Good Morning everyone. I placed a call to the rescue center this morning and left a msg...waiting for a reply I checked out the pic of the bobwhite and it doesn`t match but the pic of the nothern rough-tailed swallow is very close. The differences are that it does not have the black band across the eyes and it doesn`t have the needle like ending to the tail feathers but the overall shape, size and color are very close. My initial thought when I say the bird was that it was a swallow because of the wings. I looked this bird up on google and it is on the rare bird site. We sit at night and watch these little guys dance throught the sky in groups. This year is the first year that I have seen these so they must be new to our area or the population is growing. I live in the heart of a large city across the river from Detroit MI. I will keep looking on google and will post if/when I get an answer from the rescue center. Well I just got a call from the rescue center and the little guy did not make it.....:( She said that he may have been bleeding interally...all we saw was the bleeding from his foot....may have been attacked by a cat??? She did ID him for me and he was a Chimney Swift. I google this and the pic is exactly what he looked like. Thank you everyone for helping. Louise

Probably a Mountain Bluebird, Jennifer. Nevada state bird, huh? Well, it's Idaho's state bird, too! Problem is, I don't see them most years . . . We also have the Western Bluebird here. (And, I think that's more than Nevada can say. ;o) He's the little guy with some red on his breast. I think there has been a decline in the bluebird population because they like to sit in trees and swoop down and grab butterflies on the ground. One of our prettiest birds eats butterflies . . . I guess that figures? The problem is that trees with open ground around them usually have a house nextdoor. The house has a cat . . . Honestly, I doubt if the bluebird gets caught often by cats. I'm going to say that he's too smart for that but I'm sure that he is deterred from hunting in someone's suburban backyard because of the feline population. Did you know that there are an estimated 100 million cats in the US? I think that a Townsend's Solitaire is a real cool bird. They are gray but some of us are, too. . . You can find Solitaires in evergreen forests. Despite their name, I've only seen them in pairs. digitS' Here is a link that might be useful: cats . . .

We adjusted with much wailing and gnashing of teeth. I was 36; DH was 30 when we married. It was his first marriage, not mine. I'd been single, and completely independent, for 12+ years. We dated for three years but never lived together until after the wedding. One of the things that bothered/surprised me the most was seeing his socks in "my" laundry hamper. I was thinking 'why are his dirty socks in my bathroom?' Oh! He lives here; this is his bathroom; this is his hamper. We now share laundry! It was so weird having to adjust to someone else living in the house. There were two toothbrushes and extra towels in the bathroom. There were more coffee cups on the counter. Someone's eating my icecream! It's the little things that will throw you for a loop.

Yeah, the Home Warranty was a joke. The water heater was also original, and we had trouble from Day One having enough water for two showers, let alone enough later in the day for a slower, elderly father to shower. So we checked the warranty papers. It would replace the water heater only if it broke. Since we still got some hot water from it, it was functioning. Unless it broke completely and did not give any hot water, we were out of luck. So we ended up replacing it ourselves so Dad could get a warm shower. Last fall, just before the warranty expired, I had the furnace inspected. It had one section of the heat exchanger plugged. Again, it did produce heat, just really inefficiently. Since it did, no repair or replacement. At that time, the heat exchanger was intact with no leaks. Needless to say, we did not renew the warranty for a second year. We never expected it to take a year and a half to get the old house sold (and it is not really sold, we have a rent-to-own tennant in it now). We expected to have the money to replace the furnace, water heater, windows, doors, and to insulate in the first two or three years. In two weeks it will be two years since we closed on the house. We have two new doors in the garage, waiting for our favoirite carpenter to have time to install them. These are the first improvements.