Hello again

Well howdy y'all.
It's been quite a while since my last entry. Absolutely NO progress on my outside projects due to old man winter - cold and very wet for several months. I KNOW it's nothing like the horrendous crap up in yankeeland but still not anything I and my arthritis wanted to wrestle with. Getting warmer now and looking forward to getting back into harness. Have to get a new wheelbarrow for concrete work and moving dirt and sod etc. but hopefully things should be happening soon.
Had quite the weekend. Our daughter Hallie came to visit several weeks ago and as a a thank you , she enrolled us in something called " HELLO FRESH ". This is a service that lets you choose from a selection of recipes and then sends you a box filled with all the ingredients and recipes ( complete with pictures and detailed instructions ) for making 3 meals in quantities designed for two. And they are AMAZING !
On Friday we got the box and found everything we needed to make
1. Smoky Chicken fajitas with blistered corn salsa & fresh guacamole
2. Swedish Meatballs over egg noodles & Portobellos
3. Sage-Butter Pork Chops with roasted butternut squash and charred broccolini

On Saturday we went out and ran a few errands and then early afternoon we decided to make the fajitas.
Spectacular.

On Sunday we decided to make the other two meals at the same time so that Twila would have a choice of what to take for lunches. Fun working as a team , slicing , dicing , grating , peeling , chopping , sauteing , roasting and so on. Sweaty mess when it was all done , but , OH , the eating. And to top it off , a fantastic bottle of wine that our son Jim and his wife Jenna gave us at xmas.

After we had eaten and cleared the kitchen and the dishes we went out to our screened porch to relax and enjoy the rest of that bottle of wine , and we were rewarded with what may have been the best part of the day.The birds were mobbing our bird feeders and we watched a collection unlike anything we have seen in the time we have been in this house. Several varieties of doves and starlings and grackles and pigeons - all pretty standard but in great profusion. BUT THEN - a woodpecker. First we've seen here. Then a couple of bluejays. Then both male and female cardinals. And a pair of robins ( which we also had never seen here ). A flyby by either a hawk or an eagle. It went over pretty quick and we couldn't agree from the pictures in the bird book as to which it was. THEN - a buzzard swooped over the yard with a mouse in it's beak , landed in the tree in our neighbor's yard , and it proceeded to shred and eat the mouse. Not something you see every day.
Might not sound like much to some people , but I am pretty jazzed about all of it.
And we just got invited to a crawfish boil at my son's place in Austin next weekend.
Oh to be in Texas now that Spring is here.

As soon as all this rain clears out and dries up , I will be back in the yard doing some more concrete stuff and starting to build my shed out of used pallets.

As the man said , work to do , work to do.

OH - and I might be doing some traveling. Talked to my brother about it and we both have some things we would like to do. Back to Donora , maybe to our uncle's place in the mountains in West Virginia , maybe OBX to a reunion of the IUP Vets on Campus from my college days , maybe Vegas. Who knows?