Bob and I have both really been enjoying Apple's iTunes. Bob could never really use it before, since he was still on a dial-up connection, but once we finally did what we should have done months ago and got him networked to the highspeed connection, he can actually listen to the previews and watch videos and everything. He's been buying bottles of Diet Pepsi and checking the bottlecaps, and he's gotten quite a few free songs, which he's being very frugal with. I bought him an iTunes gift card because I wanted him to splurge a little, but a couple of weeks after I did, he's still got 8 of the 15 songs left.
I haven't been quite as frugal, although I haven't bought much of anything the past few weeks. I did splurge the other night and buy several songs, a couple of older Barenaked Ladies ones, a few from a new artist that I'd never heard of--Ari Hest--and one that I'm absolutely enamored of: Regresa a Mi, by Il Divo. There's a video on the iTunes site, too, which is wonderful, and made me swoon, and makes me want to go to Italy . . .
The full album won't be out for a couple of weeks. I can't wait!
Spring arrived here with April, and I wore shorts to work every day last week. It was a little chilly on Thursday, and windy all week but even so, the sun was shining, and the weather was beautiful.
The flowering trees are blooming, the herbs in pots on the back porch are starting to come up, and the backyard is covered in violets. I've been making an effort to keep the birdfeeders filled, and every morning there are goldfinches and purple finches at the finch feeders, doves on the ground eating what the finches have spilled, and various other birds at the other feeders, the ones with sunflower seeds in them.
Yesterday there was a big blue jay, too big really to sit on the feeder. He would fly down to the feeder, perch on it for a second, and grab a sunflower seed, then fly up to a branch on the tree, hold it with his feet, then peck at it with his beak to break the shell, then eat the nut, and fly down to get another one.
I have a couple of feeders hanging on the fence, too. Those are really for the squirrel. He hangs upside down from the fence and reaches in and picks out a sunflower seed, then hangs there and eats it. I know I shouldn't encourage the squirrels, but they're cute, and I figure they need to eat, too.
Writing about the squirrel (okay, it wasn't really writing about the squirrel, it was writing about the blue jay and wanting to type "paws" instead of "feet") makes me remember what happened Friday night.
When I came home I noticed that there were a lot of clumps of fur in the hallway. Obviously the cats had gotten into it while we were gone. We picked up both of them and looked them over, but didn't see any obvious wounds. Then I saw the bloody pawprints across my desk, and we found a bloody claw on the dining room table (that would make a great title for a movie, wouldn't it?). From the look of the claw (Dinah's claws are thin and sharp, and Pye's are fat and blunt, mostly), it seemed to be Dinah's, and she seems to be favoring her right paw a little bit.
She won't let me look at it, but I figure I'll have Bob help me tonight and we'll look at it and see if it looks like she needs to see the vet. We're just guessing what happened, of course, but we think she probably got a claw hung up on something, probably my office chair, panicked, pulled too hard and ripped off (probably just the outer sheath of) the claw, screamed, scared Pyewacket, and they got in a tussle, causing the clumps of hair.
It's always been a fear of mine--that one of them will get hung up on something while we're gone and rip out a claw, but I guess now that it's happened we've proven that even if it does happen, they're not going to bleed to death. Bob trims Pyewacket's claws more often than Dinah's get clipped, because Pye will lie on his lap and let him trim them, while it takes both of us to do Dinah's. But we'll do them tonight, and check out the injured one. Poor baby. Not that it seems to be bothering her that much.