Mostly Monday musings

1) First off, my US Cellular online account decided to let me pay my bill. Not sure why. Oh, yeah! Then they promptly sent me a text -- remember, I don't text! -- to let me know that I had successfully changed my email address. I had not changed it, they just kept sending me in a circle to confirm it. All done and now they are happy, have the new address which is exactly the same as the old address they have been using for four years. Only they are still not using it! They did not email me but texted me. And as I have said before about texting ... I DON'T DO THAT! I may go back to using my Snowy Owl to carry my communications.

2) We had a mix of freezing rain, sleet and a tad of snow last night, and woke up to icy deck, sidewalk and drive. Things warmed up enough to make it possible to get into town for the holiday train, though, and there was a better turnout than I expected, given the cold, damp gray day. The train was right on time, the kids loved it -- and that's what it's all about -- and I hope the food pantry got a lot of donations. A lot of people asked me where they could leave their donations, and that is a good sign. The temperature hovered just above freezing, and it misted most of the time we were out there. My toes got cold but I survived.

3) No recent reports of bear activity. The only interesting critter sighting of the day was a squirrel hanging from the bird feeder by its back paws and eating a sunflower seed. When it finished the seed, it climbed back up, got another one and then dropped down to hang by its back paws again and nibble away. It disappeared before I could get a photo, but this picture gives you an idea. Our squirrel, however, was hanging from the bars on the side and stretched out all the way down underneath. Although I couldn't find a photo that duplicated what I had seen out the window, I did find lots of photos of squirrels eating while hanging upside down from tree limbs and so on. Weird!

Oh, typing weird makes me think of this: 

You would find this funnier if you were an English tutor trying to explain spelling and pronunciation rules. Perhaps English doesn't have rules. They're more like guidelines -- or maybe just tentative suggestions.