Saturday morning

The "partly sunny" forecast for the day so far equals completely overcast, and I'm thinking of trading my cotton sweater for wool. It's a bit chilly.

My poor sister broke her ankle last week. She thought it was a bad sprain, but the doctor sent her in for x-rays, and there it was, broken. Apparently not enough to need a cast, but she's hobbling around with one of those support boots on. And of course, it's her right leg, so she can't drive. "I think I can plant [things she had bought on sale] sitting down," she said optimistically. My first thought was that she now has a great excuse to sit around and knit!

Silly birds--the nyjer feeder is a cage-type, with the cage around an inner plastic tube, and it has four ports about halfway up, and four around the bottom. The seed is just under halfway down, and the birds are perching halfway up on the cage and then stretching their little necks and sticking their heads w-a-a-a-y in through the upper ports to get seed. For some reason they don't want to use the lower ports.

The starlings seem to have mostly give up on the safflower seed. Once in a while one lands on the tray and throws seed around, but mostly they're leaving it alone. This is good. I've decided to try a cage-type suet feeder--not just the flat kind you stick a suet cake in, but the kind that has a cage around the suet cage. It's designed to be squirrel-resistant--they're not supposed to be able to reach their little paws far enough in to snag any, so I'm hoping that means starlings can't reach far enough in, either. Guess we'll see.

BTW, if anyone ever tells you that starlings don't like oranges, don't believe them. I think they like grapes and apples better, but they'll definitely eat an orange if you put one out.

I wouldn't mind them if they weren't such greedy cusses who keep the other birds away from the feeders. It's kind of interesting to watch them--I'm starting to be able to read their more obvious body-language

I put up a hummingbird feeder out by the puppy pen. So far haven't seen a hummer. I'm thinking I might hang a basket of fuschia or maybe red petunias up and see if that helps. I don't really expect to get any, but the flowers will look pretty.

I'm about halfway down the foot of my first Serendipity sock. I so much like this original Apple Pie yarn to work with. The yarn used in the pattern is stripier, and Apple Pie tends to have short color repeats, but Blueberry, the colorway I'm using, works up just stripey enough to work well for this pattern, I think.