Household minutiae.

It's a gray day here in Madison, but the temperature is 46 degrees. At this time of year, it would not be surprising for it to be 50 degrees colder. I drove home after my morning office hours to meet the plumber who should be showing up at any minute to fix a shower that's been dripping for a long time. Shower dripping is especially noisy because of the long distance of the drop. I hear the splat all the way downstairs in the dining room, my favorite place to work. I don't like to call in the plumber to fix just one thing. (Cf. this post, explaining how I don't like to buy only one item.) But yesterday the shower drip rate crossed the line where waiting for some other plumbing problem to occur no longer made sense, so today is plumbing day. It's also the day to get my Civil Procedure exam written, I think, as I get out of the car and walk toward the house. But I get a little distracted and stop to photograph three things on the way from the car to my front door.

Here's a bird's nest, revealed when the leaves fell from my redbud tree. I'm going to guess it's a cardinal's nest, because I often saw a cardinal couple fooling around in the tree and because it seems fitting for red birds to go for redbuds.



And here's a second newly revealed bird's nest. It's in my neighbor's hedge:



Next to the hedge on the other side of my front yard is this pumpkin belonging to my other neighbors. My guess is that the pumpkin does not represent a failure to put out the trash, but a beneficent gesture toward the squirrels and raccoons. Eat your vegetable! Have some vitamin A! Note the gnaw marks.



UPDATE: The plumber had to do a makeshift repair. The shower handle is 80 years old, and you can't buy replacement parts. To replace the handle altogether would entail an elaborate reconfiguration of the pipe work, which would be better done when I undertake the much-needed restoration of the bathroom. Having just survived the carpentry work shoring up the back of my house and the receipt of the $15,000 bill for that work, I'm not ready to do the bathroom just yet. I wonder if the plumber found the ancient fixture interesting to figure out. I've had electricians work on my house and comment on how unusual some old switch or outlet is. I like to think they find it relatively amusing to deal with these "This Old House" problems.