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For several years, we’ve been walking for exercise, and one of the many benefits is the bird watching.

We’re also lucky to live in an older neighborhood with established trees, which also brings in the birds.

Some time back, we bought a field guide for birds and used the illustrations to figure out what we were looking at. The inside cover has a couple of pages for recording when and where you’ve seen a bird, and we’ve noted quote a few. I’m sure there’s an app for that now, but we like to do this old school.

One bird that we could hear, but never quite see really interested us. We’d hear it in Spring mostly, early in the morning, and to us, it sounded like it was calling “Sue Za Zee” which is pretty close to “Suzy” which is what my family calls me. (Suzer is my work nickname). We’ve heard this bird for several years, while living in several states.

Naturally, we started calling it the Suzy Bird.

Recently, we finally saw the bird that was making that call, and it turns out he’s the Black Capped Chickadee. Oh sure, the bird scientists think he’s calling out “Chicadee”, but what do they know?

Of course, this calls for a craft!

I’ve made a print & cut project to create a garland of Black Capped Chickadees to adorn my wall. To make this one more nature-inspired, I used a dried day-lily stem to hang them from.

Click the arrow below to see how I made this. At the end of the post, I’ve also included the files as a free download if you’d like to make your own.

I am very late to the shopping at Aldi Party.

If somehow you haven’t heard about this, Aldi is a chain of discount grocery stores. They originated in Germany, and have brought their shopping strategy to the US. The stores are purposely small, with limited offerings in smaller categories than the big US chains. Most of the brands are their own private label. There are no frills – the stores are mostly warehouse style with items stacked in boxes or on basic metal racks. There are no staff roaming the aisles – they are all either at the cash registers or are unloading items. You bring your own bags, and bag your own items.

We’ve found Aldi a great way to stretch our food dollar. We had previously been doing that by couponing and leaving expensive treats (like good blue cheese, nuts and olives) off our list. But Aldi lets us have all that back, plus better pricing on many basic items.

If you google “what’s good at Aldi” you will be presented with pages and pages of bloggers views on what to buy there.

And of course I’m going to add in my top 5:

1. Cheese. Sliced, block, shredded or specialty. All good.
2. Flatbread. Better and cheaper than the name brand.
3. Produce. Especially 50 cent avocados and the multi-color peppers
4. Garlic Flatbread Pizza. It’s in the frozen section. And it rivals Papa Murphy’s Garlic Bread.
5. Eggplant Parmesan. Also in the frozen section. Comes in single serve or family size portions.

The good thing about waiting so long to shop at Aldi is they used to not take credit cards. But now they do.

There is one big trick though – you have to bring a quarter. You use it to unlock a shopping cart at the front of the store. You get it back when you lock your cart back in.

I can’t be trusted to keep a quarter in my wallet. What if the Cheez-Its start calling me from the candy machine when I’m at work?

It’s better to craft a quarter keeper!

Click the arrow below to see how I made mine.