Last week I noticed a cute little bird hanging around our front yard. Especially in the morning hours when it would sit perched on one of the stakes that helps to keep our little pear tree upright. And no, it was not a partridge! Sorry, bad joke. I identified it as a phoebe after watching its behavior. You see, phoebes are in the flycatcher family and they like to catch bugs. They are sweet birds and good to have around.

Yesterday morning I looked out the window to see a blob of stuff on our front porch which I thought might be a nest. It was. Apparently it had blown down from it's precarious perch on one of the columns on the front porch. No shattered eggs, so thankfully this nest was either abandoned or just didn't have babies yet. Notice the interesting materials used in building it. Pieces of broken tumbleweeds (we have lots of those), various assorted grasses, and big pieces of insulation snatched from one of the houses that are being built all around us. Our section of the street is an on-going construction zone. Do you think the insulation keeps the nest warmer or just scratchier?

Not to worry, the phoebes have an almost identical nest on the other column that they are using as their home base. This one is well protected from the winds and well enough anchored that I don't think it's going to go anywhere.

Note: As I opened the front door this morning to take a photo of the existing nest (below) one of the phoebe's flew out of the nest, hence my title!

Well, Natalie is in season. Sigh. She's an early bloomer. Most of our females have not come into season until at least (or almost) one year of age. I don't know why but I thought of that old song by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap 'This Girl is a Woman Now.' So the equivalent for an unspayed female, for my non-dog show friends, is a bitch. Right now she is sporting the rather large panties we had for Hailey when she became incontinent. We just call her Bone Butt because their are large bones all over the panties. We need to buy her some real seasonal panties today that fit her better.

Don't you remember your mom saying to you after you started your first period, 'you're a woman now!'  Oh yippee. Thank you for giving me a curse every month for the next 40 years of so of my life. Wonderful. What a joy, what a blessing! NOT.

It seems like it was just yesterday that I couldn't wait to start my period. I was jealous of girls who had theirs. What little I knew then! All I knew was that the girls that had started wore their new-found 'womanhood' like badges of honor and I wanted to be part of that club.

The first girl I knew that had hers was Stella Marianni. She was in my 6th grade class in Elfers Elementary School in Elfers, Florida. (This was right after my parents moved the family to Florida and ripped me out of my own lovely school in Staatsburg, NY at the end of the 6th grade school year just after Easter. Stella was my first friend in that alien place.) She had large brown doe eyes that she enhanced with plenty of blue mascara. I also remember a dress that she wore —baby blue voile with pale pink polka dots. She would whisper to me before she got up from her desk, to please check and make sure she hadn't overflowed onto the back of her dress. 

Now, really, can you please tell me why anyone would be jealous of that? But like I said, they were part of something I was not. They were moving on and leaving me behind in the world of children while they were entering the world of grownups. 

Silly me. 

As I sit here in my lovely new home, I am struck by looking around me that we’ve decorated with things we bought while living in France, or things that remind us of France. It didn’t start out that way, just kind of evolved.  Since we moved in we’ve been taking a laissez faire kind of attitude about hanging things on the wall.

Typically the houses we’ve lived in have had mostly my father’s original oil paintings on the walls. Many of them are still hanging on walls in the cabin. My father painted two kinds of scenes: Colorado and Florida, both being places we lived and visited when I was a teenager. None of which really fit into our new home, although we do have a Florida beach scene of his hanging in our bedroom over our bed. (I know Kim Murray, GASP, if you are reading this blog entry.) But, it seemed to work.

But back to the decorating scheme ...

First to go up on a wall was a print of a steep staircase ascending an obviously European city we bought at American Furniture Warehouse, of all places. Not only did it remind us of old Lyon, it had the right colors and height to hang above the fireplace.

We looked high and low for a good-sized clock to hang on the wall, and when we finally found one we loved it said Cafe de Paris ... France on the face of it. Not planned, just liked the clock. 

In our dining room hang four miniature oil paintings that we bought on various visits to Paris’s Montmartre. We watched each and every one of them being painted by the artist. Also, there is a watercolor painting of sunflowers we bought in Provence. Two framed menus remind us of beloved restaurants that we ate in, one is signed by the restaurant owner, Paul Bocuse.

And last but not least, the oil painting by my father, the last one he ever did for me, of the view we had from our house in France of the medieval walled village that we lived in, Crémieu, hangs in the bedroom hallway.