Guns 'n' Hoses Show your support of our local firefghters and police officers and help the food bank feed hungry people at the same time! During the Enmark Savannah River Bridge Run on December 6, local firefighters and police will don their full gear and run the 6.4 miles across the bridge and back, all to benefit America's Second Harvest in our mission to end hunger. www.helpendhunger.org/home.cfm/page/Events.html

Public Broadcasting System Great Blue Hill

Can I just tell you how much I love PBS? From documentaries on the glamor days of Catalina Island, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Ronald Reagan to Globe Trekka and Masterpiece how can you feel anything less than geeked out over PBS? I mean, they created the French Chef for christ sakes! Do I even need to mention that they are from Boston? www.pbs.org

The Boob Tube

Television I’m into this season: Sunday Masterpiece PBS - Masterpiece Mystery (my favorite) - Masterpiece Classic - Masterpiece Contemporary Monday Big Bang Theory CBS How I Met Your Mother CBS Tuesday House FOX “Starting Early 2009” Lost ABC On DVD/Netflix American Gothic

My Favorite Place

Two of the most redeeming things about Savannah: 1)The "to go" cup and 2)Its proximity to the beach and beach life style. A majority of the beaches in Savannah are out on Tybee Island which lies just 12 miles (approx) from my front door. It's a beautiful, easy and short drive to what has become for me, the best spot to be down here. Old Savannah Beach aka North Beach is the shore that I always head to. It is easy for swiming, good for walking, there are just enough people around and there's a great little beach shack restaurant to get drinks and eats at called the North Beach Grill. If you drive further down on Tybee there's the big pier and the "strip" as I like to call it, stop by Spanky's for spuds, a grilled cheese and a margarita and really you can't go wrong. From the parking lot of North Beach: North Beach Grill: (The back side) The walk down: The Dolphins: Its hard get perspective on just how close they come in, but if you look in the forground of the photo you can see where I'm standing and that will give you an idea. Its funny to hear the rednecks tell their kids to "look at the sharks". There is a pod of these dolphins that are always at the beach in the mornings swimming back and forth, diving slowly up and down feeding on all the fish. Its really quite something to watch and a lot of fun. The fish are fun to watch too as they clear the water by a foot when they jump. The first time that I saw the dolphins was when I was out swimming, I looked up and it seemed almost as if they were swimming right next to me! Pretty cool. Crab Holes: My view from the sand and the reason why I come here:

Book Club Meeting: My Place

The Food







Kat "The Book" Rapkin


Miss Kate & Miss Nora

More Garden Photos

The Basil Plant That Ate Chicago





Me done gardening for the morning.

More Kitties

The Bird Feeder

I had an ingenous idea for buildng a bird feeder out of scrap wood and hardware that I had in my apartment. It took a little while to put together, paint and install, but in the end I thought that it looked pretty damn good. I used laundry hooks from Home Depot to hang the feeders from and left over Ikea hardware from furniture that I had bought to secure the scraps of wood together at the top of the pole. It was my theory that if I had a feeder like this with no big perches I would be able to keep pigeons, doves and other large birds away.



It was my hope that I would get a handful of smaller birds: finches, cardinals etc. Well, what started as a single pair of rosey house finches visting my feeder every morning and evening soon turned into a flock of twenty! In addition there were Doves. Doves although stupid as all hell are persistent if not hungry and I had four of them constantly on the porch. It quickly became apparent that this was not going to work. There were just too many birds. A deck close up to the house is not ideal for dozens of feeding birds. There was seed and poo everywhere and it was really starting to wear me out trying to keep up with it all. Then I noticed the ants had started visiting as well, a result I surmised of the seed and poo on the deck(gross). I agonized for a week if not more about taking the feeders down. I just felt so badly for the birds who had gotten so used to the them, and I worried that their clutches of babies would suffer as a result also. In the end I just had to do it. It was a process taking all that down clearing everything off of the deck to clean etc, but I got it done. Needless to say sometimes things just work themselves out. No sooner had I just gotten used to the deck being bird free than I found one DEAD and ROTTING in one of my plants! Grooooosss - on ocassion when they were feeding the birds would crash into a window, my guess is that this guy had done the same and just not made it back up into the sky (in physical form anyway). If I needed a reassureance that I had made the right decsion than that was it. One, can most certainly NOT live with dead birds just outside their door. In the end it has all worked out and my efforts putting together this bird feeder pole have not been in vain as I have realized that the hooks and the sunny location make this a perfect spot to hang bundles of herbs out on for drying!