Charlie Brown Goes to the Eye Doctor

A big Acorn Woodpecker flew into our window with a resounding crash this morning. Apparently it was a glancing blow because he flew off, but it is unnerving, so I set off to find the Wild Birds Unlimited store where they have stickers to put on the windows. As usual, when going to a place I haven't driven to before, I didn't find it on the first pass and had to drive around several non-parallel, non-contiguous blocks before I could line myself up properly for another pass. This one proved to be successful, but since I was now coming from the opposite direction there, was no way to turn into the adjacent parking lot. I wound up parking a block away any walking to the Wild Birds Unlimited store.

In the course of all these perambulations, I did find a Charlie Brown statue in front of the Eye Care Institute, so he became the third in my occasional series of Peanuts characters placed around town as part of some long ago civic project.

In he meantime, back at the ranch, the Comcast guy was attempting to figure out why none of our communications devices seem to work reliably or even at all, and another guy was digging a big hole in our back yard in an attempt to find out why anybody would build a pool with no drain...OilMan thinks it is a perfectly reasonable solution to manually turn off the TV even though it comes with a remote (which doesn't seem to work). I don't find this reasonable at all and began to feel the need to get the h*** out of the house before I started screaming at somebody, so we went to another winery down the road....

Kunde Family Winery is the oldest winery in the area, currently being operated by fourth and fifth generation family members. On the wall above the tasting bar is the 1920 Santsa Rosa Business College of the founder, which reminded me of many of the family diplomas I have from the days of beautiful handwriting and serious recognition of an educational accomplishment.

Attitude properly readjusted, we're now back at the ranch, watching the acorn woodpecker (who is nesting in the telephone pole at the bottom of the lawn) raiding the bird feeders, apparently unphased by his morning misadventure....