Nesting

After an extremely mild November, the weather’s shifted over the past couple days. It seems all the world’s hunkering down for winter. This afternoon snow started falling down gently, about half an inch accumulating in the course of a couple hours. As much as I protest against winter, I’m glad for the definite change of seasons. The weird, rainy, dark extension of fall I had my winter in London was a little off-putting when you’re used to winter being something completely different from anything else you see all year.

We moved the bird feeder on Saturday to the window on the other side of the Shack and chickadees started flocking to it even before we’d gotten it completely secured. Mr. Squirrel's none too pleased with the feeder’s new locations. No more free lunches for him, although after a good half day of planning and surveying the new reality, he managed to reach the feeder by launching himself from the window. Unfortunately for him, the momentum of the leap seems to be too much for him to stay on the feeder for more than a moment. Soon he won’t be making the leap at all when we remove the screen window he’s been clinging to.

I just submitted our first Project Feederwatch tally: 5 chickadees and 3 blue jays. For Feederwatch you don’t count how many birds you see over the course of watching your feeders, but rather the highest number of a species you saw at one time. I’m hoping for a little more variety of species –that’s not to demean the fascinating behaviors of the ever polite chickadees – and I’m sure that will happen once we’ve established ourselves as consistent source of sunflower seed. Currently, the chickadees are going through an entire feederful of seed each day. They’ll eat us out of house and home if they keep that up!

This morning, I managed to finish editing the last novel chapter on November’s “to do” list. That’s all well and good, but it’s only one line of that particular list. Tomorrow we flip over to the December writing goals list and I’m hoping for a few more checkmarks on that than on November’s. That said, I may not have done terribly well with what I expected to get done in the month of November, but I did end up with a bunch of unexpected paying work. It hardly seems I’ve been squandering my time.

I held my first interview of several for the articles that need to be written over the next couple weeks. The full time housekeeping job comes to a close this week and that will free up plenty of time for interviews and writing. I’ll be glad for it.

We had a felting frenzy on Saturday and Andy’s now the proud owner of a lovely felted cap. I put in another yarn order yesterday. There are plenty more Christmas presents to fashion and felt before the holiday’s upon us. The Christmas cards will have to be addressed and sent sometime soon as well. All's cozy and well at the Shack.