28 thoughts on “September 27, 2016: Garden Gnomes”

  1. AMR, I saw two dead birds on Marquette (well, on the sidewalk) just north of 3rd Ave. I didn't look closely enough to be able to give you a good description, but they were small and one looked like it had a bit of green along its wing.

    1. Dark-Eyed Junco and Tennessee Warbler (the green one). There was also a Swamp Sparrow in the... "alcove"(?)... of the building, about where you disembark.

    2. Hey AMR, took a picture of a common bird we've seen here in Estes Park -- reminiscent of a Mockingbird mated with a crow, with striking white along the underside and wings and when we looked closely a bit of iridescent blue on top of the wings. I'll see if I can't load the photo here sometime

      1. It's a Black-billed Magpie.
        Part of the Crow/Jay family, Corvidae. A few breed in MN, in the extreme Northwest and an isolated population in the Sax-Zim bog north of Duluth (the farthest east they breed in North America).

  2. It sounds like, for what would have been my godson's 5th birthday, the Truebloods are arranging a bloodmobile somewhere around Coon Rapids (it might even end up at my folks' place?). The date would be November 2nd. They're just starting to work out details about time and so on, but if anyone would hypothetically be interested, if you would want to shoot me an e-mail, I could pass it along. Just seemed like the kind of thing worth throwing out here.

  3. I recently dreamed that I was trying to carry a bunch of different items and couldn't figure out how to hold them all without dropping something. Metaphor much? Next time I want to dream about gnomes!

    1. Yeah, the gnomes didn't seem like much of a metaphor. We sat around a fire in my brother's backyard and talked about work and family. It would have been beyond forgettable if they hadn't been garden gnomes.

  4. That's a real nice feeling you get when you get down to 1 car payment for the first time in 5 years or so. Last week, we got our rebate check from the state for our electric car and I used the money just now to pay off our Mazda3. (We had traded in our crossover SUV for the e-Golf, but we still owed money on the SUV). Earlier this year, we paid off our student loans and our one active credit card. I believe within 2 years we can pay off all outstanding debt besides 1 car payment, our house mortgage and our solar panels (which the payment is less than what we were paying for electricity, so it is saving us money already).

    1. Congrats, socal. Mrs. Hayes has been doing her best to get our debt paid down. Mostly it's debt incurred when she was out of work due to complications from a very severe Crohn's flare. I paid off the last of my student loan debt a few years back, and we've been fortunate enough to not need to take a loan for our cars, we purchased the Buick from Mrs. Hayes' grandfather, the Subaru coming as a replacement for the Camry totaled during Mrs. Hayes' first winter in the northlands, and the (currently deadlined) F100 was purely cash.

      We'll have the mortgage for years, plus figuring out how to save for the Poissonnier's education.

      1. Getting there.
        edit: typed a bunch of stuff about my student loans, mortgage & home equity loan, IRA/state retirement, 529's, car loan and minimal consumer debt and realized ... "getting there" is subjective (optimistic at best) and relatively inaccurate, so I deleted it.

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