Backyard Birds

I remembered I'd taken this picture earlier this week and wanted to share it.

It's a (I assume) mother flicker showing its offspring how to eat the suet in our backyard. The mother perched on the post and ate from the side, then perched on top and ate a bit, then perched on the cage holding the suet to eat some more, I assume in an attempt to show the youngster the different ways it could eat the suet. The chick was small enough that it could stand on the top of the feeder and stretch out it's neck to peck at the block, however. It did eventually perch on the rod to the right and eat some that way, too, however.

It was fun to watch.

Sorry the picture is from so far away, but you can get an idea of what's going on from it. The chick the the gray thing on top of the brown bird feeder.

Crazy Full!

Our garage is packed to the gills (even though garages don't have gills) with stuff for our garage sale. Julia and I have plenty of stuff to sell, but then her mom and brother brought a bunch of boxes of their stuff to add to the mix and we're overflowing!

Here's some pictures to give you an idea of what it looks like. And this doesn't include the clothes we'll have to lay out on blankets on the ground and furniture we have to move out of the way and set up outside -- or a couple of boxes of toys, a "free" box, and a 25 cent bin that aren't shows in this pictures. I hope we get a lot of business!

As you can see, lots of games and home decoration stuff!

This, and my work during the day, has been pretty much my whole week. Plus, the sale is going to eat up most of the weekend, but I think it'll be a good sale and it will be great to clear some of this stuff out! Can you imagine how many more boxes this would be if we had to move it again? (Not that we're moving anywhere, mind.)

Fixin' ta Get Ready

Julia's been out in the garage all morning moving around everything we've piled out there for our upcoming garage sale. We've been talking about having one since before I came back in November and the plan is to have it next weekend (the 17th, 18th, and 19th). We have a ton of decor stuff, books, games, action figures, clothes (mostly mine), and house stuff to unload. There are eight tables out there now, including our dining room table with both leaves inserted, and we still need more tables! I still haven't organized the game books into boxes, but I have them all set aside and ready to go. That's my job for Sunday.

Tomorrow we're heading to Kirkland for a photo shoot with the rest of Julia's family, then to a dinner cruise on (I think) Lake Union and Lake Washington to celebrate her aunt's birthday. That should be fun.

Right now I'm working on some things for an upcoming book for work, so I better get back to it.

The Third Stage of Blogging

Stage 1: Blogging is new and exciting and you do it all the time!

Stage 2: Blogging is a part of your schedule and you do it out of routine.

Stage 3: Blogging is inconvenient for whatever reason.

I'm definitely in Stage 3. It's not that I don't want to blog, it's that my schedule has changed pretty significantly in the last couple of years.

When I was in California, I didn't really feel like anything was going on. In a lot of ways my life was on "hold".

Now that I'm back in my home with my wife, my schedule is so different than before I moved away that I don't seem to find the time to post here. It used to be that I'd post something at the end of the day in those empty hours before bed. Now those hours are spent with my lovely wife. (I think I traded up!)

I'm going to make an effort in the next week to post more regularly. Maybe over lunch or first thing in the morning. We'll see how it goes.

Julia's been posting some great pictures of our yard, which is really looking good here in the third year of growth.

I spent a couple of hours a week or two ago putting together a Website for myself. I reserved leitheusser.com a while ago and now there's finally something on that page, which is cool. I have to figure out what to put on that first page, but at the very least, my resume and C.V. are up there.

Okay, see you tomorrow!