We are being watched.

There are bushes outside our big living room window. It's a great place to get a close-up peek into nature. In the spring and summer there are lots of huge bees snacking at the flowering bush. In the fall and winter we see birds hanging out on the berry bush, eating and visiting with each other. We have some regular visitors - a beautiful cardinal couple.

Dagny saw them this morning and grabbed my camera to take some pictures of them on a date under the tree where our two squirrel friends live.

Very cool.

But there's always been something a little bit strange about the birds in our yard. From the time we moved in 7 years ago there has been a cardinal that follows me from room to room (flying from one side of the house to the other) to bang on the window when they're out of seed.

And now this.

She's here every morning. First she flaps on the window a bit to get our attention. Then she makes herself comfortable. And watches.

I've always loved to read, and I love love love old books - the way they smell, the way the paper feels, the old-fashioned expressions ("Golly!") and the unintentional glimpses into the culture of the day.

I have some of my mom's books from when she was a kid - Nancy Drew, Heidi, The Hardy Boys, Little Women, The Bobbsey Twins. I like to think she said I could have them when I moved out, but it's quite possible I may have absconded with them in an unauthorized sort of way. I always intended to collect all of the books in the Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and Bobbsey Twins series and I did pick up a couple at antique stores, but for the most part it just stayed on my internal 'I'd like to do that someday' list.

But this year, Rowan fell in love with the Bobbseys. Thanks to ebay we're on our way to a full collection of adventures with Bert, Nan, Flossie, and Freddie. We're collecting the originals, not the rewrites they did in the late 50s and the 60s. We've done all sorts of research on the authors (none of whom were named Laura Lee Hope). We found this website that lists who wrote which books: http://www.keeline.com/BobbseyWriters.html. One neat thing we've realized is that because so many different people wrote the books there are all sorts of inconsistencies.

There's a really interesting book about the Nancy Drew series called Girl Sleuth Nancy Drew and the Women who Created Her.

I love the cover art. Could she be more perky?

Jon got me a beautiful Sony Digital SLR (do other people think cameras are pretty?) so I've finally shipped off my last roll of film and retired my old Minolta.

Dagny's spending a lot of time sewing these days. This is often my view of her - sitting in the dining room, head down, eyes intent on the fabric she's guiding through her machine.

Rowan's into all sorts of things, including working on her repertoire of tongue tricks. My favorite one is 'the clover'.

Rowan's tongue-tied. Luckily, I am too, so we didn't have any trouble ignoring the doctor's dire predictions about what would happen if we didn't clip it while she was a baby.