More Tuesday Things

How can we already be at the end of May? How is Memorial Day this weekend? There are still flowers to be planted. It should still be mid Spring not coming up on the “unofficial” start of summer.

Speaking of that, I kind of feel like the people who originally came up with the ideas for things like Memorial Day and Labor Day wouldn’t be too happy with how they’ve turned out. They weren’t designed to simply be a three day weekend and a sales gimmick for every furniture and mattress store around.

Confession time – I’m totally guilty of buying a big TV and our smart bed during a Labor Day sale. That seems more problematic since Labor Day was to celebrate workers but we make certain people work on that day. I guess someone has to sell us our sale priced furniture and mattresses.

I mentioned before that this giant international food store opened near us. Well, we’ve started to make that a weekly stop for certain things. It is a bit overwhelming but it is also fun because each aisle is kind of like a trip to a different place. I don’t know why but it seems like even snack things produced outside the US taste better than the stuff we have here.

The farmer’s market opened back up in early May. Right now, there isn’t a lot of fresh produce available. This time of year is mostly greens – salad mixes, spinach, kale and things like that. These are things that like the colder weather in spring and don’t do well when it gets hot. Yes, you can always get this stuff any time of year at the mega mart but I do like buying from local farmers so we tend to buy what is currently in season.

There was asparagus at one of the booths last week. Asparagus is a strange kind of vegetable because the plants can live on for several years but you’ve just got a little window to snap off the new shoots. Kind of think we irritate the plant. I mean it is trying to do what plants do and people keep coming in and snapping off the new growth. We’ve picked asparagus before and it was about the easiest thing in the world. But that place is now long gone so we buy at the farmer’s market.

Had an interesting observation at one of our bird feeders. There are several birds that primarily pick food off the ground so they aren’t built to perch at most feeders. It leads to things like seeing a dove land on a feeder and have no idea what to do. We have had robins figure out that if they can land on top of a cylinder and hang on, then they can get some food.

Yes, we could put out a tray but that would just end up being food for the squirrels and chipmunks (and raccoons) and they eat too much as it is.

Anyway, I saw a brown thrasher get a peanut from our tube feeder. It was quite the production because he had to fly up to the feeder, grab a quick perch and then snag a peanut before he realized that he wasn’t really built for that type of thing. But he did manage to get a peanut out of the feeder. Haven’t seen him repeat the process – probably decided that it was easier to stay on the ground and hope for things to fall out of the feeder.

And that’s about it for some random Tuesday thoughts.