JUST ANOTHER DAY

I woke up this morning with a “wonky head”. That’s what I call it when I have a touch of vertigo. It just seems to make me feel wonky. A “wonky head” is not incapacitating, though. Believe me, I’ve had bouts of vertigo where I spent the entire day in the bed, not moving my head one iota. Those are the worst because you still have to get up to go to the bathroom, and that is a nauseating thing. Luckily, I haven’t had vertigo that bad since I retired, and I attribute that to my greatly decreased stress level.

The weather today has gone back to being dreary. We went for what seemed like the entire month of January without seeing the sun. Okay, maybe it came out and blessed us with its presence a time or two. But for the most part it has been overcast and gray. Then we had two days this week where the sun came out and the temperatures got up to around 40 degrees! It was so nice. Now we are back to the gray, and I don’t know if that has anything to do with my “wonky head”, but I wouldn’t doubt it.

There has been zero excitement around here, but I guess on one level that might be a good thing. The days are spent with listening to audiobooks, reading articles online and checking out FB, collecting new recipes, puzzling, cooking, eating, watching TV, sleeping…wash, rinse, repeat. In amongst all that I also spend some time watching hummingbirds. Lately there have been a lot of visits, and it seems to me that I am getting several different hummers now. Last week I shared with you some pictures of one that I think is an immature male. Here’s his picture below for comparison. He’s the one with feathers that stick out to the side, and also the “beard”.

Lately I have noticed one that has a little different coloring than the male I was previously seeing. Although, that could just be due to the way the light is hitting his feathers. I think this one might be a first-year male Anna’s hummingbird because the feathers on his gorget that stick out to the side seem like they aren’t as long as the other guy’s. All of this is conjecture, though, and they could be the same hummingbird. I really don’t know how to tell one from the other!

Since I was calling the other male hummingbird “Rodney”, I have decided to call this little guy “Rodney, Jr.” or just “Junior” for short. He came to visit so many times that I had to add more nectar to the feeder after a couple of days because it was almost empty!

IT’S PUZZLING

We are still doing our puzzling thing every day. Well, some days if I have a lot of cooking to do then I have to skip the puzzling. But Linda works on it pretty much every day. We listen to music while we puzzle, and you would not believe how fast the time goes.

We got several new puzzles for Christmas…Santa Claus knows what we like. We’ve already done most of them because it only takes us a couple of weeks to get one finished. One of the new puzzles was a Charley Harper drawing of birds entitled We Think the World of Birds. Of course, you know we would like this puzzle! It was great fun to do and was fun to try and figure out the names of the birds.

The last puzzle we finished was a Star Wars puzzle. This was one of my favorite puzzles because it had a lot going on, and didn’t have huge areas of just one color. And, as an extra bonus, the puzzle maker included a fold-out picture of what the completed puzzle looks like, so we didn’t have to go by just the tiny picture on the box. Right now we are working on a puzzle of flowers, entitled Posy Patch, and it had a fold-out picture as well. Both the Posy Patch and the Star Wars puzzle were made by the same company, Buffalo Puzzles.

PARTING SHOT

Summer Girl took advantage of the sun the other day while it was out. She found some sun on her favorite place, the big bed. That’s her napping buddy, Victoria Valentine, joining her in the sun. Finally, I got a picture where you can tell she is a cat and not just a black blob.

Join me every Wednesday (barring any unforeseen circumstances) for more from the Southerner in the Northwest.