Wednesday stuff.

I've got what sounds like Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" going on in my back yard--an enormous flock of little black birds is swooping from tree to tree and making such a racket that I initially thought my washing machine had something caught in it and went to investigate! The noise is just unbelievable.

I'm feeling grumpy today, because the car repair shop just came and towed away my car this morning. After it spent two weeks in the shop, I picked it up on Friday...and the "check engine" light came on on Sunday. So they still haven't fixed everything that Todd did to it when he smashed it up three weeks ago.

And Todd would not have been driving my car that fateful day that he wrecked it if the other car repair shop had fixed what was wrong with his car the first time they had it. So let's just say that car repairpersons are not my favorite breed of people right now. I am tired of being Without Car, and even driving rentals has lost its allure.

October is speeding past at an alarming rate. Todd just got home from his fall windsurfing trip to the Outer Banks, and while he was gone I went to a rubber stamp show at the Hampton Convention Center with my friend Cheryl, and played charity bingo with my friend Bev. I swear I couldn't win at bingo if you filled in half my spaces for free, but it was still fun. And the stamp show was excellent this year. I bought some very nice Christmas and fall-themed stamps, and some more Tim Holtz distress ink pads.

We are taking off for a long weekend of touring Civil War battlefields--my idea for celebrating my 40th birthday on Friday. I figure war, blood, mayhem and turmoil will help put turning 40 into perspective. As in, "I may be 40, but at least I'm not brewing coffee from acorns and stitching up wounded soldiers with sewing thread." Or "I may be 40, but at least I'm not bleeding to death in the mud or picking bits of myself off the nearest tree." It's all about perspective.

I bought some very nice cheap chrysanthemums for the front porch and took a picture, but it's gray and dreary here today and they don't look very sparkly, so I'll try again on a nicer day. Chrysanthemums seem to love my flower beds--I put in several tiny plants a few years ago, and they're shrub-sized now and covered with blooms. Even the drought this summer didn't seem to faze them. So this year I'm planning to buy a few more for the rest of the porch decorations, and then throw them into the front beds when they're done blooming. Soon my front beds will be nothing but mums, since those are the only things that seem to thrive there, besides weeds. Why doesn't drought kill weeds?

Today is laundry day--Todd brought home a huge pile from his trip to add to the rest of it, so I am just hanging around home and switching loads from time to time. Kind of dull, but I'm housebound anyway, so I'll just enjoy being at home and being almost 40. Like I said, it's all about perspective!