As The Yarn Turns

Holiday Weekend Wrapup

Thanks for the good wishes for the 4th. We had a great weekend. We spent most of Friday hanging around the house relaxing. We had a brief storm followed by some drippiness so we still cooked out but decided it was best to eat inside. Then there was the fireworks. We live on a dead end street and one of our neighbors has a relative who has a fireworks stand. Every year at July 4th and New Years Eve, they bring some fireworks out into the circle and shoot them off. When they started several years ago, it was just the people on the street. As the years go by, more and more people come over. We probably had fifty people this year. The nice thing is that I don't have to worry about parking and I don't have to stake out a spot hours early. Some years it's the only time we get a chance to catch up with some of our neighbors.

This the gathering of the fireworks, with ghost people in the background. (Click to embiggen.) I probably took a hundred photos of the actual fireworks. Some good, many not so good. I'll just show you one of my favorites. I decided not to drag my tripod out but they still came out okay.

It was a great day; we had a blast! I won a prize in a contest over at Romancing The Yarn and it arrived on Saturday. Woohoo!

The color in the picture is close to real life. The dark parts are some glitzy bits spun into the yarn. It's very nice, soft stuff. They're having their Second Annual Yarnapalooza where they give away a fibery prize every day in July. There's still plenty of time to enter. I haven't decided what I'm going to make with my yarn yet.

Sunday was a little more stressful. Rick and I were watch a movie, The Bucket List. It was very good by the way. All of a sudden I see a bird flapping in the fireplace. We have glass doors over our fireplace with a mesh curtain behind. Then I see a smaller bird climbing up the mesh and another one hanging on the wall. It turns out that our flue was open just enough for some Chimney Swifts to come through. So I grabbed some gloves and a cloth to get the birds out, except when we opened the fireplace door, the adult bird flew out. She was easy to catch and take outside though. But then I'm left with the baby birds.

After a little searching on the Internet, we discovered that the thing to do is to place them on the wall of the chimney above the flue. So that's what we did, thinking all was well. Later that night there's a baby bird in the fireplace. It's really late by that time and I leave him there until we can figure out how to stop the flow of baby birds. The next afternoon with a more powerful and better placed flashlight I take the baby bird, who getting rambunctious by that time, and put him above the flue and finally figure out how to close that last little gap without pinching baby bird toes. Then I had a glass of wine. Hopefully all baby birds are okay and the rest of the week will be uneventful.

by Sydney  |