As some of you already know, there was a litter of kittens born in the woods in our neighborhood.  They keep coming around looking for food, so we put some food out for them in the hopes that sometime soon we'll find someone that'll be willing to capture them and at least get them fixed if not find them a good home.  Interestingly, a raccoon lives in the woods too and also likes kitten food, but does not like cameras.

Brie purchased some sort of "Moon Plant" at the Helena ACE Hardware a while back.  It gets its name since it only blooms in the evening or at night.  It has little pods of seeds that it drops periodically.

Remember the Freak Moth?  I'm sure this isn't the same one since it's been so long, but it sure did get the cats attention.

Ever seen a squirrel shimmy up the post of a bird feeder?  I think this is impressive:

 

 

We had Easter at our house for a bunch of our friends...

We did secret-Santa style easter baskets.  Steve drew my name and in it there was a Yard-O-Beef.  Here's a picture relative to a DVD case, so you can see it's not quite a yard, but it's certainly large enough to beat someone with.

 

I think this is the most I've seen at once so far...  they're about 6 inches across at most.  Four turtles on a log in our "lake":

We (and the AOII ladies) threw a big bash at our place in honor of Emily and Jeremy.  It was a hawaiian/luau theme:

Some of you might have heard this story already, but our neighbors tried to burn a pile of their leaves in the corner of their yard.  They didn't make a fire break or even have a pail of water nearby.  As you can see, it quickly caught into the very dry leaves in our back yard.  Fortunately, they quickly made a break with their rake to keep our entire back yard from going up.

Once again, the Jetta helped us get out Christmas tree home.

Laura and I stained/sealed our deck last fall.  One of the gallons of stain was stiff enough a paint stir would stand up in it.  For those of you that don't know, stain is typically about the consistency of water, so this stuff was pretty bad off.  The good old folks at Home Depot were more than happy to swap it out for a new one.

Back in November, Chris, Christian, and Emily came into town to visit:

 

 

As always, the obligatory picture up Christian's nose:

Our friend Virginia (owner of Delicious To Go) provided the food for the shower.  Special just for halloween was some sort of a dip that was in the shape of a brain:

Laura and Lauren were in full costume (as usual):

Our costumes matched...  aren't we cute?

Brie was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and Steve was Scuba Steve.

Carrie was the easter bunny, Emily was Jem and the Rockers, and Jeremy was Wayne.

Laura spreading her wings:

This has to be the absolute best self-picture I've ever seen.  Even more impressive is she took this with a Nikon D70 SLR, so it was odd shaped and heavy:

 

I took this picture out of the living room window.  As you can see by the color of the wood, this was before we cleaned/stained the deck.

So Laura wakes up one day to the sound of a backhoe in our front yard.  As it turns out, it was the Birmingham Water Works changing out our water meter.  Apparently the bills we were seeing weren't normal (we'd get a $30, then a $9 and a $9 just to repeat again) and our meter kept getting stuck.  So they were out here digging in the yard to replace it with a working one.  I'm afraid our water usage will go way up - anyone know how to get the meter stuck again?

Ah...  our brand new meter with less than 30 cubic feet of water used.  Sadly we're probably WAY higher than that now with sprinklers in the summer, etc.

And then there was some home improvement by us.  There are quite a few places in our house that leak air and believe me, we're paying enough for air conditioning.  So I have taken it upon myself to slowly replace things that aren't energy efficient (for example the door between our garage and the house didn't seal at all and wasn't insulated).  So I went to Home Depot the other day and bought a ton of stuff and brought it home in the Home Depot truck:

Notice the 16 foot long boards that didn't really fit no matter where I put them?  The bed of the truck was only 8 feet long, so sticking them straight back would have made them unstable to travel.  After getting home I wished I had put the ends of them against the tailgate and the rest of the board over the cab.  It would have been a little trickier to go on the interstate, but it would have made them much more stable on surface streets.

So that's 4 16' pieces of pressure treated wood (for the deck), two rolls of insulation and 3 sheets of plywood (for the plant ledge), a door (for the garage), and another door (for the attic).  It will probably take me several weeks to actually complete all of these projects, but at least I don't have to rent the truck again.

"Honk If You Publix" (You can't really see it in the picture, but I thought it was pretty funny).

Hummingbird:

Normal Bird:

 

How did CB get a grape?  I really don't know.  I figure it was left behind by someone at our last party.  It was starting to get a little squishy and had loose skin.  Kinda fitting CB had it, isn't it.

So I finally decided it'd be a good idea to chop down the forest of weeds we had in our back yard.  Unfortunately, I had to do it all by hand:

Also decided to pressure wash part of the back sidewalk with Max's pressure washer (thanks Max!).  I still need to do the driveway.  Hopefully I'll get around to that sometime soon:

And finally...  Laura thought she met her maker the other day...  a wasp flew in the house and she was very afraid.  I came home early that day to remedy the situation, but when I got there, there was no sign of the wasp at all.  The next day when I got home from work, Laura had found it and it was doing the backstroke in a puddle of wasp spray in the foyer:

This weekend I think we accomplished what Rob wanted us to do...  party hard:

Christian and some friends came over from Atlanta and partied hard as well:

Brian showed up for the third consecutive time, further backing up his story that he shows up when he's invited:

Rob hung out with all the ladies.  I've never been quite sure why they put up with him:

Fun was had by all:

And there was only one minor incident...  do you see what Christian is standing in?

That would be most of a 10 pound bag of CB's cat food.  And what's the best way to pick up 10 pounds of cat food off of a flat floor?  With a flimsy paper plate of course:

I'm still trying to figure out how it was that Jennifer went from standing in the previous picture to laying down in cat food in this one.  I would say she was rolling around on the floor because she was laughing so hard, but I think it might have actually been that she slipped.

Anyway, Dave is confused by the lack of efficiency with which Christian is cleaning up the mess:

But before he can act, Max swoops in to the rescue:

So all in all, I think everyone had a good time.  Even little Poo had some fun:

I think Doug has the right idea. 

So over the past couple days I've been replacing boards on our deck that have cracked over the last 2 years of its existance.  The most important part of the process though is that I'm using screws to fasten the boards down instead of nails.  Some of the boards look like the guy with the nail gun was either high or being pushed over with great force.  There have been a few nails that missed the joists completely.  And one where someone must have been trying to release some anger (it either missed one joist by 8" or it missed the next joist by 8").  I know you get what you pay for and it was probably the lowest bidder, but come on.

On the bright side, the staircase and about 1/3 of the deck floor has been strengthened.  I hope to get the rest of it done soon as the new boards I am putting down probably need a few weeks/months to dry out before we can stain/seal the deck. 

So I've seen just about everything in our neighborhood on top of one of those realtor signs...  "Builder Pays $1000 of Closing", "New Listing", "Tray Ceilings", "Lake Lot", and a very popular one: "Sold".  I think this one is the strangest one yet:

This is so sad...  apparently someone in our neighborhood had their box fall off the post (or had it ripped off).  Not being an easy thing to replace, they took the mailbox and lashed it to the pole using duct tape.  Funny how it ends up looking like a makeshift cross.

For any of you that have ever seen the movie Sideways...  I thought this was a very amusing site:  http://www.merlotfightsback.com/

This is George:

This is up close on what's in the bottom right of this picture:

So as you see, George made a new friend.

Where are Bud and Emilia do you think?

So the other day Laura and I were sitting in our living room and Laura noticed some movement in our (very late to take down) Christmas tree.  As it turns out, it was a butterfly.  It must have cocooned in our tree before it was chopped down in North Carolina and sold to us by some boy scouts.  We quickly captured it and set it outside and then realized that it was supposed to be below freezing that night and didn't figure a newborn butterfly could handle it.  We put it in a container for the night and Laura let it out the next day in the sun.  The light hit the butterfly and apparently dried its wings and got its blood circulating.  Laura looked it up an apparently it's a Pipevine Shallowtail.  Here is a picture Laura took after it flew away.

Ever wondered how people without SUVs or trucks get 8 foot Christmas trees home?

So for Thanksgiving we managed to put up accent lighting on the house.  For Christmas we added a lighted wreath and garland around the door, and candlesticks in the windows.  We had them all hooked up with X10 so we wouldn't have to run around and plug everything in (and we could put it all on a timer).

So Laura and I got a bunch of pansies and violas for our front yard and spent quite a few days before Thanksgiving making our house look a little more colorful.  We found quite a few interesting items in our yard that were left behind by the builder, but probably the most disturbing was the large hunk of concrete that was left less than two inches from the surface of our flower bed.  Our neighbor Max was kind enough to come over and help us remove it (he more or less did it as we stood around looking at how huge the boulder actually was).

We have a squirrel that routinely comes to sun himself on our back deck.  He will lay there with his arms and legs around the railing just being lazy:

Is it normal for ducks to have babies in the fall/winter?  I figured it would be a spring thing.  I took this picture on Sunday (10/30):

And here is boyfriend (the lizzard that taunts Bella through the window) shedding, I guess in preparation for the winter:

So what happened to our cold weather?  About a week ago we had some charcoal out in the "fire bowl" on our back deck and almost froze trying to roast marshmellows with it.  Now it's approaching 80 at the end of this week.  Go figure.  Is a white Christmas out of the question?

I reported a while ago that there was a new traffic light that'll help out traffic going to/from our neighborhood.  It is finally up and operational (it was hanging there for at least a month doing nothing).  At the moment it's too sensitive (changes almost immediately when a car pulls up) so it causes a traffic jam in the afternoon when it should wait a bunch a few people up then let them through, but I won't complain too much.

So the other day I was getting ready to work and had the feeling that someone was watching me:

Thanks goodness this wasn't our house - but I saw it on the way out of the neighborhood this morning...  can't believe it's the neighbor's tree.  Rumor has it the tree was cut by "professionals".  You can see the straight across cut they made on the trunk of the tree.  Brilliant.

I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw this...  it appears as if they have the equipment installed for a traffic light at Morgan Rd and Aviation.  Woo hoo!  This was a terrible intersection.  Once this and the light at I459 get turned on, I will no longer have blind left turns at a stop sign onto major streets.  Yay.

Why is it the oddest looking creatures are always the ones trying to get into your house?  This moth was beating itself to death to try to get in our living room last night.  Its wingspan is approx 6 inches.

Our girl cat, Bella, has taken to sleeping on top of the entertainment center in our bedroom.  Keep in mind the shortest part of the ceiling pictured is 8 feet off the ground and the boards she is standing on are approximately 1 inch wide.  Apparently this is the way she gets up and she jumps down on the bed.  She also apparently does this when the fan is running only a few inches away from her.  A very strange one, that Bella.  By the way, excellent job camerawoman (Laura).

Our Christmas Cactus (courtesy of my sister Tara) seems to like the sunlight it gets in our living room.  See the sprout on the middle stalk?  Go cactus!

There were quite a few people setting off fireworks in our neighborhood over the weekend, but these are pictures of what we saw through all the trees...

And this was a picture taken down our street.  Not sure why they were setting off fireworks with all their house lights on.  It was also very humid and you can tell my lens was fogging up on the picture below.

Rob finally sent out pictures from our last party.  I really need to learn to take pictures while people are here.  A few of the highlights:

L to R: Cherrie, Laura, and Becca on the playground...

I'm really not sure how I slept through this, but at some point apparently Christian jumped me and Rob shot a flash in my face after I had already gone to bed:

The damage after the weekend (thank goodness there were a LOT of people here):

And the kicker for me....  out of all the pictures Rob took, this one turned out upside down.  I am curious to find out...  was Rob hanging upside down on the monkey bars?  Or do pictures of Crazy just turn out upside down for some reason?  The world may never know...

I am very excited...  they seem to have the light poles up at the exit I usually take to get home in the afternoons.  This will make my drive home WAY easier and faster once they get it done.  Let's just hope it's soon.  It looks like they have all the wires run and just have to hook things up.

My latest freebie project...  update our homeowner's association web site.  I only spent a few minutes on it this time around but hope to have a lot more dynamic content soon.  We'll see how that goes.

I believe our subdivision put a dock in before I had a blog...  this was one of the most bizarre things to watch them construct.  The little construction crew created two 4'x6' platforms and drove in 2 posts...  anchored one end of the platform to the posts then drove two more posts (in the water - using a sledgehammer from a canoe) in to hold it above water.  Then they took the other platform and submerged it at the end of the other one and then drove in two more posts at the end of that platform.  So the end result is more or less an underwater platform (which I assume is for embarking/disembarking on the long voyage around the tiny lake).  Maybe I should buy a kayak.  Not sure why they don't want anyone to use them though.  I wonder if this sign will be permanently up.

Last night I took this picture of a rabbit in our back yard.  Would you believe this picture was taken near dusk without a flash using a 300mm lens?  (I was a considerable distance from the rabbit).  Thanks to having a manual camera and photoshop for helping this picture look normal under such odd lighting conditions.

I believe there is a guerilla war going on in our yard.  On several occasions I have noticed this squirrel digging up nuts from our yard, taking them across the street, and burying them in a neighbor's yard.  Is it rotating nuclear ordinance to keep other squirrels from stealing it?  Or is it stealing from those squirrels to increase its own military standing within the neighborhood?  And when will our squirrels be coming by to teach this one a lesson?

Caught everyone enjoying the sunshine this afternoon.

From left to right:  Bill, Persey, Maggie, George, Petunia, and Bella.

A while ago now we remodeled our 1/2 bath.  Really this meant we pulled everything out (except the bottom half of the toilet), painted, and put everything back in.  The paint idea was Laura's - it's alternating high gloss and flat paint of the same color.  We also added the crown molding to make it match the rest of the house.