Downy Woodpeckers

It hasn't been a particularly auspicious day for the first day of spring. It has been dreary and raining all day but the birds are out in force despite the rain.

I love the downy woodpeckers...a pint sized and much more mild mannered version of the acorn woodpeckers who, having filled our rain gutters with acorns and pecked holes in our house, seem to have moved on. I lurked behind the living room windows with a long lens to catch these two on either side of the suet feeder. I could be a little sharper focus, but I didn't want to fiddle with a tripod....

All I have done today is to tear apart and reknit a section of the sweater I have been working on for months. Each row takes a long time because the whole body of the sweater is knitted on a round needle, so I had been resisting taking out what I had already done. It was clearly beginning to look like the shapeless knitting project in Audrey Hepburn's lap in Breakfast at Tiffany's, so I finally undid about eight inches. 

It's a perfect sort of day for turning on the fireplace with it's remote control and finishing my current book, The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel. I must say I'm quite taken with the imagination of the author of  Life of Pi. even though I'm not always sure what he's trying to say.