Birds and More Birds

It was a busy day today. We took off early this morning for Tacoma, Washington. As I hinted in a previous blog post, we've been interested in getting a camper for our truck that we could use on short trips in lieu of our humongous 5th wheel. We want to keep the 5th wheel for long trips and for when we fly south for the winter. But for shorter trips, we've been thinking of getting a camper. Aside from its more compact size, it would allow us to hitch up our flat bed trailer so we could tow our ATV's or our boat up to the lake in the summer. Yes, we are flush with toys around here. We have several "big boys" hanging around the place.

But to get back to our morning, we drove up to Tacoma, which is a three-hour drive both ways. As it turns out, there is only one brand of camper, Lance, that we could load into our truck bed and still safely tow a trailer. The Lance is lighter than most, and Mike found the best price in Tacoma. So this morning, we drove up to take a look at it, and yes, we bought it. Here's a picture of the interior from their website:

Not much to see because it is small. But it has a slide out on one side that gives us a full extra foot in the dinette area. The door on the left side of the picture leads into a bathroom with a flush toilet, a sink, and a shower. There is a queen bed over the cab and enough headroom to allow us to sit up when we're in the bed. So...there it is. Just in time for our crappy winter weather. We won't take possession of it until November 9th because our truck will need a few modifications. It'll be a fun addition, and the kids can borrow it at times too. A toy the whole family can enjoy.

So as long as we were up in Tacoma, I took the opportunity to find a quilt shop to visit. Oh boy, did I find a good one! I'm excited to tell you about it, but I'll save that for a separate post. 

Once we got home, I finished binding my White Trees quilt...and I've decided on a new name for it: "Snow Birds". Thanks to Janarama for suggesting that name. It fits on many levels, since we are sometimes snow birds in the winter. And here it is:

And now that it's all finished, I'm linking up to the Finishing Party at:

And here are the rest of the birds. These are the latest pictures from my bird cam. I've decided it is working properly now. It just needed a new set of batteries and adjustments to the settings again. Interestingly, the most pictures I've ever seen it take in a 24-hour period was around 120. I increased the sensitivity by decreasing the amount of time between detected movements to 10 seconds, then telling it to take 4 pictures for each 10-second interval. OMG! I ended up with 3,600 images! Don't you know that took some time to wade through. Nevertheless, I got some great shots. Here are just a few of my favorites:

I really like this image below of the two jays fighting over the peanuts.

I like this next one for the way it shows the blue markings on his head. Usually I can only see his black topknot.

When the peanuts were all gone, I switched the feeders around so that the camera was trained on the suet feeder, and I got these great images of the Northern Flicker.

I can't help but think they know they're being photographed. Mike told me it makes a tiny flash just before it shoots the picture to get the bird to look at the camera.

Finally, this little bird, whose name I do not know. I will need to look it up.

And that's about it for today. I'll tell you about the quilt shop in tomorrow's post. For now...I'm tired. Jammie time. Hope you had a good Saturday.