We went on vacation a few weeks ago. Two weeks in the upper regions of Wisconsin. Sorry I didn’t tell you about it beforehand, but I figured you’d all come over and loot my house.

We took our pup. Ursa learned the word “swimming” (which means standing around in shallow water) and was otherwise bored as heck while her humans read a thousand books.

This tree branch fell during a storm long before we went to Wisconsin, but it bears documenting. Look at that beast.

That’s Greg. He’s 6’2″, for reference. He had to saw it down to workable pieces (we don’t own, in case you need the visual, a chainsaw) that we stacked for the city to pick up. Here are some Chicago vocabulary words. We piled the pieces on the PARKWAY (little grassy spot on the other side of the sidewalk) as TREE DEBRIS (if it’s small enough to fit into a city trash can, then it’s not TREE DEBRIS, it’s YARD WASTE, and that’s what you should do–put it in the trash can for the garbage dudes to pick up). But no, we had TREE DEBRIS and so a special truck came around and got it. Rather quickly, too.

One day Greg went to the hardware store for…something and later in the day when I went outside to head to the grocery, this cute little pineapple bird feeder was hanging in our yard.

Maybe you don’t know this about me, but I like pineapples. They’re really the cutest and most whimsical fruit. And they grow in Hawaii, where I should live or at least visit quite often. They also mean “welcome,” but that’s not necessarily what I’m going for (see the part where you loot my house, above).

See those little brown sparrows? They’re jerks. But they’re cute, so we feed them. Every sparrow in the world has been in my backyard since I got my new birdfeeder. Little gluttons.