Eyes open. Look Around. Look Up.

I’ve seen some interesting things this week but here are the highlights, all bird related.

• a very light-colored hawk catching the late afternoon light
• two blue herons flying almost side by side
• first turkey vulture of the spring (yeah! Spring’s official!)
• about 20 Double-Crested Cormorants, flying north along the Hudson, crossing above and in front of my car daring me to think they were Canadian Geese.
• some groups of grackles

I’ve also been watching a couple other birds, long distance:

• Eastern Screech Owl
• You might also check out our local Peregrine Falcons

If you do see interesting birds, you can report it at the web site of Cornell Lab of Ornithology. They do interesting things like bird feeder bird counts in the winter. I was glad to find you can write in your sighting so that others can view that info. It’s one of the ways scientists and others track the movement of birds and the changes in their range.

Now, get out there and look around!

It’s all about winding bobbins. Lots and lots of bobbins. Lots of colors. Lots of bobbins.

Betty and Mary Beth do the Chicago quilt show. Unretouched photos

• here
• here
• here
• here
• and here

Sometimes all you need are some good hats and some friends to wear them with. Salute!

What a gorgeous, glorious day to be off work and home. Even though most of my day was spent cleaning and tidying (more on this soon) the windows were open and it was great to have fresh air. As I write this, there’s a gorgeous deep orange sunset going on in a bank of deep steel blue, lavender clouds. There’s no entertainment like what you see out your window!

In quilting news, I’m really making progress on the stuff that’s going onto the green background you saw recently. I’m not quite ready to show that one, for a number of reasons. Aren’t I mysterious?

I asked about having the roto-tiller serviced. No problem AND they’ll pick it up. What’s not to like about that? I guess that means I have to decide if I want to do battle with the local wildlife over who gets to eat the veggies.

Finally, I hit a motherlode of quotes and basically doubled the number of quotes in the rotating text box at right. So keep your eyes open for a lot of new art-related quotes.