1. It’s Friday: Is that a good thing? (I mean, it is Good Friday.) But I find that weekends have a whole different feel to them now that I am a parent who works (very) part-time from my home. No longer do I find them relaxing, as I did when I was not a parent. Nor do I find them as stressful and exhausting as I did when Carla was wee. Now, I kind of see them as My Time to Do Stuff with My Family, Whom I Do Not See During the Week. I have spent the week working and storing up plenty of solitude, and now I want to get out and do fun stuff with my husband and kid. My husband and kid, however, do not feel the same way. They want to retreat to their separate corners and play video games and build with LEGO and make elaborate crafts and tool around on their guitars and watch endless episodes of Bluey on their iPads. I try to give them space, and sometimes I succeed in flopping on a couch and reading a book all day. But other times, I end up doing laundry and making meals and feeling like I am doing the exact same crap I do every other day when I want something different and fun. Not something social, mind you – something different and fun with my family. Really, I want to force them to spend time with me. Maybe now that the weather seems to be turning toward pleasant, I can lure them away from devices with the promise of… what? Bike rides? A trip to the [Local Attraction we’ve visited too many times]? A day trip to see one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural gems? I would be delighted by any of these options. Maybe what I need to do is come up with a big list of Fun Things that we can choose from. BUT WHAT? What fun things are on your agenda for the warmer months? What are some of your favorite ways to occupy yourself (and your family) on the weekend?
2. Overeager Emailers: When I got these two back-to-back emails from Take 5 Oil Change, I had to screenshot them. Which was difficult to do because I was rolling my eyes so hard. Have some chill, Take 5. Also, I have never set foot in a Take 5, which I am assuming is a place where you go to get your vehicle’s oil changed, so I am baffled as to how the company got my email address. Perhaps I should have taken their survey, in hopes that one of their questions might be, “Are we inexplicably spamming you?”
3. Comment Concern: My blog is eating a bunch of legitimate and lovely comments, and sending them to spam. This is happening to multiple commenters, for no apparent reason that I can see (like, it’s not every comment from a specific blogger, and it’s not comments with links or specific terms in them). If you are not seeing your comment, it is because of this, NOT for any other reason. I love you and your comments and I appreciate your taking the time to read and share your thoughts. Meanwhile, I will try to keep an eye on the ol’ spam folder.
4. Upgrade or Not?: In addition to the comment eating, my blog has also become overly exuberant with the ad serving. It is driving me nuts. I cannot even see my post title on my homepage anymore, all I can see is an ad or the space where an ad should be. Sometimes there are even POP UPS, which makes me so teeth-grittingly annoyed I can hardly stand it. I put up with the ads – even though they have, unfortunately, offended some of my beloved readers in the past, for which I am so so apologetic – because I am cheap, and I don’t pay anything for WordPress to host my blog, and I recognize that nothing in life is truly free. HOWEVER. I am growing very weary of the ads. Plus, I have been posting in this space for nearly fourteen years, and maybe it is about time to put some money into it? I don’t know. Maybe I could figure out how to get ads that are in some way relevant to the people who show up here? Or at least get rid of that big banner ad that’s BLOCKING MY CONTENT? Anyway, this is all to say that WordPress is forcing me to consider I am starting to wonder whether I should upgrade to the premium version of WordPress. Have you done that? And, if so, are there pros and cons you care to share?
5. Spring Clean: Carla’s class did a spring cleaning recently and she cleaned out her desk. This is all the writing utensils she found inside her desk. The desk that only she uses. They were, of course, hidden beneath piles and piles of paper and “treasures” and worksheets and brochures for school events and paper plates and craft materials and folders and pencil sharpeners and bits of yarn/pipe cleaner/rubber band. I keep reminding myself that I used to be just as messy/hoardery/disorganized as she is, and yet I have become a moderately tidy adult. I can only hope she follows a similar path.
6. Enduring Grumps: I am in a writing slump. I am in a reading slump. Friendship angst, about multiple friendships. My face looks like I am in the throes of peak puberty. My heels have been hurting again. I have been trying to lose weight and am not losing weight. I went on Facebook for five minutes to check on a friend’s vacation photos and saw a post requesting recommendations for bulletproof backpacks. We keep having thunderstorms (but no tornadoes, so I am counting my blessings) and the wind and lightning stress me out. I still feel pressure to Make Holidays Magical but my husband is the founding member of Dads Deeply Against Excessive Easter Baskets and I don’t want to, like, openly defy him. Except I already bought a few things beyond the few things he knows about. But I didn’t get anything to hide inside Easter eggs, which the Easter Bunny still hides around the house for Carla to find. Is she just going to find empty eggs this year? Is that the most depressing thing ever???? Carla’s new schedule is AWFUL, and even though it’s better than her fall schedule was and even though I am pretty sure we will get used to it based on the fact that we got used to the fall schedule, it’s awful RIGHT NOW. I need new shoes but I feel like all I do is spend money. I have tasks that MUST be completed and yet I keep dragging my feet. The school year is almost over and I have loved this year, and so has Carla which is obviously more important, and I don’t want it to end. The school year is almost over and there is a flurry of end-of-year everything cropping up and every day I get a new event to add to my bursting calendar and it seems like we will never have a free moment again. It is only April and already the humidity makes me want to die.
7. Merlin Bird ID: Do you know about this app? Carla has it on her iPad, and she’s talked about it for years. If we see a bird of uncertain heritage in the wild, she will take note of its characteristics and then look it up in the app later. I guess I always thought that it was similar to a bird book – useful for identifying a bird based on size, shape, color. And it is! But it also has an auditory feature which I discovered after Carla had been regularly leaving her bathroom window open in the middle of winter. When I asked why she was opening her window, she said that she likes to hold her iPad up to the window so it can tell her which birds are in our yard. This feature is SO COOL. My husband and I used it to identify a weird trilling noise that we kept hearing outside our bedroom at night. I thought it was a raccoon and my husband thought it was some sort of creepy insect, but it turns out it was an Eastern screech owl. This app is completely free (although make sure you download it while connected to WiFi omg.)
8. Mail Melee: We have a new mail carrier. I know this because we went on vacation and had our mail held while we were gone. And then when we came home and the mail resumed, we never got the pile of mail we normally would have had after a ten-day absence. I went to the post office to inquire after our missing mail, and the supervisor said we had a new mail carrier. He couldn’t get ahold of her, but when he did, he would ask whether she had our mail. I left my phone number and never heard back. We have since had two days with very full mailboxes, so we are hoping that all the held mail has been returned to us. Although… I am not sure how we would know??? (Usually, it comes in a big pile, held together with a massive rubber band or sometimes stacked in a Post Office bin that we have to return. And it’s always been delivered to the stoop rather than into the mailbox, so it’s very clear that it’s the held mail. The two days of excess mail could have just been… heavy mail days.) My husband said something about going through our bills and seeing which ones we get via mail and then looking in our files to determine about when they normally show up… but that sounds very complicated and also not foolproof. We have also gotten a rather alarming amount of mail that belongs to various neighbors, and at least one neighbor has commented that he has also been receiving mail that doesn’t belong to him. So. Our poor mail carrier seems to be facing a rather steep learning curve.
9. Planless Purchase: I bought these spice mixes at Trader Joe’s… and now I have no idea what to do with them. I tried mixing some of the umami one into sour cream to use as a dip for potato chips… it tasted like nothing. What would you use them for?
10. More Controversial Pronunciations: I loved everyone’s responses to my Enduring Marital Arguments post. It was especially enjoyable to learn how many people have strong feelings about the pronunciation of Don and Dawn (my strong feeling, again, is that they are identical morphemes). I remembered another homophonic disagreement my husband and I have: the pronunciation of the three words Barry, berry, and bury. THESE WORDS SOUND THE SAME. Unless you ask my husband, who says they are all separate and distinct.
Well, that’s all I have for you Internet. Hope you are enjoying your holidays, if you are celebrating this week. Have a wonderful weekend.
Okay, first things first. I know you’re in a slump but I want you to know that when this hit my inbox I was SO FREAKING EXCITED. Any time I see a post by you I get SO FREAKING EXCITED. Like, on the levels I would when I got a letter from a camp pen pal. OMGOMGOMG Suzanne! So please know that you bring massive joy to my world just by being here and writing and being my friend.
Second, weekends. It’s so hard to carve out that time to do fun stuff. I get this! One of the things I loved on our vacation was that we did things together as a family, which happens pretty rarely these days. We watched TV together in the condo every night and both boys thought it was really fun to just…watch Seinfeld reruns together and drink cocktails/ beer. It was such a small thing and yet we had such a great time doing that.
Lol at the oil change place. Both emails sent at 11:02. Settle down there, guys.
That bird app is amazing!
I do have the paid version of wordpress and I haven’t had any issues with it at all. I went from blogger to wordpress and it was great – however, there is a cost to it, which is something like…I want to say $150 a year, maybe $200? I don’t know exactly, because I pay GoDaddy for my domain name. I justify it in my head by “per month” cost for a hobby.
I cleaned out a drawer that had OLD CRAFT SUPPLIES (remember how old my kids are and when they would have done craft supplies) and I found probably hundreds of old markers and pencil crayons.
I didn’t weigh in on the argument because I wasn’t around but my middle name is Dawn, and I don’t THINK I pronounce it differently than Don. Maybe slightly? But not so you would notice. Maybe I make the word Dawn a little longer than Don?
This is a very long comment and I could say more – mail carriers, what is up with them – those spices, I would have bought them too and not known what to do – but I should probably close. I hope it doesn’t eat my comment! Ha! I kid, that doesn’t happen much *copies comment just in case*
Thank you Nicole. You are so kind. 🥰
And I hope you try the bird app! It is amazing!
I love that you all just sat around and watched Seinfeld. Sometimes that kind of mundane togetherness is The Best.
And thanks for sharing your experience with WordPress — I am gearing myself up to make a change.
I have an ad blocker, so I get NOTHING on any of these websites where bloggers have been mentioning a huge uptick in ads. I don’t see them ever (AdBlock on Chrome is an incredible addon!!).
I agree with Nicole. I just love seeing a post from you come up in my feed!! Sorry you’re feeling “slumpy”!
Other than Christmas I set a very, very low bar in terms of celebrations. For us, Easter is all about our faith, so candy and Easter baskets basically pass us by and I’m 100% down with that! I am craving a white chocolate bunny, though. My parents always stocked up on chocolate *after* Easter when it was marked way down…so I grew up eating bunny ears in July. Haha! But it has been literally been decades since I had a solid chocolate bunny in my house and I think it would be a really fun blast from the past to have one again!
Thanks Elisabeth 🥰
Bunny ears in July! I love it!
Chili-lime spice blend is amazing on melon or mango! I haven’t tried the TJ’s but I am a Tajin addict.
Awesome! I will keep this in mind! Thank you!
the lime one is SO GOOD on fish with garlic and lemon and even dill, and it is perfect on English cucumbers.
can YOU just do something fun on the weekend? day spa? hike? solo movie?
our easter bunny puts cash in eggs– very satisfying and fun to find later if missed on the initial hunt day
Cash is a great idea, and I definitely want to try the chili lime on fish!
Wait…are we the same person?????????????? When the weekend comes my family just wants to hunker down and I wanna go places and see things. To be fair, they both get outside the house during the week and I was happy to hunker down in prepandemic times. I’ve been in an Epic Slump since February to the point that I’m going to give therapy a shot to see if I can figure out a better way to handle stuff.
If it’s any consolation, my blog occasionally likes to send my comment replies to spam. And I’ve never seen an ad on your block cuz AdBlock;-)
Clearly I need to look into ad blocker! I applaud your decision to try therapy. I have been toying with that idea too for awhile. I hope it helps de-slumpify your life.
I understand your slump, which is why I’m addressing it first. I had this feeling while going through perimenopause. I’m working on another list of 100 things I love, and I literally added menopause to the list because having a period every month was torture. Losing my period was torture. I know you didn’t mention it, but I believe that women, on top of everything else we do in our daily lives, don’t talk about hormones enough. I see you and understand what you’re going through. 😘
That app for birds! YOU MADE MY WEEKEND. I just dowloaded it.
I never seem to like what other people like at Trader Joe’s. Never. This mention made me feel incredibly validated.
Yes, perimenopause may really be at play here (although I have a friend who is For Sure going through it and her experience is WILDLY different to the point that I think I *can’t possibly* be going through the same thing… and yet bodies/people are different and experience things differently). I hope you love Merlin Bird ID! It is so amazing!!!
It’s exasperating how different perimenopause is for each woman. AND how little information there is.
I used Merlin yesterday! I heard these birds in our backyard and have always wondered what species they were; Black-capped chickadees. ❤️
1. Slumping: It happens, and you have to just roll with it. Let go of your need to smack yourself around so much. Life is Ebb And Flow.
2. Seasoning Blends: If you stir stuff into sour cream to make dip, you have to wait at least 3-4 hours to let the flavour develop. The Green Goddess seasoning would be killer for dip. Chili Lime sounds like it would be great on shrimp.
3. Bird App: I have that app on my phone and the sound ID never works for me! What the heck?
4. Weekending: Why don’t you see if there’s a nature preserve or a lovely park and plan a Nature Walk one weekend? Then say, “I’m going on a Nature Walk to do some birdwatching and see what else I can find. Would anyone like to join me?” You can use the app and also maybe make a checklist of things to look for, like a scavenger hunt. (I’m not sure how old your daughter is, but you can put things in Nature on there that are age appropriate, from plants to animals to landscape features, etc.)
Now, as far as pronouncing Don and Dawn, yes, they are different in northeast Ohio (NEO) dialect. And I don’t see your ads; I have an ad blocker. I don’t know if that’s good news or bad news for you. I use Blogger as a platform and don’t have that problem (or do I, and I just don’t see it because, as I said, I have an ad blocker…).
Oh no! I’m bummed for you that the sound option doesn’t work on your phone! It is really so fun.
So many people have ad blockers! Clearly I need to get in on this ad blocking action!
Weekends aren’t what they used to be in our house either… although I am comparing them to pre-kid life. I don’t really have TGIF vibes although lately I have been relieved when the weekend rolls around since work has been intense. I am so over winter so weekends feel extra hard right now since we still have a lot of snow on the ground. But it should melt next week as allegedly temps will be in the 60s!!
I did the bare minimum for Easter baskets this year. It snuck up on me and with all my travel, I didn’t to peruse Target like I usually would. Target pick up to the rescue! My MIL has 54 eggs for the boys to find so I felt I could mail it in since she got so much for them!!
I am so happy for you that your MIL is taking the lead on Easter. WHAT A RELIEF. You have been so busy!!! Here’s hoping that your warmer temps come through, Lisa — you need it!
I used to plan out trips to parks and the zoo when I had the summers off with my daughters. I don’t know what’s around you though. Is there a cool play area? Does Carla like trampolines or game rooms? I’m appalled by my weight these days but don’t have the motivation to do anything extreme about it. That’s a LOT of writing utensils! I used to keep a bunch in my desk because students seemed to always need one. 🙂 I hated those pop up ads that used to be so common but they don’t seem to be a problem these days. My email dumps my own messages that I send to myself (photo attachments) into the spam folder. Dumb.
“I’m appalled by my weight these days but don’t have the motivation to do anything extreme about it.” YES. This is how I feel! Except that I also feel like I HAVE been taking extreme measures to counteract the feeling and yet they are not working. Argh!
Dawn and don are the same and so are bury, berry, and Barry. I think it’s the Midwestern in us.
Your blog has occasionally eaten my comments for a couple of years now. I have taken to pasting my comments onto my clipboard before I try to post them. It’s strange because it does seem to be just your blog, but I have never let it dissuade me from posting because obviously whatever I have to say is super important. *eye roll* (at myself)
I second Nance that we cannot get the sound part of Merlin to work on our phones. It’s also a huge app and takes up like all the memory on my baby phone, so I have installed and reinstalled it approximately eight times. *sigh* Why can’t I just be normal?
Your comments ARE super important. So I appreciate that you take the time to redo them! I have a similar weirdness ONLY with your blog, where if I click in the comment box and start typing impatiently, it will finish loading and then delete whatever I’ve written. I am TRYING to take a breath and wait until the comment form loads before typing away like a maniac, but it is quite often that I forget. Whatever. It is a VAST improvement from the many years (well, it felt like years) during which I was unable to comment at all, because I didn’t yet realize that Safari is the worst. Now I use Chrome to read blogs and it’s much better.
Friday evenings here mean pizza (takeout or from grocery store dough on alternate weeks) and a movie (if North doesn’t have a migraine, which all too often these days, they do). That makes it feel like the weekend is starting.
We used to have pizza every Friday night when I was growing up and it was SO fun. I love pizza. Makes every week seem a little special.
I would say if you want to go out and do/see things go. Go by yourself or a friend. Who knows, maybe having a plan in place with low expectations of their attendance, might spur them on?
Only very recently, have the ads been popping up for me here – I clearly need to get the ad blocker. I wonder if there is way to move them to the side bar or the bottom of the screen? I *think* you can do this with Blogger.
I know for a while there my blog was marking all comments from the usual people as spam. After I marked them all as “not spam” they were no longer sent to spam.
As for the Easter eggs – small change and jelly beans were usually the route I took back when we did them.
I will have to look into whether I can move the ads around — thanks for the idea! They are driving me nuts.
First things first. While I had to disagree with your “Don” and “Dawn” pronunciations (they are different!!!) Barry, berry, and bury are exactly the same. I remember I had a
boyfriend in college who made fun of me for that (he clearly was not from the midwest.)
Sigh, I’m sorry about your slump. I think I’ve mentioned my own complexion issues before- I have rosacea, but a “special” kind that, when it flares up, looks like awful acne. I went for months and months without a flareup and I thought it was gone (HA) but now it’s back, and yes- it’s hard to feel good about yourself when your face looks awful. No matter what I’m doing it’s always in the back of my mind. And of course my left heel hurts and will apparently hurt forever. Also, I don’t really like Easter (although we do Easter baskets and I will be filling eggs to be hidden- I try.) What I’m getting at is, I partially understand your slump although of course I don’t know everything that’s going on in your life. I hope things start to feel better soon.
About weekends- my daughter has made it very clear that the worst thing in the world would be to do something together as a family. SIGH. Flopping on the couch reading a book all day sounds pretty good to me! I get that it’s not what you want though. I hope your Easter weekend turns out to be… fun? We’ll get through this!
Jenny, I think you and I have the same skin issue. I was recently diagnosed with roseacea (the pustular kind) and while I’m glad to KNOW what’s going on, I just hate it. And my derm’s solution was to prescribe some cream and then some other cream when that didn’t work and now I’m waiting to see if the second cream will make any difference. (So far: NOT MUCH.) I’m really sorry you are going through the same thing with your skin. The flareups are so awful.
I’m sort of cracking up about the mail carrier because wow. That sounds like he or she is just phoning it in. (But also hopefully the mail carrier will sort out how to deliver mail properly soon.) Canada Post seems to deliver on as “as we feel like it” basis. In the winter they seem to feel like it every 7-10 days…
Despite having lived less than a mile from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology for five years I’ve never used the Merlin app and now I feel kinda bad about that. I LOVED the trails at the lab of O.
Also, I was stoked to see you had posted again!
Thanks! 🙂 I love that you used to live near the Cornell Lab! How cool! I bet the trails were amazing.
Apparently I have no clue what is going on here since I didn’t know you were in a writing slump and are back…
As for weekends. I feel you. The husband is in the office 3 days a week and eats lunch in restaurants, sees people, sees life and such. I work from home. so on weekends I want to do something different. Well he wants to sleep, play games and watch basketball.
Maybe you could coax your family out by running a local ice cream challenge this spring/summer. Try to come up with a rating system and then go out to any place you can find.
Have a wonderful Easter weekend
I love the idea of an ice cream challenge! That would be really fun!
I’m having a similar problem on WP with legitimate comments going into spam, and less-than-legitimate comments showing up in pending. I don’t like it either because I enjoy the comment part of blogging and don’t want anyone to feel like I’ve tossed them aside. That would never do.
I have a WP business account. It’s worth the expense because there are no adverts cluttering my blog and if you have to talk with the so-called Happiness Engineers they reply almost instantly. Also there’s a better selection of templates available.
As for being in a writing slump, I felt that way in March, every post seemed off, but now I’m back into it. My advice, for what it’s worth, is keep writing, delete what you must, but eventually something will re-ignite your zest for blogging.
I will have to look into the WP business account. The perks sound worthwhile.
There is so much here that resonates with me, but I’ll just choose one… My family got me one of those bird feeders with a camera in it for my birthday last fall so I could enjoy this spring with lovely spycam footage of the birds I hear outside my window that I could make backstories about. It has yet to be set up (sigh), but knowing there is an app where I can better identify my bird friends is making my day in such an amazing way that I am even more excited now!!! Seriously, sending you good thoughts and know that a slump (or slumps) can help us enjoy the non-slumps once they end (even if they feel endless).
That bird feeder sounds amazing!!!
Oh my goodness. I went from almost immediate tears at your mention of bullet-proof backpacks (WHAT world are we living in?? God have mercy on us) to laughing out loud at the Easter basket marital conflict. My husband has strong opinions about most things related to the kids (which is good!) but as a church musician, his own Holy Week and Easter prep is so time-intensive that I have always been able to follow my own muse for Easter baskets. I always include the summer necessities I would buy anyway (new swimsuit, sandals, goggles, sunglasses, even new toothbrush or underwear), along with their favourite candies and some type of religious book or devotional object. This year I bought each of the girls a bigger gift to go along with their baskets (a snap circuit kit for the 9 year old and an art kit for the 6 year old) and hesitated before setting them out, thinking maybe I should save them for another occasion. But they were SO excited about them and have already played with them for a long time between yesterday and this morning.
That audio identifier on the app is so cool!! Technology is amazing sometimes.
Berry and bury are identical to my ears (“beh-ry”) while Barry sounds like “Bairy”. I do know some people who pronounce bury as if it rhymes with jury, but I am not one of them.
Your Easter baskets sound great! But I admit that I am so perplexed by how you pronounce Barry! Because… I say it the way you indicate: to rhyme with “hairy.” But… bury and berry ALSO rhyme with hairy!
When the kids started school, I was always so happy to go places with them on the weekend. Coach was often not with us because of work or because he was studying for a fellowship or doctorate. When the weather warmed up, that was the best time. In cold weather, we did museums – a play museum was our fav and in warm weather, the zoo or the forest preserve for walks. We used to enjoy trying out new parks. I hope the spring weather lures your family members outside.
While I think Dawn and Don sound different, the bury, berry, Barry words ARE pronounced exactly the same.
I’m not on wordpress, so I have no advice – but there are a lot of ads on your blog. Sorry about the grumpy issues that are irritating you. Hopefully nice spring weather will come your way and everything will feel fresh and enjoyable.
I think I got burnt out on the museums/zoo/parks thing a little bit from when the kiddo was little… but maybe they would be more fun now that she’s older?
I’m Team Suzanne’s Husband on Berry, Bury, and Barry. Sorry, they are pronounced different to me.
Ok, as soon as I opened your post, I said aloud: Holy Shit With The Ad’s Suzanne! The ads have taken over your blog. Sorry, and yes, it’s distracting.
I use WP Premium; I think it’s $96 a year.
I need the Merlin Bird ID.
Thanks for the giggle: “Husband is the founding member of Dads Deeply Against Excessive Easter Baskets” LOL!!
THE ADS ARE AWFUL!!! I hate them so much!
I, too, use Chrome with an adblocker. And now it makes me think that, because I use Chrome to view my own blog, there may be ads on there that I don’t know about? Eeeks. No one has complained, but…
Slumps suck. I’m sorry. I hope that you de-slumpify soon. I’ll be very interested to learn the outcome of the Great Easter Debate. On the comment thing? I find that if I’ve had a tab with your post open for a while it kind of goes dormant and if I post a comment without refreshing it, it then tells me it can’t post my comment. So one thought for those having issues (but not that it’s going to spam) is for them to refresh. And yes, I always copy my comment in case I have forgotten to refresh in what WordPress deems an acceptable amount of time.
And, I’m sorry, but berry, bury, and Barry are pronounced in completely different ways.
Signed, a Midwest transplant who now says “ope” but has not, apparently, changed her whole way of speaking. 😉
Slumps suck. I’m sorry you’ve had a rough go of it lately. I hope it eases for you soon. Sometimes, I just have to lean into the slump and try to enjoy other things, like watching TV and coloring, when reading/writing is just not working for me.
I have the paid version of WordPress and it’s worth it for me. I pay maybe $10 a month for my domain name and then around $400 a month every 3 years for blog hosting. The way I see it, my other hobbies cost money so why shouldn’t blogging?
I’ve been on the self-hosted WordPress platform for years and I love the freedom that I have with my blog (layout and functionality), but you do need to know a bit about the backend to make it all work for you.
I think you can pay a little bit for a WordPress.com blog to get your own domain and also get rid off ads (I think) and get some other functionality. Paying a little bit might be worth it for you… you’ve been pursuing this hobby for so long now!
That bird app sounds really cool! 🙂