I haven’t had much spare time to post an update so I’ll try and make it short.

My glasses came in a couple of days ago so I’ve stopped sporting the ever cool one arm look. I had a couple people suggest that I could have increased my geek cred by taping the arm on but I passed on that opportunity.

As for the squirrel about thirty minutes after my previous post he stopped making noise. I have no idea if he finally figured out how to escape or met some other horrible fate. I like to to think he figured out how to get out.

Last Thursday night Alex and Andrew were horsing around in our room upstairs when Andrew fell off the of the mattress he was jumping on and conked his head on the edge of the bed. He hit our box spring and it ended up giving him a pretty good gash right above his eye. It was deep and bleeding pretty good so we took him to the hospital where he needed three stitches to close him up. I’m not sure if the actual process was more traumatic for him or us since we had help keep him immobilize him in the “papoose” while they were put in. Now that he’s had them for a couple of days it really doesn’t look that bad and in the next day or so he’ll get them removed so we’ll see how it looks then.

I haven’t updated this in a while so I’ll try and just sum up the big stuff that’s gone on in the last week or so.

Last Thursday, Thanksgiving of all days, Andrew got a little rough with me and tried to steal my glasses. He’s done this about a million times before but this time when I picked them up I saw they were missing an arm. Great. It was a clean break right where the arm attaches to the glasses so there is no way that I’m going to be able to repair them. Of course I haven’t been to the eye doctor in just over three years so before I could get a new pair of glasses ordered I needed to go to the eye doctor. On Friday morning while the rest of world was out for post Thanksgiving day shopping Jen and I went to the eye doctor and ordered a new pair of glasses.

The glasses haven’t come in yet so for the past week I’ve been wearing the broken pair which is being held up by only one arm. From the right angle it looks like I’m sporting a Morpheus look.

The other item of note is that we have a squirrel stuck somewhere in our chimney which must have happened this afternoon or early this evening. We have a stainless steel chimney and right now he is frantically trying to escape from wherever he’s stuck which is making a huge racket. I can see all the way from the our fireplace to the top of the chimney and he’s not here so I think he’s stuck somewhere between the chimney casing and the actual stove pipe. All I know is that this racket is going to end up keeping us up tonight since the chimney backs right onto our room.

The other night we were trying to decide what to eat for dinner and I suggested crepes. Alex just looked at me and said “Huh, what’s that?”

“You know, crepes. They’re like thin pancakes. You usually put syrup on them.”

“Grapes?”

“No, crepes, it’s French and anyway you don’t put syrup on grapes.”

“Oh”

To complicate matters Andrew was sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl full of grapes which I think lead to the confusion in the first place. Alex was going to help me make them and I started getting out the ingredients and when I discovered we didn’t have an flour which brought the crepe making to a quick end. Alex was really disappointed.

“But I wanted crepes.”, translation “But I really wanted to eat something with syrup.”

“I’m sorry son but we don’t have any flour we can’t make any crepes.”

Alex then walked over to me holding a bowl of grapes and said “Can I have syrup on these?”

“No, you have syrup on crepes not grapes.”

“Why?” Oi. We ended up settling on tomato soup with crackers, not syrup.

I would like to say that things have been really really busy around here the last couple of weeks and that’s why I haven’t been making regular updates but now that I’m sitting here I can’t actually come up wit what I’ve been so busy with. (Well we have been busy with lots of Halloween activities over the last couple of weeks.)

When we were in New Orleans a couple of weeks back I chipped the edge of one of my crowns and when we got back I went to the dentist to get it looked. He said that everything looked in one piece and got out the drill to grind down the chipped edge so it wouldn’t keep grinding my tongue on it and when the drill hit the tooth I thought I was going to die. They took an xray and then referred me to a specialist for a root canal. I had that done on Thursday and to be honest it didn’t hurt quite as bad as I thought it was going to. I think I set myself up that this was going to be one of the worst experiences ever so it turned out not to be quite that bad.

We’ve taken a bunch of pictures lately and I’m working on getting those pulled together but we did get the boys school pictures this week. They both turned out pretty good and Alex has a great smile. I wish I could get him to smile like that for my pictures.

Andrew is a big fan of birds, actually he’s a big fan of just about any type of wildlife but birds are the easiest thing to attract to the backyard. A couple of months ago we bought a second bird feeder for the back yard and Andrew and I make it a weekly ritual to fill them up. If the squirrels don’t get to the food it typically takes about a week for the birds to go through both bird feeders.

This weekend as I was looking out our back door inspecting the level the bird food I noticed there was more left then normal. The feeder farthest from the house is empty and the one right out the back door is still about 3/4 full. The far one usually empties out first since the birds don’t like hanging out so close to the house unless they really have to. I also thought it was kind of odd that I hadn’t seen any birds in flying around the backyard in the last couple of days and I haven’t seen any at the feeders either.

Today we unexpectedly found out why we haven’t seen any birds in the last couple of days. While going to get the news paper this morning Jen noticed there was a large collection of feathers under the tree in our front yard. At first she thought that the next door neighbor’s cat had got into a heated battle with a bird but then out of the corner of her eye she saw something moving in the tree. Perched in the tree still munching on his breakfast was a rather sizable hawk. It looks like this bird of prey has been using our little backyard sanctuary as a free meal ticket.

So I guess for the next couple of days we are going to be on the lookout for our hawk since we haven’t seen him since this morning. We’ll have to watch and see if any of the birds return or if there are any birds left to return.

Feathers littering the front yard.

A fresh still red bone eaten clean.