Thursday morning and it is a partly cloudy one so far. Weather reports say that we have a couple of days of rain on the way. Well, "Que Serra, Serra", as the song says. What will be, will be.

We have been busy the past couple of days getting ready for our vacation. We been shopping and stacking aside stuff that we plan to take. I hope the car will hold it all. I suspect that as usual, we'll take far more stuff than we need. I haven't begun to try to put stuff in the car yet of course. The problem I se is that a lot of what we are taking is in boxes and boxes are often flexible. But --- this ain't my first rodeo and I'll get it all in.

We have had our "handi-couple" here for the past couple of days. They have been painting our fence, both sides with two coats. It looks beautiful. They have a bit more to do along with some other stuff I want them to do and they will finish up next week when the rain is gone and we are on vacation. They are some really hard workers and I'm so glad we found them. I'm also glad that we decided to have that fence painted instead of replacing it. I probably saved myself several thousand dollars. I'd bet it would have coast us at least $10 K to have that fence replaced and it would not have been able to be replaced where we wanted it.

We have new nocturnal friends in the backyard. We have "Bandit" the raccoon who has been here three nights this week that I know of. Bandit has a buddy that comes along but doesn't' get up next to the house like Bandit does. When I'm sitting out here at night, generally around midnight, I'll see the feeders swinging. Usually, if I go over to the door and knock on it, they will take off. Sometimes he will just sit there though and look at me, literally eye to eye because it isn't but six feet from me, sitting on a branch in the pussy willow tree. But, if I open the door, off they go acrosss the yard. My other guest is "Stripes", a young skunk. Stripes comes up here next to the back door and eats the seeds and stuff that the birds have knocked down, I can tap on the door and Stripes won't even look my way. And, I'm not going to open the door. So, since he isn't hurting anything and he's cleaning up mess from other critters, Stripes can pretty much do what it wants. It doesn't stay long.

Most of my feeders are empty this morning and I need to fill them before the storms hit today. The bird baths are pretty well empty too. The rain will most likely fill them up.

That's it for today. Time to do a bit of conversation with the One who continually fills my life with blessings. There should never be a day go by that I don't give thanks to our grace and blessings giving God. I hope you find your day fully blessed too. Peace.