Our bird counting is over for this year's Great Backyard Bird Count. The sky has darkened, the winds are up, and rain is coming soon. We've had a wonderful time though, both in our yard and by the lagoon. There are quite a few species I can recognize easily, but many more that were just too fast for me or we needed binoculars for. That's a *must* purchase for us before we start the Flying Creatures curriculum next school year.

I've gotten some much needed outdoor work done over the weekend as well. Our yard is filled with leaves crying out to be tossed into the compost tumbler. I managed to get a pretty good bit into it on Saturday afternoon. Our tumbler isn't anything fancy ... just a trash can with a well fitting lid that hubby drilled some holes in around the top. It's easy to turn onto its side and roll around the yard a bit to tumble the contents. Sadly, it's been a very ignored tumbler. I really have to be more diligent about keeping up with it. I also did some weeding around our garden patch that's been cooking over the winter. We made a small area using the lasagna gardening method. It didn't cook down quite exactly as the book implied it would, but we'll have to give it a go and see what happens. Hopefully we can get some walkway areas down around it next weekend and some fencing up to keep out the rabbits, possums, raccoons, etc. plus our cat.