Flowers, a card, and stray chickens

Check it out! Two members of our home meeting blessed me with flowers tonight:


From Steve

From Jesse

I was so touched.

Also, here's a birthday card I made today for my brother-in-law, who's turning 40 this weekend!



I've lately been trying my hand at cardmaking, inspired by my talented friend Vanessa (you inspire me too, Jenny, but I don't have Photoshop!) and this card is far from perfect, but I'm sort of posting as a mile marker for myself so that if I get any good at this, one day I can look back at my "early work" and see some progress!

And in other news, since I know all my readers yearn for updates on the activities of our chickens, today the doorbell rang just as I was trying to get Caroline down for a nap. It was Stuart, my next door neighbor (a.k.a. Oscar's dad). He kinda scratched his head and said, "Hey, are those your chickens in my front yard?" Sure enough, those naughty girls had figured out a way to squeeze through the closed gate (!) and were huddled in the neighbor's bushes, apparently scaring the "heck" (he used stronger vocab) out of him when he opened his front door. He told me, with a gracious chuckle (and I got the feeling that maybe he'd been percolating on this one for quite a while), that we were "the most unusual neighbors he'd ever had," and as we flushed them out of the bushes and chased them back into their rightful territory, he remarked with some bemusement that he'd spent the morning lecturing students on screenwriting and now was spending his afternoon herding chickens. I told him maybe he could work it into a movie somehow.

Coming to a big screen near you ... one of these years.