Dinner at Donnie's Place

Our favorite restaurant is closed for the week. Cheryl and I usually eat at Big Daddy's (a nice little diner about a quarter mile from our house) twice a week. But every July they close for a week. So we decided to try Donnie's Place in town.

I said on Facebook that Donnie's was an interesting experience. We haven't been there in three or four years. The menu has changed (no more alligator). The name has changed. But it's the same owner, the same basic atmosphere...

Tonight was a Karaoke contest that was slated to start around eight. We didn't know that. Donnie's is a seat-yourself place. Just about every table had a "reserved" sign on it. We found one table. It was five til seven. The waitress was there in about three minutes with our menus.

As far as I could tell there was only one waitress. She was nice enough. She was very busy...

I ordered the special (a 12 ounce NY strip), Cheryl got the seafood plate. We had our drinks and salads in just under five minutes. Iceberg lettuce, cucumbers, grape tomatoes, shredded cheese. There was also bread and butter.

We ate our salad, talked, waited, watched the place fill up with people, and waited a little more. It took our food just over 40 minutes to arrive. My stake was good. The seafood was okay.

We decided that although the food was okay, people don;t go there primarily for the food. We left just as Karaoke was about to start. $33.50 plus a tip...

A bad year for birds...

Over the past several years we've had the pleasure of watching families of birds get raised in two different cedar bird houses in our yard. Last year our Eastern Bluebirds raised a brood and them lay a second clutch of eggs. It was the first year they’ve laid two clutches. We left for a week at the beach, expecting to find newborns when we returned. We found the eggs gone, instead...

Why do bird's eggs disappear? We suspected a young boy in the neighborhood, but we didn't know for sure. And we forgot about it. This year the bluebirds moved back into the their house and the tree swallows moved into the other house.

The bluebird laid eggs. The eggs disappeared. There'd been a hard frost. We though maybe the eggs froze. More eggs appeared. They also disappeared. It was a puzzle.

The tree swallows had more luck. They hatched babies. Then we got up one morning and the house door was open and little pieces of the nest were scattered across the back yard. A raccoon, perhaps. Or maybe a cat. I can fix that for next year by putting a bungee cord around the house to hold the door shut.

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Today I think I figured out where my eggs went. We can home from a trip to town and looked out the back door to see a five-foot snake with its head in the house.

Snakes don't generally bother me a great deal. I'd just as soon let one get away as kill it. That one was different. But unfortunately I couldn't get across the yard quick enough. It escaped into the high weeds that border the yard.

So now I have this winter to decide how to keep snakes out of my bird houses...