Color My World

Blogroll Me!

Firstly, I must reiterate: I write these posts with American spelling, because I know most of my readers are American. I KNOW how to use Canadian spelling, so I do know that I can color in the States and I can colour in Canada. And if you're American, you'd better honor my choices, and if you're Canadian, honouring me is the only choice.

Good, that aside, I can continue...

My family and I went on the annual Toronto Walk for Israel today -- it was a gorgeous day, a beautiful turnout, and a fun time was had by all.

Fun is the result of several events of the day, among them promotional freebies that are given out along the route or at the final checkpoint. My kids were busy doing something at the after-walk festival, so I picked up a few of the goodies for them. One of them was three packs of crayons, one per child. Afterward, I thought to myself, "I stood in line for 25 minutes for THIS??!! I could sell THEM crayons...we have so many at home."

But later this evening, I looked at the box of crayons, and saw something rather interesting (at least to me!) about the box. No, not that the artwork -- 3 panda bears eating bamboo leaves -- sucks (It does! What's the correlation with panda bears and crayons except that they both might originate in China?!). But under the name of the company, and the word CRAYONS, it says MADE FROM SOYBEANS!

Hmm...so is this company saying, These crayons are so healthy, you could eat them. Should I feed my kids something like soup, salad and pita pockets for a Sunday lunch, and say, "Here. Have a couple of these colorful crayons to go with that. They're healthy too!"

Many crayons say "environmentally safe, and non-toxic" as this box does, but it also explains these crayons are "pure" as well as "smoother, brighter, no waxy flaking because Fun Pro contains no petroleum wax, only pure soybean oil!" (And what's with the exclamation marks? Will these sell better because of a little punctuation?)

I guess there are some people who are much more "natural thinkers" than I might profess to be; perhaps they look for crayons like these; perhaps they only use bean-based crayons...

Just picture it!

For the Birds -- Part 2

Blogroll Me!

So you've had time to think about birds, have you not? Okay, back to that line of thought...

When we moved into this house 2 1/2 years ago, we replaced most of the windows. The previous owner had replaced a handful of them, but clearly not the same quality we'd opted for. So clear in fact, that a couple of the screens don't fit well into the frames.

And how did I discover that? Soon after we moved in, I'd left my sons' bedroom window open and later in the day I went into the room and the screen had fallen inward so that fresh air (and dust and pollen and whatever else) had been free to enter the room. I was annoyed about the situation and that was that.

Several days later, one late Saturday night, I was sitting in our family room watching TV. I think hubby was in the bathroom at the time and I was lounging on the sofa in our sunken family room (a few steps to go down into the family room, and the kitchen overlooks the family room, which by the way has a very high, cathedral-type ceiling).

SUDDENLY, I sensed something was in the room with me. I could've sworn something had flown past. I looked up, and there was a small bird flying rings around the ceiling, and swooping, like dive-bombing, toward the furniture. I had visions of Hitchcock's THE BIRDS.

I screamed for my husband; he came running. "WHAT? WHAT?" I pointed to the bird flying in circles and swooping, as I kept ducking my head and body.
He started grabbing a sofa pillow, and like an airport runway engineer who stands with flashlight-type lights in his hands, guiding an aircraft to a particular laneway to direct his plane, he was trying to do the same with the pillow. He was shooing the bird who flew up and down, up and down, back to the second story and then to the main level. It took a few minutes, but somehow hubby managed to shoo that bird out of the house.

All I could say was "Ooh, ooh, ooh" and wonder how much bird poop had been dropped by this very anxious flying machine.

Then hubby and I calmed down a bit and tried to figure out how the damn bird had gotten in the house, and WHEN he'd gotten in the house, how long he might've been in the house, and WHERE he'd been hiding out in the house.

We narrowed down the possibilities to a couple choices:

1. We'd often leave the screen door wide open to let our former dog come back into the house after he'd do his business outside.
2. The bird had somehow flown into my sons' bedroom that day I'd found the screen had fallen inward and onto the floor. Okay, but we couldn't figure out where the bird had been for a few days. We thought he might've hit a wall or piece of furniture upon his landing, been a bit stunned and managed to find a perch somewhere atop an armoire or cabinet where he wouldn't be readily seen.

We're pretty sure he must've come in through the bedroom window. Why he chose to make his appearance known at that particular time on that particular night is byond me. I wish I could say it was The Birds I was watching on TV; alas, no. I think it was Saturday Night Live...and that feathered friend just wanted its 15 minutes of fame...

"LIVE, from the family room in TorontoPearl's house, it's THE BIRD...!"