I spy

Now that G is attending a new adult day program (fingers crossed, it's still working) that picks him up and brings him home again, I need to be cognizant of the bus' arrival in the afternoons so I can go out to get G.  The arrival time can vary by as much as 40 minutes.  Some days I'm outside working in the yard with Oscar, who barks when he hears the bus coming.  (Don't give him too much credit - he barks when a UPS truck or school bus goes by, too.)

If it's an afternoon when I'm working in the kitchen, though, Oscar doesn't always let me know the bus has arrived.  And the kitchen is at the back of the house, so every few minutes I stop what I'm doing to look out the front windows to see if the bus has pulled up.

Then it dawned on me:  a spy mirror.

When I first met G (a real Dutchman who moved here from Holland when we married), he told me about spy mirrors.  In many old Dutch villages, homes were built right up to the sidewalks.  It wasn't uncommon to have a small mirror mounted outside the front window, so the home's inhabitant could sit inside, just out of sight of passersby, and see what was happening in the street via their spy mirrors.

So I took the small side view mirror off my bicycle, attached it outside the window over the kitchen sink, adjusted it so I can see the street, and voila.  We'll see how well it works tomorrow afternoon.