Today for our chat I am pulling out some tea, cocoa, lemonade, and even iced tea. What are you in the mood for?

This week’s weather isn’t really calling for lemonade since it will still be fairly cold, but I think lemonade can be good on any day.

I’m going to be having some peppermint tea with local, raw honey in it as we chat. My husband made it and oh wow. It’s so good.

*sniff* I needed this. (She said dramatically like she’s making a silly YouTube video.)

It’s gloomy and raining outside, but I don’t mind too much because I have my tea, my blanket, and a good book.

We did have some nice, warmer days this past week — nice enough that we spent a couple of afternoons and evenings outside playing and simply enjoying the warmth.

The Husband had three days off this past week so were able to spend time as a family relaxing on Thursday and then traveling to another town on Friday for a used book sale and a trip to a park.

On Thursday while we were sitting outside there was a huge flock of turkey buzzards or vultures circling the woods behind our house and then our house itself. It was really stressing me out, especially as their numbers started growing and they started lowering themselves. As far as I knew there were no dead animals around us but there were three living ones — my two cats and our dog — in the backyard.

At one point, Zooma the Wonder Dog ran into the yard and jumped up toward the birds. One of them began to lower itself and I yelled at it to go away. I then yelled at all of them.

“You get out of here! Go on! Go! You’re not taking my dog today!”

The Husband said I sounded like Fran Drescher from The Nanny while I was yelling. I didn’t take the remark as a compliment.

Either way, the birds started to move away. At one point there were close to 30 of them swarming the sky over my house. I searched online and learned that circling vultures doesn’t always mean they are looking for carrion, or dead animals, to eat.

Sometimes, if it is in the evening hours, they have probably arrived in the area that day and are preparing to roost for the night. I hope that was what has happening but later my neighbor told me the birds were circling when her dogs were out too.

Online is says buzzards/vultures can not physically lift a dog and also don’t take live dogs, but….I don’t know. This isn’t the first time this has happened when we’ve been outside.

Also, locally we call these birds “turkey buzzards”, but they are actually turkey vultures, according to information online. In the UK, buzzards are some other types of birds. Either way, these are pretty ugly and creepy birds and whatever they were doing, I didn’t like it.

Yesterday, The Husband, The Boy, and Little Miss and I traveled to a town about 45 minutes east of us to visit the library there for their bi-annual book sale. We also picked up some lunch at the local supermarket, visited a park to have a picnic, picked up our groceries (through pick up), and visited a garden store before stopping at a playground on the way home.

The most exciting find for me at the book sale was a box of The Hardy Boys Mystery books from the early 1940s. These books were actually published in the 1990s, but they are reprints of the originals, which were written in the 1930s or 40s.

The books were 50 cents each because they were in the children’s section. I double checked with the library ladies, but they insisted they were only 50 cents, so I picked up 19 of the some 28 books they had, including a book with three books in one.

They had three Nancy Drew Mystery books, but I already own those, so I didn’t get them.

Little Miss also picked out four cozy mysteries for me. She really enjoys doing that and has grabbed some great ones for me in the past. I was really excited that she grabbed another Amish Inn Mysteries for me to add to my growing collection of that series.

The Husband found The Count of Nine by Erle Stanley Gardner and said he has it on Kindle, but I said to grab the paperback. I never know when something might happen to one of our accounts, causing us to lose all of our books so I prefer to have paperbacks or hardcovers of books I know we will enjoy on our shelves. Our shelves are getting overrun, though. We are going to have to do something – like knock out a wall, build on, and create an entire room to be our library. I’m not sure the husband or our bank account will go for that but it would be very cool.

Anyhow, after the library sale we grabbed some lunch from the local supermarket and headed to a park. The kids played by the creek for a bit and then we headed to a small garden store that also sells . . . well, a lot of different stuff. It is a very relaxing place, and they carry some natural soda that I can actually drink. I can’t drink sodas anymore because of my corn allergy so it’s a treat to have some natural soda once in a while. This is also one of the local places where I can pick up some raw honey.

From there we made a stop at Walmart and Aldi (Aldi was just a  pick up thankfully) and then on to another park that has a zipline, slides, and access to a creek. Little Miss usually loves to explore the creek but this time she and her brother played on the zipline instead.

I’m not sure if I have ever explained this or not but when I write the word “local” that often means something different for people in my area. Local for us can be anything from 5 minutes to an hour away. When you live in a rural area, it can take a long time to get to “civilization.” For us, it is about 30 minutes one way to pick up groceries at an Aldi and in that town, there are a couple supermarkets and smaller stores but nothing larger like a Walmart. Forty-five minutes southeast, where we went yesterday, there is an Aldi, a Walmart, and a larger supermarket that carries more natural items. About an hour south, there are larger stores like Walmart, Target, Gamestop, Barnes and Noble, etc. About 90 minutes north we can find those stores as well.

Local, in other words, clearly means different things depending on where you live – a rural or urban area. If that wasn’t obvious already.

This upcoming week we don’t have a ton going on. The last night of the church program Little Miss goes to was last week. We might attend a library event in the town where The Husband works but other than that there is nothing on the agenda until the weekend when The Husband is taking Little Miss to an Easter egg hunt he is taking photos at for the newspaper.

How about you? How was your week last week and what do you have coming up for this week?