Male cardinal

Saturday
It’s become an almost daily job, keeping the bird feeders filled up during this bitterly cold weather, and also topping up the water in the bird bath, which is kept from freezing by a heating coil, but it means that the water evaporates quite quickly. It was another frigid start, but blue skies and sunshine all day. After topping up the bird feeders, I set about taking the Christmas tree down, which I always leave up through twelfth night. We have a real tree, so this of course involves vacuuming up all the pine needles once we have it out the door! Roger was working on fixing our bed frame, which had partially collapsed over the Christmas period, and we’d had it propped up on blocks of wood since! Roger blames the French movers, who didn’t understand how it took apart, and he thinks they forced something that shouldn’t have done! At one point, while Roger was out at the hardware store, I heard this tremendous crash, and since I was alone in the house, wondered what on earth it was! We have some small ladderax style shelves in a corner of our family room, which hold our bottles of alcohol and some glasses, and one of them had collapsed! Fortunately, things fell on carpet, and remarkably none of the bottles were broken, but of course it was a different story for the glasses. These were mainly a set of glasses Roger had received from work, and not ones that we regularly use - those are safely in the dresser in the dining room. However there were a few of our better sherry glasses! The mysterious thing is what caused it to fall, since the supporting brackets are still complete and appear to engage properly in the track, and the shelf is in one piece, so it’s not as if it broke under too much weight!
In between my jobs, however, I was drawn to the breakfast room window, watching all the birds at the feeders, and trying to get a few shots. This male cardinal was scavenging for dropped seeds on the ground, since there was no space on the feeder! Late in the afternoon, we both went to the gym to work out, then did a grocery shop on the way home.