Traffic and car woes

Last week was interesting, to say the last. On Wednesday, we celebrated our eighteenth wedding anniversary with a dinner at an almost empty restaurant. The food was good, but the fact that there were more waiters than guests was a little disconcerting.
To get away from some stressful issues and to hopefully photograph some migrants or butterflies, I ventured out to Beechwood last Friday. Bad idea! I was stuck in traffic three times on the way to and from the nature reserve and any thought of relaxation went out the window. Had I known that I would hit two traffic jams on the way home, I would have never left the house. To top it all off, I didn't see any birds or butterflies there. Where have they all gone? I did see a wooly bear, though.
Sometime last week, I must have driven through a freshly painted line because my car is all white on the bottom of the passenger side. To assess the damage, I pulled the car out of the garage and decided to finally check out that rattling noise my car makes whenever I start it. I still don't know where the noise comes from, but my husband and I found a whole winter's supply of peanut shells scattered all over the engine room. With the aid of a vacuum cleaner, an old toothbrush, a barbecue skewer and other long sticks, we were able to get most of the debris out of there.
Lesson learned: Don't store any open bird feed in your garage!