Casa De Morrill

Last night was Cheryl’s (my sister-in-law) birthday. Mom and dad had everyone over to their place for hamburgers and hotdogs, etc. Everyone included all of Cheryl’s family and her family is not small. She has two other sisters who live in town and each of them have a husband and two kids, so we had a goodly amount of people over at my parents last night eating and socializing. I didn’t do too much of the socializing since I really don’t know these people much. I’ve never been particularly interested in socializing with any of them outside of family events such as this one. It’s not that they’re bad people, they’re nice. It’s just that we’re two different types of people. Blissfully, Sean showed up around 8pm when he promised he would get there, so I at least had someone around there that was directly talking to me.

Once dinner was over and we’d had cake (actually, it was tiramisu, but who’s complaining?), it was time for Cheryl to open her gifts. She’d already received a few of her gifts earlier, including a nice potting stand that my parents made for her. Now, Cheryl’s hard for me to shop for. Since we don’t share a lot of similar tastes I can’t usually go with the old trick of buying someone something that you would like to have. I did remember though that she had mentioned to Sean and me when we were planning out her garden that she wanted to put up some bat boxes in her backyard to encourage bats to nest near the house, thus eating all of those horribly annoying insects flying around. I thought it was a great idea and I knew that she knew what she was talking about (she teaches a summer class every year at Burritt about bats). So, instead of going out and buying her jewelry or some such other item that wouldn’t really have meant anything, I went out and hunted down some bat boxes. They look a lot like a simple bird house with no opening in the front. Instead, there’s no bottom to them and the bats can then just fly up inside and hang as they want to. When Cheryl pulled the boxes out of the bag you could see that she was pretty happy with the gift. Her sisters on the other hand were just repulsed by the idea of getting bats to nest near your house. Her sisters never were really convinced on the benefits of bats, but oh well. The gift was for Cheryl, not for them. Hopefully, next time I go over to their place I’ll see the boxes hanging up outside. Talk about the type of gift that you wouldn’t normally think of getting.