Monday, September 16, 2013
Coyote Wiley vs Curious George
I jiggled the mouse the next morning. Oh no! Windows closed down my computer to install ~Important~ updates. Blog is gone. I just got up and left the computer. It pretty much summed up the week I was trying to close out.
As for the blog... In the words of Donna Summer...I don't think that I can take it 'cause it took so long to bake it / And I'll never have that recipe again, oh, no.
But...I will try.
I knew that I had overbooked myself last week. It was going to be a miracle — Moses proportion, to get done what was on my plate this week. As it usually does if I have a big day planned, my internal problem solving alarm clock rang early. Two consecutive mornings at 3 a.m. exactly. Uh oh...this is NOT going to be good. My reasoning skills among others evaporate with lack of sleep.
I closed my eyes and tried to go back to sleep while my brain mentally planned the course of the day out. I glared at the clock, it's 4 a.m and Don is faring much better than me, obvious by his nasal baritone.
4:58 -4:59- 5:00 a.m.... I watch the minutes tick off on the bedside table and cut the alarm off seconds before it would have sounded.
Minutes later I am at the kitchen sink trying to figure out the sequence of putting my percolator (which i have had for ten years) together. I glanced up and out of the window and noticed a shadow pacing the pond. The quacking little Aflac ducks were swimming to the silhouette on the bank across the pond as fast as they could.
As stated in the Miley Cyrus/Duck story last week, the domesticated aviary community beside my pond is castrated, docile and oblivious to fear. To the ducks, dogs are friends who usually accompany their owners bringing buckets of cracked corn, bags of bread and as we have witnessed.. mom's dinner out of the pockets of Tween boys.
Only, this morning....there are no owners bearing gifts and the dog is a coyote.
The ducks were within 20 feet of the bank when I realized that I must intervene. I glanced down..pink Curious George pajama's. Oh hell, no time to change.
I flew out of the patio door in as much blind naiveté as the ducks. I waved my arms furiously while shouting to the coyote as I headed toward it. Great, now the ducks are coming to me. I glanced back at my house, realizing that there is as much distance between me and the coyote and me and the back door... and to boot — I am now standing between a hungry coyote and it's breakfast.
The coyote is much bigger than he looked from my window and damn healthy looking too. He is not pacing anymore or backing down for that matter.
I cannot believe that I am outside in my pajama's staring down a coyote. Don is in bed, hell so is the neighborhood.
I tried to remember National Geographic channels advice on encountering wildlife? The hair stood up on my arms.
Do I continue the stare down? Make myself appear larger? Lay down and wet myself? I forget.
The coyote lowers it's head and gives me a good look over as if questioning whether he could take me. For once I am glad I am still toting around the extra five Christmas pounds.
He gave me this steely eyed stare and then sauntered off into the wood line. Daylight edged over the trees and a neighbor across the pond waves a thumbs up at me. I feel a little guilty because I really don't think I ~wanted~ to save the duck —maybe I just didn't want to see it die in front of me. I mean this is really what happens behind the scenes in the brush, at dawn, at dusk and while we sleep anyway isn't it?
Don and I talked about the intervention over coffee. We both agreed that nature would and has indeed taken care of itself without us for a long time. In the normal course of things, maybe one duck would die... but the next one would know the difference between a coyote and a dog and wouldn't go near the bank when one came up. True, but...these poor ducks are nature neutered. It may have been easier to close the blinds if I had not watched them rely on the hands of the community to carve out an existence.
I told a friend later about the morning's wildlife adventure.
"I don't remember coyotes, bears and aardvarks in the coastal peninsula when we were growing up." I told her.
She doubled over. When she could talk, she told me "We don't have Aardvarks..we have Armadillo's."
"Ok...those too."
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Miley Cyrus Don't Break My Heart, My Twerky Jerky Heart
I have a large pond just feet from my patio. What should be a relaxing time watching nature and wildlife has turned into a man-made fiasco right in front of my eyes.
It started about 6 weeks ago. A white duck that looks exactly like the Aflac duck has landed into a gag of Canada geese and adapted an identity crisis. He has a particular favorite pack of seven that he hangs with. They respect him, they love him and they let him guide them (seriously) all over that pond during the day.
But, when night falls they fly to their sleeping quarters and guess who stays in the pond by himself?
Nature knows itself. If it quacks like a duck and acts like a duck..you know the rest. But NO!, let's not let nature work it out the way it has since creation. In come the saviors, that's right us...humans. The duck can't possibly live on it's own could it? Let's rent a duck for a friend! So now I get to witness a duck release program.
That's right, a little Aflack duck is dropped off to be his friend. Someone to play with during the day and the evenings when the geese fly away. Something just doesn't feel right about it.
But, Mr. Aflac seems to love his new little white duck. They swim side by side all over the pond and he stopped his incessant honking for the geese to come back. For three days they brought the little duck to the pond. Mr. Aflac was sooooo happy!
And then today. No release. He quacked and quacked and walked to the area where they would bring his friend and then sat ever so quietly and with his head tucked. He didn’t' resume his call for the geese, my first time to witness depressed duck behavior! Don't get me wrong, I am sure the big hearted people who released the duck had good intentions.
The snowball effect is evident in the behavior of the geese and breakdown of the eco system of the pond. I watch the flock being fed pounds of food every day, each thinking they are solely keeping them alive. I have personally seen 4-5 quart sized buckets of cracked corn fed to them every day by one sweet neighbor, the next comes with her empty ice cream quart container and feeds them unknowing they have just eaten and yet another bucket in the afternoon and all of this is in addition to numerous bags of old bread.
You can hardly see the pond water for the muck because what they would naturally eat turns to algae. This flock of geese has crapped enough to put a hole in the ozone layer over my house.
First there were 7 geese. Last week there were over 50. Flyovers have left us grumbling as we get into our cars in the morning. Goose poop is no joke. Driveways are littered with excrement and feathers. Flocks of black birds have descended to eat the leftovers and caw incessantly. And let’s don’t forget, it is a pond. People fish , they lose their line and tackle. I have seen two geese with lures attached to their webbing.
I pulled my blinds and headed to the computer with my coffee. I can only bear to watch the geese in the morning now when they glide across the new blue horizon and touch down in the pond. Everything beyond that point is orchestrated.
I wiggled my mouse to wake up my computer. Miley Cyrus was all over the headlines. After hours of reviews and remarks, I fell prey to this headline. Miley shocks the world with her twerking performance on VMA. It took ten minutes for me to get the nerve to do a Google search on twerking. Afterwards I silently prayed that my computer would never be confiscated and it found on my search drive.
I took a walk with Snowy and realized I couldn't look up at the clear blue skies to enjoy the morning for avoiding the geese poop on the ground. We created the problem ourselves, so should we put on a shocked face when the source fed in excess creates poop? Immediately Miley Cyrus popped into my mind. Miley Cyrus, what went wrong here. Let's go back a few years. 2006 to be exact. Hannah Montanna.
No, let's go back a little farther and show our innate ability to actually breed the illness. Billy Ray Cyrus...Achy Breaky Heart. A mullet to remember. ~Don't break my heart my achy breaky heart~ Lord, I still cringe when I hear the song and every man I know that had a mullet is trying to forget about it.
We opened our wallets and drove that ridiculous song to damn near an anthem in the US. We made a rich man out of Billy Ray Cyrus from Flatwoods, Kentucky. I have absolutely nothing against wealth, but I like to think I know the difference between a fad and talent.
But darnit, I did it again. When my granddaughters were little, I bought them Miley Cyrus clothes, pens, pocket books, accessories and bookbags. I have twinges of guilt about that today.
Now I stick with classic character gifts, i.e. My LIttle Kitty, Spiderman. Their true worth doesn't come from what others think about them, the cheers of the crowd, clothes, make up, money. And…. you don't get that nasty taste in your mouth when you open a closet to the leftover lunchboxes and junk from the Brittany, Lindsay and Miley era.
My poor duck is on skid row. Because we thought it was pretty, we fed it and we told it we would provide love and then we took it away. The Canada geese may not fly away this winter. Why should they. Maybe we could open our garages to keep them warm as well as feed them. Hmmm...I see similarities here.
Excess, Billy Ray Cyrus cancelled a last minute interview with Piers Morgan to defend Miley Cyrus. I could understand that, whew that’s a hard act for a daddy to follow. Or maybe there is a duet in the wings.... Don't twerk my heart, my twerky jerky heart.
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Back to School 70's Style
Enter...Music. I was browsing through Spotify looking for new stuff, realizing a few minutes in that this would be comparable to a whale picking out one fish for dinner in a sea of swarming krill.
I landed on the vast, but recognizable category of the 70's. For the next hour, I sang every word to every song. Ahhh.. the 70's, that hangover decade following the 60's Hippie peace and love, sleep in and smoke out era.
It's all well and good that we were a decade behind because country girls didn't make very good hippies.
First, not enough people knew what it was to be a hippie in our little town, so you couldn't really rebel because no one knew what you were doing anyway.
Second, There were only two channels that came in through the ~antenna~ at my house, one for the news and the other for Gunsmoke or Hee Haw. Happy Rain was the closest thing to a hippie around there.
Oh, we gave it a shot. We colored peace signs on our book covers and wore bell bottoms, hip huggers and halter tops to the dismay of the church ladies.
We thought we were ~Far Out~ and knew it all, then a stray would move to town from Californi or somewhere off and show us something that we were missing. Maybe recite some Poe.
I started thinking about how stress free school clothes shopping was for our parents. The guys usually got two new pair of Levi's, which they scrubbed up as soon as they could to get the new blue out, a new pair of sneaks, no need for shirts, they wore their coveted concert shirts until they were threadbare.
Us girls were happy with some new clogs, earrings and belts to accessorize the embroidered jeans we had been working on all summer. If our jeans were beyond repair, we made blue jean pocketbooks out of them. Basically, the style was to not look like you were wearing anything new.
Maxi's, mini's, embroidered and painted jeans, chevron shirts and dresses, floppy hats, bell bottoms, hip huggers, sizzler dresses (oh my) and clogs rounded out the apparel.
We didn't need to re-hash our summer vacations or camps with friends because our summers were always spent together. I am going to guess that our generation coined the phrase ~Hanging Out~
And hang out we did...In parks, by the river banks, floating the Edisto, fishing in gator ponds until it got to hot to fish and then peeling off clothes and swimming when we could see the gator on the other side of pond.
We drowned ourselves in baby oil and iodine and lay on shiny aluminum blankets to tan...eeek! For thrills we'd get hold of some Boone's Farm Strawberry Wine and play cow pattie bingo or cruise the town limit signs.
I crank the volume on the Spotify 70's radio station, Seals & Croft singing ~Summer Breeze~
No, I don't think I would go so far as to call the 70's ~The Good Ole Days~ but judging from the pinched faces of the parents I have seen in retail stores with grumpy kids and long list in hand. They weren't all that bad.
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