My Oldest Grand-Niece on TV, Swimming Sound and Cooking

I'm going to start out by being the proud Grand-aunt of Lexi, my oldest niece's daughter. My Grand-niece has been featured in several broadcasts and I shared a shorter clip of this on Facebook within the past week, but yesterday my niece posted the full interview, and I wanted to share. Here's the You Tube link, and I hope you enjoy meeting my Grand-niece. She'll be graduating next month with a 3.8 (out of 4.0 possible), and continuing onward in her educational goals to Augsburg College - a private and rather elite local collage. She has a full scholarship for her advanced education. So, here's the link: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i24GgGQ_uNA

My new Aftershokx headset arrived at the shop yesterday, and I instructed Chickie to "Make Sure he brings it home with him". So, DH walked through the door last night with a small brown box in his hand with a note, "Make sure you bring this home with you", attached. I immediately got it out of the package, dumped the packing materials and plugged it in to charge. Fortunately, they do arrive pre-charged, at least 80% charged, so that took minimal time. I downloaded my book onto it, counted out the hours, and started it playing. It's played overnight. I know I'll be re-listening to some chapters, but hopefully it won't be a lot of do-over. At least I have a book to listen to again, instead of just counting laps. Hurrah! 

I'm delighted to have my headset back. I'll be re-listening 
to parts I've already listened to, but I'll let it run until I'm 
finally at the new parts of the book. At least it's better than 
counting laps, which I can do while listening to something 
more interesting than my breathing and the sound of the 
water. 

It was a lovely day yesterday. As I was driving around on my errands, there were green leaves sprouting from trees and bushes everywhere. Spring is most definitely here. A year ago yesterday, we had a 9-inch snowfall - the last snow of the 2022-2023 winter season (which ended up with more than 90 total inches of snow). This year's snowfalls amounted to less than a foot! We've been getting some lovely rain, which is great, and we're not quite through our drought yet, but the ponds and cache ponds are full, and the birds are coming back. I filled and hung my hummingbird feeder yesterday. They are very terrirorial birds, and I want to catch a male (they're always the first into the areas, followed by the females). Once I have a male calling my area home, he'll keep all of the other males away and I'll have a busy feeder with his females and their chicks. I'm already looking forward to this year's hummers. 

It might be a week or two early, but I decided to go ahead 
and put the hummingbird feeder up. It's a very early 
Spring, and the weather - although cold now for a few more 
days - is totally in Spring mode - no more Winter. Time to 
tell those little, wonderful birds, that they are welcome. 

My fence company should be receiving my paperwork and downpayment today. I went to my bank yesterday and got a new check-card to replace the one that had been compromised. I'll have to try a small purchase to make sure it's working properly and that it's attached to the correct account (I have four accounts with my credit union), but I'm 99% sure everything is perfect. Then I came home and started cooking. I had started the day at my co-op - so many WONDERFUL veggies. I ended up with WAY more than intended, and doubled the batch of vegetable soup I had been planning to make. I have a bunch of wonderful, flavorful soup in the fridge, and if I want to add meat, it's an easy add. 

I decided to make the recipe called "Seriously Good Vegetable 
Soup" by Cookie and Kate. The co-op had some serously 
wonderful veggies, and I WAY overbought. I made enough 
soup for an army! I'll be eating this for a week or more, and 
I won't mind at all. I can add anything to it and it'll just 
bring more flavor to the broth for that day's portion. Yum! 

So, I'm off to the pool, my new headset draped around my neck, ready for the day to come. It'll be a busy one - DH got a shipment checked in yesterday, and I'll be making and printing price tags for much of the day. I hope you have a wonderful Thursday and I'll be back tomorrow. Slava Ukraini and חיים למען ישראל.