MY NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION

Whether this blog will ever get off the ground I know not but I am resolved to have another try.  Apart from family (who I am, of course, slightly interested in) my main pursuits are watching the birds in my garden and card making.  Both extremely sedentary occupations.  Oh yes!  Watching craft channels on my laptop, checking Amazon and consequently BUYING.  More money than sense frequently comes to mind but can be easily ignored.

To make this blog faintly more interesting I need to post photos but, that, too is escaping me at present so I will continue about the birds in my (sadly neglected) garden.  Quite a small one in Hackney, London.  Several unexpected birdy visitors recently.

Entertaining two old friends to lunch on New Year's Day one of them suddenly said - "you've got parakeets on your feeders."  I know people in the northern part of De Beauvoir, where I live, have had them but this is the first time they have ventured in my direction.  In fact several days later I had 8 of them perched in a tree.  I'm not sure at present whether they are welcome or not.

 My other excitement was having a flock of 5 long-tailed tits arrive.  Infrequent visitors but today (8th January) one has returned several times obviously liking the Westland Peckish Daily Goodness nuggets.  Starlings, sparrows and tits like them, too, and my bucket of nuggets is running rather low. Sadly Westland seem to have discontinued their buckets so now it's packs which are only available - from Amazon, of course.

Dried mealworms are going down a treat with a cock blackbird and the starlings and last year a pair of jays, a magpie and a crow found them delectable as well.  They haven't appeared so far although I saw 6 magpies the other day but no gold has come my way yet (5 for silver, 6 for gold).

The last bit I'll say about birds today is my infuriation. that feral pigeons (the sort that used to populate Trafalgar Square) can get on to my premier sunflower feeder and they eat and eat - even found the tiny hole in the nyger seed feeder especially for the goldfinches. I have to admit I'd shoot them if I could.

As I believe my blog is entitled "Elderly Card Maker" I ought to say something about that aspect of my life rather than go on about the birds - which I could at considerable length!  One of my most recent purchases is the MISTI stamping tool - (Most Incredible Stamping Tool Invented).  Indeed it has given my stamping an incredible fillip so I'm really, really pleased with it.  It is enabling me to use rubber stamps that have been difficult to stamp perfectly in the past. Currently MISTI is not easy to come by in the UK but I got mine from the US just after Christmas. And here I should really post a picture of my successes so far. The first one might be of my dining table strewn with craft materials, my eCigs and a glass of port which could be easily taken with my phone but I don't know how to upload it.  So there we are.  Enough meanderings or maunderings for today.