My sweetie and I woke up Saturday to a gray and dreary day.  Although it was icy on the trees, the deck and the windshield, the roads were warm enough to be safe.

After breakfast at Cracker Barrel (my favorite place for breakfast!), we decided to do some errands.    My sweetie has been doing most of our cooking this last year and lately has decided I was right about the better flavor from fresh ground pepper.

Not only that, I discovered that we were out of most of our Italian seasonings that I buy bulk at Penzey’s.  I don’t know how it got used up from the freezer without me making a note to replace it, but it was gone.

When I first started shopping at the local Penzey’s, they asked if I’d shopped there before.  No, I replied, but I have mail ordered from you for years.  They said a number of their customers said that and they were pleasantly surprised at how many former catalog customers now came in to buy.  The last time I’d referred to Penzey’s, KittyHere mentioned that she was a mail order customer of theirs also.  They really are good.

Don’t you love the old brickwork in this building?  It’s a nice complement to the wooden shelving.

It was so gray and dreary out that we took our time to look at each type of peppercorn, read the labels, and decide what we felt like bringing home.  We checked out most of the shelves, opening the jars and smelling all the herbs and spices.  It was a fun and lazy way to spend Saturday morning.

At this point, my sweetie discovered he didn’t have his wallet.  Rather than stay downtown to grab lunch, we headed home to make sure it was on the counter and let the dogs out for a few minutes.  Shortly after bringing them back in again, my sweetie noticed that the big oak tree outside our fence had a new batch of dead leaves – yep, the hawk was back again, blending into the scenery.

It was positioned in the tree in such a way that from our back door, its head was behind some branches.  From the window there was a screen, which made the resolution poor.  Plus it was still gray and raining out.

Although I thought the weather was a bit nasty for the hawk to be hunting, the prey was out.  The squirrels ran along the back fence, sideways on the crossbeams.  I thought they were trying to hide, but my sweetie thought there was some . . . ummm. . . nookie involved and that they oblivious to the hawk.  The hawk didn’t react to them either.

When I stepped onto the deck, being careful to not make eye contact, the hawk silently slid away and I got no further shots.

So we went out, got some lunch and did a few more errands.  A few years back, I’d bought some Bose headphones which recently a) broke and b) quit transmitting sound in the one ear.  The Bose shop gave me a very good trade-in towards a new set of headphones.  I was glad I found out they did this before I threw out the broken pair.

We finally got home late in the afternoon.  I ran the fire for a while (no dogs cuddled with me on the couch!) and took a nap.  We decided to skip being productive and spent the evening watching our favorite BBC detectives in Midsomer Murders.

Have a good week!  I hope you enjoyed spending some time with us.

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