Neighbourhood Bully and mystery puzzles and weather predictions

I use that term loosely...my neighbourhood is not your conventional neighbourhood. I live in the country, and I can see only one neighbour in the summer, 4 in the winter when the leaves are off the trees. I do have a lot of "feathered" neighbours though and one of them is a bit of a bully. He seems to think the feeders are put out exclusively for him.

He is not real good at sharing and occasionally sits on top of the suet feeder keeping all others away from "his" food. I have dubbed him the neighbour bully.

Yesterday while doing dishes and looking at all the birds from my kitchen window; oh I know I am one of the few who does not have an automatic dishwasher, but I did at one time and when we renovated the kitchen we decided to take it out and see if we would miss it. When the new cabinets were built we had one cabinet installed as a separate unit so it could easily be removed should I change my mind and want a dishwasher installed and here we are 13 years later and still no dishwasher! Every once in a while I think about it but then quickly forget about it again. Just think of all the entertainment I would miss if I was not standing at the kitchen window over my sink... I was counting up the different birds that come to dine at "Wendy's Winter Diner" and thought myself quite fortunate.

Doves, Grosbeaks, Blue Jays, Woodpeckers, Chick-a-dees, Nuthatches, and Starlings. There may be a few more but that was all that came to mind because they are the regulars. I had my hands in hot soapy water so I did not take the time to get pictures of all of them, but here are a few I have captured in the last couple days.

What else have I been doing besides dishes and bird watching? Well I did a mystery puzzle. For those of you who do jigsaw puzzles you know that the picture on the cover of the puzzle box is referred to very often while assembling the puzzle. Here is the picture on the box of the puzzle I recently assembled.

This however is what the picture looked like when finished.

This puzzle came with a short story of a "who-dunnit" nature. You had to assemble the puzzle and collect clues along the way to figure out the mystery. I am not much of a sleuth so I stuck to the puzzle making. It was a bit of a challenge making a puzzle with no picture to reference and as you can see it is a desktop and papers are crumpled and upside down and cups turned over so I never knew if my puzzle was being built upside down or right side up. I did finish the puzzle in one day but never did solve the murder.

I have also been working away on my PhD.(Projects Half Done). Right now that happens to be hand quilting a lap quilt that I started several years ago and never got around to finishing and working away at piecing a queen sized quilt for the cottage (also a vintage forgotten project)

I have been keeping busy with retreat projects and planning for mid February Retreat as well but of course I can't show you those until after retreat.

The weather Networks long term forecast says we have a prediction of 15 - 20 cm of snow coming this Thursday and 20 - 30 on the following Tuesday. I'm not sure how accurate they are but I forecast good quilting and bird-watching days ahead. We'll see who is more accurate...

My favorite weather is bird-chirping weather.
Loire Hartwould