Moving forward, hopefully

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Much better today. Houston, we have a brain. Last weekend Ben spent just about every waking moment working on the architectural plans for the new house while I imitated June Cleaver by doing laundry, grocery shopping and -- I cannot believe this -- baking cookies for the Election Day school bake sale. Apparently the wild yak has been fully domesticated. Anyway, we were inside the whole time so late Sunday afternoon we all went for a walk in the woods to have QUALITY FAMILY TIME, dammit, and we had a cool nature experience. As we approached our house at dusk, I heard “whoo hoo, whoo hoo” nearby. No, it was not Homer Simpson or some uncouth teen wolf-whistling at my hott bod. It was a great horned owl, I figured, though of course you couldn’t see it. But -- wrong! I looked up in the general direction of the hooting and there it was, a blob on the highest branch of a dead tree, moving now and then. Of course it took off as I was telling the others where it was, but I kept my eye on it, figured out which tree it landed on, and started looking, and I found it again. Ben ran into the house to get binoculars, but the kids saw it with the naked eye. I put the binoculars to my eyes when it was my turn, and holy birdshit, another owl flew into the picture and landed next to owl #1. The kids were quite excited, especially when I translated the owl-ese they were hearing: “I slept all day and just woke up, and I’m starving! I could use a nice juicy mouse right about now.” Then we went inside and Sarah raced upstairs for her kids’ bird identification book, and we saw what the owl would look like if we could see more than a dinky little silhouette. And through the magic of wireless laptop and Google image search, we quickly found a lot more pictures.

Tomorrow is a big day for two reasons -- we find out whether the Dems got control of the House or Senate as a result of today’s election, and we can go to the Leafy Suburb town hall and get the damn building permit for our house already. After all these months, some work on the site might actually start any day now. Stay tuned.

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