Wednesday odds and ends

Last week a surprise package arrived at our house with goodies for me and the dogs--all the way from Arizona! Thank you Parsnip for the lovely gifts and for your thoughtfulness!

A pretty windchime for the porch!

The dogs playing with one of the two toys sent for them. There were also yummy chicken treats included in the box that they love!

So it's officially summer break. I still can't believe that in a few weeks I'll be starting my fourth year at the school. I feel so fortunate to have such a great schedule these days, with summers off. I don't have any big plans for the summer. If we can resume most normal activities (with precautions like face masks, social distancing, etc) I'll be satisfied with that. 

My book club will be meeting later this month for the first time since February. I've really missed those women! The book for this month is The Gown by Jennifer Robson. It was a fictional story of two women who worked as embroiderers for Queen Elizabeth's wedding gown. This book was.....okay. The writing was kind of thin and the ending was predictable. It was a quick easy read, though. I also went ahead and read the book we'll be discussing in November, The Last Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine. It was trashy fun, like a soap opera, and a good mindless summer read. It would be perfect for the beach. I also downloaded a copy of The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England the other day, thinking I might enjoy it after my Phillipa Gregory kick last year. I'm halfway through and to be honest, I doubt I finish it. It's really kind of boring, and all the names start to run together after a while (particularly Henrys and Richards) and are difficult to keep straight. Oh, well. It was only $1.99 to download it onto my Nook app so at least I wasn't out much money.

We're still seeing lots of birds at the feeder, including the pair of Painted Buntings. We've also been spotting small rabbits by our back fence! We see them almost every day lately. I've taken to putting out leftover (wilting) salad greens and chunks of cucumber whenever I have them for the rabbits to enjoy. The other night we saw a deer run through our neighbor's yard, and this was dead on the road near our house:

A harmless corn snake. We're not sure what happened to it.

So that's about it for today. We're still spending lots of time on our porch, enjoying the (still relatively cool) summer weather and all the birds and wildlife. Speaking of which, let me show you how spoiled my dogs are. We were out there the other day, and tried to get the dogs to come out with us. But it was a little bit on the warm side, and they preferred to stay inside where there was a/c....except they wanted the door open so they could look out which also let out the cold air:

Spoiled, spoiled, spoiled!