Today must be a Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays. (Douglas Adams)

I went to bed yesterday at 9:30 pm. Normally I would be up and busy until about at least 11:30, and more likely 1:30 am! But it was just one of those days where it was easier to just give up early and call it a day.

I'm really counting on today being better.

You can take the girl out of the country, but you can't take the country out of her apartment. (Pat Greenlee)

I was telling a co-worker about Becky's latest "pet" yesterday and her response (my quote of the day) made me laugh out loud. Which was good thing, since I could really do with a good giggle. Sigh. At least there's only 19 more days of tax season. 

You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance. (Franklin P. Jones)

Becky spent the day at a friend's house, and I think she had a good time. After all, she came home with a egg to hatch. (My children's friends are definitely interesting!)

The egg (which has not been named, yet) has been bundled into a sock and settled into a makeshift nest. The egg is about a day old already, so in 14 days we'll be able to "candle" it to see if there is a chick inside. If so, around day 21 we'll be looking for a permanent home for the chicken.

We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones. (Francois de La Rochefoucauld)

I'm feeling very proud of myself. I worked this afternoon at the tax shop, then did a couple of loads of laundry, and made dinner. It's only 8 o'clock and the kitchen is already cleaned up and I'm sitting on the couch, sipping tea while "working" and surfing the net with Daisy. (I love having a laptop!)

You must be subtle and notice the hidden to be victorius. (Sun Tzu)

Well, I'm in trouble with the condominium homeowners' association. Apparently they don't like the idea that I would (1) be out looking for "weeds" in our professionally landscaped and expensively maintained yard and that (2) that I could actually find some! Actually I was surprised that I did manage to find some clover, hidden in the thick St. Augustine grass.

So I have my entry for this week's photo scavenger hunt after all. The challenge was for "clover," with two bonus points for four-leaf clover and five more points if it's photographed growing in the wild. I'm not as lucky as KeithAlanK, who is the only person I've ever heard of that actually found a four-leaf clover (and could back up that claim!), but I'm still feeling pretty lucky for finding the clover.

And it must have had some luck, since when I got back from hunting through the grass I found an email from Brookston letting me know that I had gotten an honorable mention for last week's landscape entry!

Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying. (Fran Lebowitz)

I picked up the boars' meat from the butcher yesterday. There was a lot of it! We have more than 25 packages of pork sausage in my freezer, and Cheyenne has even more than that in his freezer. Pictures of the hunt have been posted.

You may delay, but time will not. (Benjamin Franklin)

I got a lot of things done today, and they were all things that needed to be done. Unfortunately, none of them were the one thing that I absolutely had to get done today. So I guess I'm going to be up late again.

I did want to take a moment to post this picture. It's of one of my favorite places, just outside of Cherokee, North Carolina. I'm already counting down the days until our trip there this summer for the family reunion.

This picture is also my entry for this week's Scavenger Hunt. The search was for a landscape of earth and sky, with a bonus point if the landscape is roughly equal between earth and sky.

Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done. (Andy Rooney)

I'm so excited! I am now the proud owner of "Daisy," an XPS m140 Dell laptop. If anyone has anything bad to say about Dells (and you know who I'm talking to!), I just don't want to hear it. I think Daisy is wonderful. I've spent a lot of time justifying my need (okay, desire) for a laptop. Now I actually have to put it to use productively. And how do I start? By making a post to this blog, of course. Oh the freedom of typing this entry as I walk around the house...

I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.

(E.B. White)

Both PJ and Becky woke up this morning in grumpy moods. The fact that I'm in an especially obnoxiously cheerful mood didn't help the morning go smoothly. Maybe the rest of their day will get better.

I noticed that the tree in front of my parking space has blossoms on it today. This is the same tree that I used for the dead leaf in Brookston's Scavenger Hunt last month. What a difference a couple of weeks can make!

We are Hunters and Gatherers

It took a while, but Becky and I finally have all the strawberries from yesterday cleaned and bagged. It's a little disappointing; after all the work we did, I feel like I should have more than just eleven bags of berries. (Of course, we did bag them in 2.5 lb portions...)

PJ came home from his first hunting trip just bursting with excitement. My cousin Cheyenne had invited PJ to join him and Ralph on their hunting weekend, and they really made it a special time for PJ. Apparently he got to shoot lots of different types of guns, and he made his first kill (a boar). According to PJ, Cheyenne has offered us a share of the meat from the boar PJ killed and Ralph has offered to have the boar's head mounted for PJ. I always did like Cheyenne best.

If you never did, you should. These things are fun and fun is good! (Dr. Seuss)

Yesterday morning Mom met us in Indiantown to do some strawberry picking. I've been wanting to do a roadtrip, and Indiantown (which is about 40 miles northwest) was the perfect trip. Becky and I put on a CD of my favorite oldies songs, and we had the windows down and the music blaring the entire ride.

This was the first time we had been to this strawberry patch, and it was really cool. The plants were in planters stacked on top of each other and designed to spin. Mom has decided she wants this same system as a garden at her house. (Another project for my brother-in-law!) Mom, Becky and I picked 35 pounds of strawberries before stopping for lunch! After lunch, we moved on to tomatoes and peppers.

Before leaving, I got mom to act silly with me and pose for a phoon:

Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday. (Don Marquis)

Brookston Photo Scavenger Hunt

"Neon Lights"

1 bonus point if your neon lights are at least two distinct colors.

2 bonus points if your neon lights are three or more distinct colors

Lately I've been leaving everything to the last minute. If it wasn't for the photo hunt, I'd probably never make any entries in this blog! Becky and I went out this evening looking for an interesting neon light. Most of the ones we found were in the windows of bars (and we decided that beer signs weren't acceptable for us to use) or were ordinary single-color "open" signs. We finally settled on this picture of our favorite Chinese restaurant. It's a tiny mom-and-pop shop in a little strip mall down the street from us. The owner is wonderful, and even if the food wasn't good (and it is terrific!) it would still be worth going to this shop on a regular basis just for the customer service. The owner remembers everyone's name, and what they like. She asks after their families, and remembers details of their lives. For example, my mom came with me one time to pick up an order and ever since the owner has remembered to ask about her and send greetings.

We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.(Arthur O'Shaughnessy)

I can't believe that I've gone an entire week without posting any pictures. And I have lots of pictures that I could have posted, since I took over 175 photos while my cousin Charlie and his family were visiting. (And that was just in three days!)

Once again waited until the last minute to put my picture online for Brookston's Photo Hunt. This week we were looking for a woodwind instrument, with a bonus point if it is a real instrument (i.e. not a toy). I had originally planned on doing a photograph of Becky playing her saxaphone, but she didn't bring it home to practise this week. (I really need to talk with her about that.) I played around with Cari's flute, but I couldn't come up with anything original.

Mom and I are going to the Rennassaince Festival in the morning, and when I was getting out my costume I found my Ocarina. This is a handmade clay flute, one octive, that was popular during the Rennaissance period. Ocarinas have a beautifully whimsical sound.