Pretty Pretty Princesses

I'm going to be surrounded by 12 & 13 year-olds today! Okay, I suppose most days I'm surrounded by kids that age, working at a middle school and all - LOL! But today my daughter is having her birthday party. Her choice of activity was to have a "dress-up" party. The girls will all get fuzzy hats & matching fuzzy purses, a bunch of plastic "jewelry", colorful boas, and of course lots of treats. And we're having pizza, and cake & ice cream, naturally.

We tend to do fairly simple, small group parties around here - and we have a blast! When my other daughter turned 13, she chose to go to Dave & Buster's, just us and one adult friend we all love. It was tons of fun! And when she turned 14, we had the "big little kid" party I told about in this post.

So we have fun in our own sometimes unconventional style, and we love it!
I hope you have fun in whatever you're doing today!

It's A Bird's Life

Here are a couple of new pictures of the birds:

We decided to try Bandit's "bathtub" in the sink, because when I put it on top of her cage, she lifts the edge & dumps it over!

I have a shower-curtain rod across the space between the cabinets by the kitchen. Bandit hangs out there to "supervise dishwashing or cooking. She has torn all the plastic off of it, so now it's a plain metal bar, but it's her favorite hangout when she's not on me.

Marley likes to stay on or near his cage, but has been stepping onto my hand at least once a day, even if it's only to move from the cage door to his "bedtime" perch. But once in a while he decides to come out for a very small adventure.

Here he is, deciding whether he wants to investigate more or go back to his "house".

(He decided to stay a while - until he wanted to go back in, every time I gave him my hand, he'd step on, then turn around & step back onto the bar!)

(I don't think he really appreciated the picture-taking, though!)

Network Blues and A Chuckle

Ack! My network has been down for a bit - thought it was the modem, so I replaced that (or rather, swapped it out at the cable office), but had the same problem. Swapped out the cables & the splitter, and took out the "surge protector" that I had on the wall outlet - It's very old, and probably hasn't worked for years. My cable lines were running through that. Everything else is plugged into a normal battery backup/surgepro. Once I was finally connecting, I had to call to find out my account # & install the Comcast software (they're taking over Time Warner Cable, but it's not all switched over yet), to reset the modem. Otherwise, any page I tried to go to just went to the Comcast.net home page. So all of that's done, and I'm back online. Yay!!!
I need to catch up a few things, and then I'll post a couple of cute pictures of the birds. :-)

Here's something that was e-mailed to me, that I found amusing (you have to do this):

1. go to www.google.com
2. click on "maps," above the search bar...
3. click on "get directions"
4. type " New York " in the first box (the "from" box)
5. type " Paris " in the second box (the "to" box)
6. click on "get directions"
7. scroll down to step #23

I'm Pumped!

Okay, lousy play on words, maybe, but I'm very happy about my most recent home improvement!

I have well water here, and it will be some time before I can afford to switch to city water. But the pump and tank I had were SO old & decrepit - I should have taken a "before" photo of those so you could see how bad they were. The tank was all rusty & gross-looking, and the pump whined & screamed like it was going to blow up any minute. This was the reason I let my lawn die out this past summer - I was afraid to use the well-pump as much as I'd have to in order to keep the grass watered. So this summer, I may just have pics of an actual living grass lawn to show you! (If I can get it to grow from seed, that is - I'm not doing sod).

I'd already had bearings & such replaced before, but really, it was obviously time to replace the whole mess. I was pleasantly surprised by the cost, too, so that was a nice bonus.
Anyway, here's my new well pump & tank:

Now to get the well-house rebuilt! It's sorta falling apart. The roof section is very sturdy, but the rest of it, not so much... Oh well, one project at a time!