This work is hard because you have to pay attention to details. You don’t want to accidentally throw out the receipts for the tax return you haven’t done yet. But there’s fun it too: finding receipts from our apartment in Dubai filled me with nostalgia, and I got teary-eyed reading\u00a0the last birthday card that Dad ever gave me, on my 50th.<\/p>\n
The woodpecker<\/a> appeared at the window.<\/p>\n As he had done before, he clung to the frame of the window, and he looked in at me.<\/p>\n He looked around the office, he looked at me some more, he turned his neck and looked up, down, behind him. He seemed to be taking in every detail.<\/p>\n This\u00a0gave me\u00a0the incredible luxury of being very close to a wild animal for long long\u00a0minutes. Every second was intense.<\/p>\n I drank in the details of\u00a0his eyes and the pupils and the tiny feathers of color around them. I noticed that his beak is longer than the depth of his head, and how the muscles underneath support it.<\/p>\n When he faced head-on, looking right at me, the wind ruffled\u00a0his red crown feathers. \u00a0They’re red red\u00a0red, and they’re very\u00a0short, and when the wind hit them they went\u00a0into crazy designs. A few times they stood straight up as though he had a mohawk and\u00a0he had used hair product on them.\u00a0I laughed so hard.<\/p>\n I talked to him.I said hello, I said greetings in various languages. I asked him what he was doing, I asked him what he was looking at. I said I’ll miss you when we leave this house.<\/p>\n Eventually I even told him where we live. I told him our address, said we are moving back on Friday, said he was welcome to visit me there, although I made it clear that he is not allowed\u00a0to peck at the house. He looked at me and made no promises.<\/p>\n After\u00a0the woodpecker left, my paperwork became\u00a0very dull indeed.<\/p>\n Once I got past the memorabilia and handwritten notes, and had shredded about 1,000 pages of bank and health records, all those details weren’t that much fun anymore.<\/p>\n The woodpecker must have wondered, How can she afford to spend so much time just to tear up\u00a0paper? She can’t eat it and she can’t mate with it and she’s not building a nest.<\/em><\/p>\n Good question.<\/p>\n Today’s penny is a 2015, the year we bought the shredder.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’d put it off as long as I could, but today I had to face the file folders in my office. I hadn’t done a thorough sorting of office paperwork in maybe four years – not the superficial kind of sorting where you are only stuffing more paper into existing files and tossing the junk … read more Attention to details<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10334,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[321],"tags":[67,780,1397,179,396,56,1398],"class_list":["post-10329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tress","tag-67","tag-bird","tag-details","tag-nature","tag-observation","tag-paper","tag-shredder"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10329"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10343,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10329\/revisions\/10343"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/MVI_0241-2-e1480105588794.jpg\")
<\/p>\n