Excused

After reviewing the information provided on your documentation, you are being excused from jury service at this time.

PHEW!

Thanks to everyone who left me comments about jury duty! It kept me only the teeeeeniest bit nervous about not getting excused! I was very glad to get this notice today.

Birds on the porch

We recently refilled our homemade bird feeder on our porch, at Melinda's insistence. A lot of seeds were spilled all over the porch and in the "garden" area right next to it, and the birds have been eager to come and help themselves. I was able to sit back on the couch and take pictures of them with the optical zoom on my camera- getting too close scares them away.

We had a cute baby bird and his parent come. I didn't even realize it was a baby bird until I saw the parent feeding it! They came at least 5 different times yesterday afternoon.

Here's the baby bird opening his mouth wide, saying "feed me!"
A couple different shots of the baby bird getting fed:

And cute fuzzy baby bird sitting on our brick wall:



We also have a couple cardinals that come to eat the seeds. The males are bright red, and females are a bit duller/browner overall but still have a really bright beak. We also have small pigeons that visit, but I haven't taken pictures of any of them.

CAUTION: May cause flames!

So, a funny (scary?) story.

Jesse comes home from work for lunch most days. Today was not an exception. We had a couple italian sausages in casings leftover from a dinner I made a couple nights ago, and Jesse decided to cook them on the broil setting in our toaster oven for his lunch today. He's cooked sausages in the toaster oven before. Most recently, he didn't use the drip pan, and grease from the sausages dripped down onto the heating element and caused little tiny flames. So he learned his lesson, right? And today he used the drip pan, and also used the broil setting so only the top heating element would be on.

Good thing I was standing in the kitchen working on the kids' lunches. About 10-15 minutes into broiling, suddenly there were loud sounds of dripping grease, and flames coming OUT of the toaster oven. We opened it quickly and saw the source of the flame: A tiny hole had opened in the sausage casing, and the pressure build-up from heating the sausage was causing grease to actually spray vertically into the top heating element. Even after we removed the sausage, it continued to spray grease for at least another 30 seconds. We're talking about a spray that went from the surface of the sausage to about 3-4 inches high before it started curving back down with gravity.

CRAZY!!

So, lesson #2 learned: If you're cooking sausage in its casing in a toaster oven, you should always make a few holes in the casing to allow grease and pressure to escape during cooking. Mmmkay?