"What 's a week-end?" as spoken by Lady Grantham has a much more acerbic tone than when I say it. Not that the end of the week is profoundly different than any other day of the week in character but a hold over from the work world still shadows my being. We had a little dusting of snow the other day and one yesterday but according to the overly excited weather news media we are going to get pounded. I'll wait to see, of course, predictions have been less than accurate this Winter.
I cloved up a pear yesterday. I ran out and the back is a little skimpy. This is one juicy little pear I will tell you, juicy. The drying may take a while.
It has taken me a while to come up with the Winter mantel decor. While doing the studio purge I found an old (I mean probably 60 year old collection) of little birds that Husband's Granny used in a dining room decoration that I remember well. She had a thorn tree branch in a crock, painted Winter white and had all these sweet little birds perched all over it. The tree is long gone but I bagged up those birds when I cleaned out the house. Many of them were in bad shape and needed to go go their reward. Then by accident I found a bag hanging on a hook in my storage room and lo and behold, a bag of birds. New birds, still in their little cellophane wrappers! A plan was hatched.
Birds in the branches, that was the plan. Keeping the antique butter churn, pewter and iron I confiscated the branch from a dining room installation, popped in some of the birds and viola'.
I need to work on getting a full length photo with a different camera but it is sort of cute. Because of a severe deer over-population here (they were on my front porch yesterday morning, A few of the brighter ones must have thought that the wreaths hanging on the from porch with their little silver twinkle pieces were food, I know, something needs to change) I cannot feed my birds anymore. The deer literally destroy everything in their path. It is a large herd. Sometimes they all come through and I can count 30+ at a time tromping through my back yard. So my birds are content to hang out on the family room mantle.
Not the same but it will do for now. Despite the efforts to reduce the size of the deer herd it is really difficult when others feed them and my property is the interstate between the food and the forest. Dear son, who is a hunter, came again yesterday, hunting paraphernalia and all, but couldn't do it. The darn things follow him around like dogs. They walk right up to you. Really. Then they they look at you with those pleading eyes and there goes all the intent.
These birds don't eat much!
The wood on this mantle is one large piece of oak. I give it a nice coat of bees wax several times per year to keep the wood from drying.
The clove studded tangerine is living there too.
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