S. Worthen | Weblog

I've seen them now, which happily settles the "debate" innostrantsa, my houseguest, and I have sort of been having the past day or so. Last night I had run upstairs to get the seccateurs (I'm blanking on the North American word for them) to trim the stems of the roses Jenn gave me, and, while I was up there, had a look on the deck to check on the plants. They'd gotten to my flowering plant (technically it's not in flower, but I bought it because it would be in flower). It was uprooted and they'd dug deeply into its pot, scattering soil messily around. So I had a look around and, standing on the benches, saw some rustling down near ground level, along the fence which runs under the edge of the next door neighbor's grape vines. Two medium-sized racoons emerged onto the garage downstairs and poked around for a few minutes.

I kept watching. Soon they changed their minds and backtracked, back under the grapevines to the back of the next door house and proceeded to shimmy up the drainpipes onto their roof. And then across the roof to climb over the narrow gap between the houses onto our roof. At which point I yelled at them, and they hid in the space under our deck, between the deck and roof, at which point it wasn't really possible to get to them any further. I've repotted the flowering plant and it may yet survive, presuming it's not taken again, which I'm fully expecting it will be. There's no way to keep the racoons away, after all, although they have been avoiding the beds with the wood mulch on them, so I could at least try that on the pots.

It was a good day, one of my better birthdays, especially given my early tendency to run away from my birthday parties. I do okay with them as long as I organize them and everyone gets along. Happily, they did. Especially good given that half of them didn't know the other half of them.

Amazingly, the numbers worked out perfectly. One friend who'd confirmed she would come cancelled at the last minute, but this means she'll be able to go on the camping trip this weekend which is a Very Good Thing. And my two "maybe" people both came, which was a very happy thing. So the reservation numbers ended up being exactly right.

Despite the fact that C.'s plane was due to arrive at 10pm, so we were just going to meet up at home, we were only just finishing cake at 10pm, so I called him, reached him, and he came over to the restaurant for cake and coffee.

Jenene gave me a gift I already had. Now usually this isn't something I would advertise, but in this case it was rather funny. She was initially confused when I admitted I already had it since she thought that I would have told her about all the Harry Potter things I acquired along the way. Why hadn't I told her I'd received this game already? Because she helped C. pick it out in the first place, last year. So of course she already knew, it had just slipped her mind. On the bright side, she was coveting the game a bit herself so she's happy to have a copy - and also on the bright side, it was heavily discounted and on the clearance table, so cost-wise it's not a problem either. Hurray!

The house is now swarming with pretty flowers. C. sent me a bouquet, and Jenn gave me tons of roses, so I've used up all the vases in the house and had to improvise on a few more.

The weather held out. Along the way, it looked as though it might rain, but it never did. For the first time ever, we sat out on the patio at the restaurant. I've been there many times, but for some reason, we'd never even looked out the back. It was a very nice patio.