A Skiing Flamingo

I restocked the bird feeders yesterday morning and the parakeets and starlings were on the suet balls within minutes. In fact, I don't think I made it back inside before they showed up. Maybe it's hard to find food at this time of year. Anyway, I saw six parakeets on the feeder at once, which might be an all time record.

They're quite aggressive with each other and there's always a lot of snapping and jockeying for position. The one above kept nipping the tailfeathers of one of its pals, and held on even when the other bird took flight! Fortunately it promptly let go and the feather didn't come out.

In mid-morning I made a rare trip to the post office to mail a letter. I haven't used snail mail in an age and didn't have a stamp -- didn't even know how much one would cost, to be honest. Fortunately that problem was easily solved with some spare change retrieved from our dusty coin bowl.

There was some kind of holiday market on West End Green and I briefly wandered through, but I'm not really buying gifts this year so I didn't purchase anything. I did, however, stop in at the plant shop to buy...

...a wreath for our front door. Pretty nice, huh? I thought it was festive without all the red-ribbons-and-pine that we traditionally see at Christmas. Something different.

At a nearby bulk foods store I picked up a felted skiing flamingo. Because everybody needs one! Don't ask me why the bulk foods store was selling flamingoes because I haven't a clue. As far as I could see they had no other felted items on hand.

Oh, and I impulsively got both a flu shot and a Covid booster. I happened to walk past a pharmacy that was advertising them, and thought, "Why not?" After all we're going to be traveling soon and I'll be visiting some older and vulnerable people in Florida, so it would be good to take precautions. I probably should have done it weeks ago but I just didn't think that far ahead. Normally our school provides flu shots for staff and faculty but if we were offered one this year I missed it somehow, and the flu is going around.  My Covid arm is sore this morning -- the flu arm less so -- but otherwise I feel pretty normal.

I asked the pharmacist whether it was a good idea to get both shots at once. "It's recommended, actually," he said. OK then.

The rest of the day was filled with minor tasks. I trimmed some dead stuff out of the garden, raked some leaves and filled a yard waste bag. I watered all the houseplants. I cleaned and vacuumed.

And I edited this week's garden cam footage! The resulting video is very short. I had quite a few clips but most of them weren't very good. I'd returned the camera to the back of the garden, but I put it in a bad place -- too close to a pile of leaves, which reflected back so much light that everything beyond it was lost in darkness. Also, there's a very intrusive stick in the way -- in real life it looks like nothing, but on the camera it looks HUGE.

So, anyway, bad positioning aside, here's what we've got:

-- We start out with Pale Cat, who wanders around and then jumps the back wall. This is how all the animals get in and out of the garden, by jumping over the walls or fences.
-- At 00:23, we have a wary fox, followed by a couple more.
-- At 01:18, a squirrel is packing dry leaves into its mouth and running off with them. Building a nest, I guess?
-- At 01:48 we get a great view of a fox. I came out the back door and startled it lurking in some shrubbery. It ran to the back of the garden and stopped right in front of the camera, stared at me for a long while and then jumped over the fence.
-- At 02:08, another fox goes by, then wanders off behind the shed.