Backyard Hobbies

So our family is taking backyard hobbies to a new level.  First off, the birding.  I know I have talked about this before.  This has completely turned into Dave's thing.  They are his birds or should I say "friends."  A real, human friend of ours teases that one day the birds are going to come and claim Dave as their own.

He has really got quite the system out there, with multiple bird feeders, a squirrel baffle and now...A HEATED BIRD BATH!   Yep, you read that right.  It's a regular day spa out there for the birds.  He has also successfully deterred all the annoying black birds and grackels so we pretty regularly have gold finches, purple finches, house finches, cardinals, chickadees, woodpeckers, robins and red-breasted nut hatches.  In addition to these regular visitors we also have chipmunks and two big fat gray squirrels. 

I hate to say it but as annoying as those squirrels are, I personally get a kick out of watching them try to figure out how to get at the bird food.  You can just see them looking up at the feeders, thinking, judging how far they can jump, testing out if they can jump from the picnic table onto the feeder stand and all kinds of crazy stuff.  Do you know how funny it is to watch a squirrel over and over try to climb up a pole, hit the baffle and slide down.  Hilarious, especially if your threshold for hilarity is low.

We also have another "pet" that we are currently caring for.  A Venus Flytrap.  A friend gave one to Paige and right along with the birds she and Dave have started caring for it.  Dave did a bunch of research to teach Paige how to care for it and viola it is thriving.  It started off with two heads and now has like seven or eight.  The best part about this pet is that you can set it outside during the day and it catches it's own food.  Not sure what we will do in the winter, there aren't usually a lot of flies around, that's probably when this fun little plant will start getting on my nerves.  I'll be worried about feeding it, but definitely not interested in catching flies and other bugs for it.

Finally, there is my little backyard hobby--the garden.  Dry conditions made it a tough year for some of my veggies, but the tomatoes went gangbusters.  Too bad I'm too busy and unmotivated to do some canning. 

As you may have noticed, Ashley doesn't seem to have a backyard hobby.  I guess it's just really not her thing, which is okay because she often gets recruited to help with everyone else's projects and she is a pretty good sport about it.