Avian Flue

This weekend was our anniversary. We went up to my parent's for the weekend. Nate thoroughly enjoyed it, as usual. He got plenty of time to ride on the tractor and the Mule.

Saturday was our actual anniversary. We first went to a pancake supper at the local feed store and then we headed over to the city park for an auction. Then we drove up to see my cousin Beth at her house and visited with them for a couple of hours. Nate got to meet his first snake while we were there. I will need to see if I can get the picture of him with it and post it here.

We then took Nate back to the grandparent's and headed out. We drove north into Iowa. Lynn wanted to check out an Amish Furniture store near Bloomfield. We then drove over to Bonaparte, Iowa. We did dinner at the Bonaparte Retreat, an old grist mill on the Des Moines River. Bonaparte is also the place that Brigham Young and the Mormons crossed on their track out to Utah. Mormon Trail and all. We both had Seafood. It was a good meal, and rather inexpensive. their credit card machine went down when we were checking out so I had to walk 3 blocks to a gas station to get some $$ from the ATM.


We also saw some antique stores there. One of them had the most hen's on a nest that I have ever seen. My mom is quite the fan of these "antiques". didn't get any, but I will need to keep an eye out for one for her birthday...

Sunday we spent over at my Grandfather's place, clearing brush and picking up trash. While he was alive, he was quite the fan of letting every weed on earth grow where it came up, so we had a lot of fence rows to clear and picked up a lot of scrap metal. Got it all done in a reasonable time. Nate was so good and stayed in one place, mainly playing on the Mule, and stayed away from the fire, but we all smelled like smoke afterwards...

Before we left on Friday, Lynn called me in the morning to let me know that there was a bird in our fireplace. I had thought that we could just leave it there over the weekend and it would either die or get too weak to struggle if we opened it up. unfortunately, it started to chew out the insulation in the door. We tried to get it with a trash bag but it flew out, thankfully flying to the front door, into the glass window. We were able to open the door and let him out. I'll need to get a wire cage over the chimney this weekend....

Well, I gotta be going.

Later,