a bad property. She told them that it was a good starter home but she failed to mention all the drawbacks....like the fact that their offspring would become hard cooked.

Ok. I'm off to bed. I got the body of my sweater done and I just have the sleeves and the neckline to make. I'm feeling my resolve weakening. I usually only knit on one project at a time because I get bored quickly and I know that I wouldn't go back to the projects that are nearly done out of sheer boredom. But I'm really excited to knit with this super super soft yarn that I just discovered for myself (Malabrigo...it's like baby bottom it's so soft and smooth...). I just know that if I start working with that, I won't want to go back to working on my plain Jane boring vanilla sweater, though. Decisions, decisions. (Pictures of the sweater to follow...)