A Great Day

Kate's birthday was yesterday, and we really let loose! We went to the Home and Garden Show. Bought a duster and three spatulas! Came home and had a steak (in honor of Kate's birthday we had a Kobe beef) along with a very nice bottle of pinot noir. Put a pretty good dent in a second bottle as well. Watched a documentary called Stomp in High Definition. Got a good night's sleep. The thing was, it was a great time. Doesn't sound like much. But we had lots of laughs.

Then today things got even better. We were going to drive Kate's Jeep to the Jeep dealer to pay them to investigate a loud "thunk" sound that had arisen out of nowhere. We had taken the Jeep to our trusted mechanic Mike Glasgow - who couldn't find the source. So he suggested we take it to a Jeep dealer and see if they could figure it out. I could just smell the money going down a pipe. The thing was, as we were driving to the Jeep dealer, the "thunk" sound went away. We were so happy we went and bought another case of the pinot noir.

And as we were taking Greta on a walk on the University of Minnesota golf course, we had a delightful birding moment. Greta started pointing as we were walking near a wooded area and as we came up to where Greta was we were ten feet from a great horned owl, sitting on the ground next to a tree.



The owl puffed up his feathers to look ominous - big and scary. Greta quickly became uninterested, as she always does when she decides something is unlikely to be edible. And Kate and I had a few minutes alone with this magnificent bird. What a treat! As we walked on we became concerned that we were only half a mile from the Raptor Center, where injured raptors are often nursed back to health. We thought that this guy might be injured and released just a little to soon into "the wild." But by the time we made it back a half hour later, the owl had flown away. More good news. I should have told him where the crows hang out at night (see below).

It's amazing how it can be little things like the absence of "thunks" and the presence of owls that turn a good day into an excellent one.