this is how much we use the guest bedroom.

so i'm in a panic because i just remembered that tomorrow is liz's birthday, on top of everything else. i did what i normally do in these situations, which is to go up to the neglected and somewhat smelly guest bedroom that gets used maybe 3 times a year, but which is where i keep all of my treasures that i don't like to think about very much because i like to be surprised sometimes when i wander up there. it's also the room with the inappropriately dubbed "crafts closet" which is where fabric and remnants and yarn tangles and thread and all the associated pointy instruments go to die. maybe twice a year someone worth cleaning up for comes to stay, and i try to shove/organize/destroy the amorphous pointy mass that it has become, the result of countless drunken or hurried frenzies of inspiration and related rummaging. "i know it's here somewhere -- i just saw it last year" type diggings occur on a fairly regular basis and it just gets worse and worse and the pile spreads out until it looks like an art installation about mass wasting and the slope stability of the mind.

so i go up there, and i'm looking around, half thinking of liz, half thumbing through boxes of old art and being nostalgic and trying to remember who painted what, when i look at the closet.

there, on the top shelf, it appears that something has been growing. a cloddy mass of moss is protruding from a tangle of white cotton remnants that haven't been touched since halloween. i edge over to it, half driven by that lovely what-the-fuck? flavor of curiosity, half worried that my slovenliness has given some horrifying swamp moss creature the perfect environment to evolve in. i reach up and tug at the cotton, which has been swirled around and seems to be holding the mossy clump in the vortex of its folds, and as i swing it around a bit more, it hits me.

birds have been nesting in the crafts closet.

i guess bo opened all the windows in the house at some point without me knowing, probably when the weather had that weird nice streak somewhere in january. i've been a little confused about the fact that the air conditioning hasn't been penetrating the upstairs, but i figured it was just another one of those things that sucks about this house. nope. open window. happy little bird family, safe in the comfort of jesus-costume-castoff cotton, building the coolest damn nest i've seen in a long time. i don't know if they've gone -- there're no eggshell bits in there. probably just some little avian bachelor pad that had a resident until i started keeping the door open in there and the dogs scared it off.

maybe liz's present is a birds nest.