Years since they've seen the plow

2003-11-05 - 8:24 p.m.

This morning I saw a bird in my backyard that I've never seen before. When I first saw it, I thought it was a scrub jay because we have a ton of those here and it was about the right size. But it quickly became obvious that it was not a scrub jay. I was going out to my backyard to mow the lawn so I had just yanked up the mini-blinds in front of our sliding back door. The bird looked at me and then flew off to land on our back fence. When it flew I could see the underside of its wings were bright red or orange. It sat on the fence staring at me and I stood inside the doorway staring out at it, staying perfectly still so as not to scare it again. The bird was all gray, darker on its back than on its underside and it had what looked like a little black bib on it's chest. Its beak was black and was medium length and sturdy looking, sort of like a woodpecker's. After we stared at each other for a while it decided I wasn't a threat and flew back down to the ground, giving me another display of it's brilliantly colored wings. Then it hopped around and and pecked at the ground for quite a long time, presumably eating the bugs out of our lawn. I tried to take a picture of it through the screen door, but of course that didn't work. So I snuck around the other side of the house and peaked around the corner to take a picture of it on maximum zoom. As soon as I tried to get closer than this it flew away. Do any of you have any idea what kind of bird this is?

At any rate, I ended up not mowing the lawn because, as usual, I couldn't get the lawn mower to start. I'll give it another try tomorrow after work. I have a feeling that if I get it going tomorrow, it will be the last time I mow this season. After all, fall is here. Yesterday when I went to work there was ice on my windshield.

I went to my optometrist today. I told her that the contacts she gave me to try only last for about four hours before they become uncomfortable. So she ordered another brand for me to try. I bet she cringes whenever she sees my name on the schedule, I'm such a pain.

And since I didn't mow, today, I decided to dig a hole. In my neighbor's yard. No, really. Actually, we had a tree that was growing in our yard right next to the fence between our yards. It got really big and the roots started causing havoc with the fence and the sidewalk around our house so we decided to chop it down. That was a long time ago. We still haven't entirely dealt with the big roots. Well, my family dealt with the ones on our side of the fence, but the neighbors haven't done much with theirs. The have one huge root still left. The fence between our yards has been down for a long time now and it's generally a big mess over there. So I decided to dig out their root. I'm so sore now.

Oh, and by the way, someone actually read my NaNoWriMo story. And his unsolicited review was, "It's very fluid, I kinda liked it. I was grinning like an idiot at work and missed someone saying goodnight 3x in a row. It's a little silly, but entertaining." That just might've made my day. He kinda liked it.

NaNoWriMo Progress: 5,752/50,000