Happy Friday! It is a bright one for sure. When I first came out to the sun porch I said  it sounded like rain even though the sun was shining brightly. That was because the sun was melting the ice off of the trees. The temperature has risen to forty-six degrees, so it is a very nice day.

I now have happy birds again. I just came in from filling all of the feeders and cleaning out and plugging in the bird bath. I hope this electric bird bath makes it through another winter. If not, for sure I will buy another one. We’ve had this one for several years now and the birds really use it all winter long. There are many days that this may be the only open fresh water supply around when it is freezing or snowing.

Well, —- Ms. Kate got a deal yesterday. I think it was ten years ago that a Kirby Vacuum Cleaner sales team came through the neighborhood selling door to door. They’ll come to your door and offer to clean your carpet, absolutely free. Of course their end goal is to sell you a very expensive vacuum cleaner. I had that job as a very young man and didn’t last through the orientation. It just didn’t feel honest and I couldn’t tell people things that I didn’t think were true just to make a sale. And yes, at the time they came through our neighborhood last time, we were weak and gave in and bought one for probably 1200 dollars that we really could not afford. But —- it has been a very good vacuum. However, we’ve noticed that it didn’t seem to clean as good as it once did. Well, yesterday a Kirby team came through again with the same pitch; “We’ll clean your carpets absolutely free”. What they didn’t know was that (a) we already have a Kirby, and (b) we’ve just been talking about having the major traffic areas of our carpet cleaned. So, Ms. Kate invited them in. It was then they they found out we already had a Kirby, but by now they had to honor their word that they would clean the carpets, and they learned quickly that we were not in the market for a new one. They looked at our current one and discovered that the only reason it wasn’t doing as good of a job was that it had a broken belt on it and therefore the roller wasn’t working. So, their team leader left “to go check on the other members of his team” and left this poor kid to spend almost an hour vacuuming and cleaning the high traffic areas that we were going to have to pay Stanley Steemer to do. The team leader came back when the kid was done and of course tried to put the high pressure on, — but there was no way we were going to fork out $2500.00 for a new vacuum cleaner especially since we had a perfectly good one. Oh, and by the way, he had also already given us a new belt to replace the broken one. I kind of felt sorry for the young kid because he knew that he wasn’t going to get a comission, and he did a really good job.

I think Ms. Kate wants to go to the store so I better get cleaned up and be ready. Have a wonderful weekend. Shalomn.