Vacation Starts Now!

Tomorrow morning we are leaving for our vacation. We are very excited. It has been an interesting week. I only worked Mon-Wed. My sister called me Tuesday night and told me that one of Meme's friends called her and said that Meme was not doing well at all. Of course, this upsets both of us and freaks us both out since I am about to leave for vacation. I got up super early this morning and drove to Dallas and went to see her. She is sick, but she doesn't look as bad as her friend had said. She was up and around and today was her last day of antibiotics for her pneumonia. Hopefully now her stomach will be better and the pneumonia will clear up. I took her some stuff that she can hopefully eat to make her stomach feel better and then she can build up to real food. Anyway, I felt a lot better after seeing her for myself. Scott took half a day off today so that he could help me get things done around the house since I was going to spend most of my day at the nursing home. We had a big list of things to do, but they are basically all done. Scott is burning some of my CDs to MP3s. He burned all of my Tim McGraw CDs to one disc together, and the same for Faith Hill, Kenny Chesney, and then we put our Jeff Foxworthy and Bill Engvall CDs all together on one. Isn't he so technologically advanced? That way, we have enough room in my CD case for all my CDs. Other than that we have spent our week getting ready for the trip. I did so much ironing on Sunday night, it was crazy. I know Shana is just cringing thinking about that much ironing! But, all that ironing and starching has made everything fit great into my suitcase...it's so flat! Here are some pictures from this week (if you click on the picture, you can look at it full size and see everything better, then just hit your back arrow to come back to this page):



I have been raising the blinds every evening for the cats and us to watch the birds. The other day when I was emptying the dishwasher, we had so many birds and I was able to get some really good pictures of them. This one is of one of our male cardinals. They usually fly away when I get close to the window with the camera, but I was able to be covert and stick the camera through the blinds and he didn't fly away.

Here is the cardinal in flight - when I pushed down the button, he was on the hanging basket and when the picture took, he had taken off. Isn't that awesome?! I am glad that I got a good picture of my hanging basket - just in case it dies while we are gone. I don't think it will because our neighbor is going to come take care of the cats and she said she would water the hanging basket as well. I got the idea for this basket from Southern Living. I think that it looks a lot like the one in the magazine.

I think that this bird is a Carolina Chickadee. He likes sunflower seeds a lot. I think that most of our birds like sunflower seeds the best. We refill it three times as much as the thistle or the "wild bird mix". So, if you have a bird feeder and have to make a choice, choose sunflower seeds.