Birdwatching

Today Audrey and I went to the Wild Bird Center to get a bird guide. Some of the birds here are familiar, like cardinals, mockingbirds, and mourning doves. Others, like robins, are birds we haven't lived with but know from the book Mom gave Mary for Christmas a few years ago. In fact, there's a robin that sits in a tree in our front yard singing, "Cheer up, cheerily cheerily, cheer up!" over and over and over. Some birds are completely new to us. As soon as I opened up the guide, I recognized the brown and white bird that was singing on our front porch railing the other day, and found out that it's a brown thrasher. But now, as I'm looking through the Cornell All About Birds website I'm thinking maybe it wasn't a brown thrasher. The brown thrasher is a bigger bird than the one I saw, and its song is different. None of the other brown striped birds on the ID card sound like the one I heard. Next time it shows up in my yard, I'll have to see if I can tell what it is.

Garden

I went outside to take garden pictures and heard a crashing as this big deer bounded away. She jumped over the creek, then stood still and stared at me. I zoomed in as much as I could and took a couple pictures. She's mostly in the shadows, but you can see her eyes glowing.



Here's what else is in our garden:

really tall red flowers



broccoli



mint, sage and chives



flowers that look like fireworks. I saw a hummingbird near them the other day.



Here are some garden flowers in the kitchen.





I'll have to find out the names of all these plants that grow in North Carolina. I called a landscaper who used to work at the North Carolina Botanical Garden, and we're going to schedule a time when he can come over and walk around the yard with me and tell me about what grows here and how to take care of it (or get rid of it, if it's poisonous or invasive).

The living room is now a cardboard-free zone!

Here's a picture of the front part of the living room.



And here's the back half. They used to be two separate rooms, but the previous owners knocked down the wall between them to open up the space. Scott found a nail on the wall above the fireplace, so he hung up the picture of May. The blue, red and black in the painting look great with the red couch, blue pillows, and black chair. This is the view from the kitchen pass-through.

Look, I found the kitchen counters!

Scott bought some shelves yesterday. He had to trim them down to fit the cabinets, but once he did, I started excavating. He had to go out to Lowe's again to find something to plane the sticky doors, and when he got home he said, "Hey, when did you get someone over to install counters in our kitchen?"

Moving out

We got to eat a pineapple from our backyard before leaving South Florida.



If April showers bring May flowers, what do Mayflowers bring? Furniture!



We made it all the way to St. Augustine the first day, and spent the next morning sight-seeing.



Next stop was Savannah. Our hotel was in the historic district and had a pool on the roof. We all had a good time spashing around on the first afternoon. Day two, we explored the touristy shops along the river and met my high school friend Beverly and her goddaughter for lunch and a tour of the Juliette Gordon Low house. Mary got a special pin and patch to wear on her Brownie uniform that you can only get when you visit the house.



The next day was a long drive from Savannah to our new home. The movers came the next day. They unloaded pretty quickly and were done by 1:30. Here's Scott the human trash compactor.



Here's the kitchen on the first day. It looks better now. At least, all the boxes are out. There's still a lot of stuff on the counter because we haven't figured out where to put it. There are only two upper cabinets, and they only have two shelves each. We tried to get lumber cut at Home Depot to make more shelves, but their saw was broken.

Grackle feeding another grackle

Reinvent the Wheel

Our new science unit is Inventions. We're using a book called Reinvent the Wheel, and so far we've reinvented the wheel (naturally), the shadouf (an ancient Egyptian device for watering crops, and a catapult.

First, we invented the potter's wheel, but I didn't take any photos. Next, we had to figure out how to use the wheel to make it easier to transport our cartload of goods to the marketplace. Dragging a travois over rough ground (okay, carpet) is a real drag. Our cart wheels were kind of floppy, so they didn't roll smoothly, but we were able to stablize them a little bit with some Play-Doh (I'm sure that's what the ancient Mesopotamians used as well).

We couldn't find a good forked stick for our shadouf. That's one of the problems of living where there are mostly palm trees. So we used the handle of our handy dandy pitchfork. The lever stick didn't swivel easily to water the crops, but the rocks taped to the stick sure made it easy to lift a heavy bucket of water -- just imagine the little paper cup is several times bigger.

-------Photos coming when Blogger isn't being so SLOW-------------

We built the catapult on a day when Scott stayed home sick from work so he could play with it, too. I don't mean he stayed home so he could play with the catapult. He was home, so we decided to build the catapult that day instead of the next day. Our farthest launch was 9.5 feet with a mini-marshmallow, and 5 feet with a large marshmallow. Science that involves marshmallows is always fun!