Randomday, after a Brief Desert Interlude

 Last week, last minute, I was able to fly down to Arizona. If you fly out of PDX you are kind of supposed to take a foot selfie on the backdrop of the carpet, so I did.

And this picture of my Dad came out rather nice,

This little bird - a Grackle? - was missing its left leg and kept hopping around the patio at AJ's gourmet grocery store, hoping for food.

She even jumped up on the chair next to me and posed quite nicely. I'm still learning the ropes of photos on my new iphone. Later when I got home, Quarta noticed the bird moving its head when we scrolled through the photos. Apparently this is a thing iphones do. It's like Harry Potter pictures. The fire flickers, hands and heads move.

Beth took this picture... she flew all the way in from Scotland and I didn't get a face shot of her. But after she and Deb and I got pedicures I took this:

Foot selfies, with Aunt Carol animatedly talking to Dad in the background. She was telling the story of Grandpa crawling through the burning appliance store next to the burning  paint store, to retrieve the customer records, sometime in the early 1940's. That sounds very like Grandpa, and it explains a lot about risk-taking behavior in my family when you think about it.

Back home again, it was really rainy for several days in a row. It was so rainy this giant slug sought refuge from the out-of-doors and found its way to the ceiling above the front door. It was moving slow enough that the moving-picture iphone effect didn't kick in. I used a table knife to pry it off the ceiling and it fell onto the front mat, so I carried it outside and dumped it in a puddle. In Arizona they have to deal with scorpions and rattlesnakes, so I guess this isn't so bad... but still. We at least are having some blooming crocuses.

The project this week for me has been working on Russian. I finished the Swedish tree on Duolingo a month or so ago, and finally I decided to tackle the Russian course, with the help of the Memrise course which forces me to get the spelling right and take it much slower. So far I can understand the first few lessons, and it's getting easier to say things like Я ем хлеб, Моя кошка, спокойной ночи.  (I eat bread, my cat, good night). I like how they have so many letters that aren't even in our alphabet. Maybe I will eventually progress to more.

Today I did some shopping erands with Tertia, helped Steve prune the grapevines, and made pizza dough for Quarta, who took it from there. We just watched a lovely animated movie, Song of the Sea, about an Irish boy and his little sister, who is a Selkie.

I need to have a blog post for book reviews. I feel like I've let that slide. Also I need to start a new knitting project because I finished Steve's socks last night.