What made you smile today?

A hot ol' time coming up in the D & D household!

I've just seen the weirdest film ... Zebraman. True cult. Cheerful makin' cult

That makes me so melancholy.

Aw, Diane, Hatch chilis aren't so terribly hot.

Is it legal to ship Hatch chilis across state lines? We would love to get a pound or so of them. They aren't available in VA.

I can find them canned here. I've seen them dried too.

RJB, send us your address and we'll find some and send them along. Littek's right, they aren't so hot that you lose your ability to taste for several hours, as in habanero's.

so anyway, when we moved here we noticed there was 2 families of finch's nesting next door so we hung up a feeder on the patio for the little (cute) buggers but the sparrows were eating all the seed we put in the feeder so we got a finch feeder (Finch's can eat while hanging up-side down) and this morning I was watching the Finch's gobbling up the thistle seed they seem to like so well and there was this one sparrow sitting off to the side watching the Finch's eat and after awhile he flew up to the finch feeder and attempted to hang on the perch upsidedown like the Finch's do and he immediately fell off the perch nearly landing on the patio floor on his head. The finch's returned and finished their morning feed as the sparrow flew away.

We also laugh when a hummingbird flies over to Fred's cage (our conure) and hovers, looking in as if to say-"whatcha doin in there, big boy."

And Fred says?

I laughed this evening with Silvia. I had put her brother on the hammock with her and was pondering what it was he was thinking. He was gazing up at the leaves with a little open-mouthed smile. He looked as if he was thinking poetic thoughts. So, I spouted into an ode to the moment from his point of view and Silvi latched on to the whole concept. So, she and I swapped odes: hers were about stinky diapers and kissing (sometimes about kissing dirty diapers) and mine, directed by her, were about love. She was dismayed that I didn't have enough kissing in mine. She's at an odd age.

I'm pretty grumpy, some life stuff, some news stuff. Posting grumpily. Felt something, looked up, and there were a bunch of birds -- sparrows I think -- standing very still in a row on a rainspout, all of them looking at me intently. When I looked at them they got all agitato, like gawkers staring at a celebrity and then the celebrity looks back at them. They kind of fidgeted, looked at each other, looked back at me, hopped a bit, looked star-struck.

I'd never noticed that area before, now I'm watching them -- there seems to be a nest, and an almost grown-up family? Hard to tell.

Anyway, they're helping.

{{sozobe}}

I'm worried about our brethern in FL tonight...
but I had to smile about this: several days ago, one of the A2K curmudgeons posted a piece of drivel about how, in dime-store romance fiction novels, some variation of this line occurs: "In the distance, a dog barks..."
I smile at how many of yall have managed to work that into a post in some way. Clever.

I liked that, sozobe!

Not having to work or to shop made me smile today.

newspaper:

"just like the Eskimos have a hundred words for snow, the Dutch has an unending vocabulary to describe sucky weather"

That was beautiful, Soz. Very, very beautiful.

My sister is going through a really, really tough experience right now, larger than life tough - but the kid is helping. I was talking to her on the phone last night, night before last, and she described how he's learnt to say "mamma" and "pappa" now - so he's up in his sweet, little room when he's supposed to be sleeping, or woke up early, standing up in his whatsitcalled holding on to the rails, and mouthing aloud, "pap-pa!", "mom-ma!"

He doesn't know yet what crying is, my sister discovered last week. At one point in the day, she just collapsed into sobs, and the little guy at first started laughing - laughing along to something that, if it was like anything he knew the sound of, was most like laughing. When he realised the tears were actually a bad thing, he reacted in kind. "Bah," he said, watching the tears and reaching his little fingers to her face, trying to rub them away, "bah". He didn't like it one bit, a sad mamma.

No matter how grumpy I am (and I was today morning) I read this thread and I am instantly smiling !!

One of my employees had a birthday today. Twenty-something. Her boyfriend came by and took her to lunch and, when they got back, there were balloons, candles and cake. Very nice.
As we were throwing away the paper plates and plastic forks, one of my other employees said, very quietly: "Today is my birthday, too."

aw, and then what?