A bird in the hand...

Kiddo and I went with some friends to a nearby park this morning that has a trail frequented by wild birds as well as people. (How crazy is this weather - it was in the 50s here today! Outdoors in a light jacket in late November? Woohoo!) The reason we went to this particular trail was because we'd heard if you bring some bird seed with you, put some in your hand, hold your arm out and stay very still and quiet, you can be a human bird feeder!

Our friends had done this before, and told us if you try this in the winter, the chickadees positively swarm your hand to devour the seeds. Today's chickadees seemed pretty well-fed, as the trail was quite busy with human bird feeders. (We also saw cardinals, jays, woodpeckers and finches, but only the chickadees ventured onto our hands.) We weren't exactly swarmed, but we each had birds land on our hands a few times. We will definitely go back in the winter to feed the birds again!


(PS - Another plea as we're now just 17 days away from my birthday.... won't you please help me make my 40th birthday wish come true? Thanks so very much!!)

Lost, Shmost, it's Sweeps Week on Cat TV, too, you know...

Yes, Spring means "sweeps week" for our local Cat TV stations (aka windows on the lower levels of the house).  Besides the regularly scheduled programming of Birdies, Squirrels and Chipmunks, we also get the big guns - BUNNIES!!

Though, all the hours of sweeps week excitement do tend to tire a kitteh right out............

Saturday in the park

Despite ominous predictions of rain and clouds today (it was deemed the "washout" of the two weekend days just last night by one local meteorologist), it was sunny, albeit cool, for pretty much the whole day.

So, we decided to head off to the park up the road and pay a visit to the fish hatcheries with their teeming hordes of hungry fish. Good thing I had a pocket full of quarters for the fish food pellet dispensers!

Here's Kiddo feeding one of the pools of two year old fish (they were all different kinds of trout). The two year olds had that "swarm" thing down pretty well.



Kiddo realized that feeding the older fish required some dexterity...



...because the fish were quite splashy in their quest to Get Those Pellets In Mah Belly!




A better shot of Kiddo getting splashed in thanks for all her efforts at staving off the fishies' hunger:



The perpetrators of the "Ewwww, I'm covered in fishy water" crime:





Alas, Kiddo wasn't the only one who got splashed! (Hubby also got doused a few times, but I didn't capture that for posterity, as it turns out):


(Yes, I know I haven't had that pedicure yet. I haven't chickened out, I swear! I'm going to do it at the beginning of August so my feet look purty poolside when we got to Disney next month!)

This was an entirely candid shot. I have no idea why Kiddo had this look on her face as she looked over at us, but hee!



Another candid that cracked me up. Kiddo was either singing to or calling to the fish as she fed them... Feed the fish, tuppence a bag (or, rather, a quarter a handful, as the case may be)...



On our way back to the car (in that pouring down rain...), I asked Hubby to get a picture of Kiddo and me in front of some pretty flowers. Our faces came out kind of shadowed so I had to lighten it up to see our faces, and Kiddo's hair was blowing in my face so it's kind of pixelated looking, but it's still us along with the pine cone Kiddo picked up and decided we needed to bring home. At least we didn't bring any of the voluminous amounts of goose poop that was everywhere around the hatcheries home with us...



Last but not least, here's an updated shot of Kiddo's room, all moved into and lived in now, featuring a cameo appearance by Crazy Cat, who was perching atop Kiddo's easel and giving Mad Eye Glow. Yes, Kiddo *does* sleep with that many stuffed animals on her bed (and actually there still are a few more bags of stuffed animals we haven't unpacked yet). It's an SPD thing...

(Kiddo's in-town Grandma is making her some tiebacks out of a cute pink fabric with white polka dots, and in the meantime I tied the curtains back with some pink gingham ribbon. I'll post an update once those are in place and the safari animal photo decals go up next weekend.)



Now it is evening, Kiddo's about ready to head to bed, the clouds have rolled in and the rain is falling. So glad we had a whole nice day before the weather predictions came true! Hope you're enjoying the weekend in your neck of the woods!

Just like Lewis and Clark, only with slightly less scenery and a lot more wallpaper

So, renovating our new old house has turned out to be quite the voyage of discovery, and not in a good way, most of the time. I keep waiting for the "wow, look at this Antiques Roadshow type ancient vase full of gold bullion that was hidden in the eaves for decades" type discovery, but ours have been more of the "oh crap, that's going to cost a lot more money and time to renovate than we'd thought" variety.

For example, the other night, I was having a grand old time stripping in the downstairs bathroom. Stripping wallpaper, that is, ahem. I hunched down to remove the last of the How Did This Seem Like a Good Decorative Idea Even in the Mid-60s?!?!? purple, floral print from under the sink and had discovery #1: the drain pipe under the sink was little more than a collection of rust molecules, held together with a bit of corrosion. Egads. I promptly summoned Hubby to corroborate my find, and he made discovery #2: there is no water shut-off valve on the sink. Double egads. This led to discovery #3 the next morning, when Hubby called me from work because it had occurred to him that perhaps that wasn't the only sink without a water shut-off valve and had me run around the house and check all the sinks: yep, there are no shut-off valves on any of the five sinks in the house. Quintuple egads! This meant that as soon as Kiddo had brushed her teeth and was headed off to bed last night, Hubby had to shut off all the water to the whole house in order to replace the corroded, rusted drain pipe and install a shut-off valve.

Now, I must digress for a moment here and give some major props to my husband. He has already done way more house-repair type things than any one person who isn't a professional plumber, electrician or contractor should ever have to even know how to do, from running wires from the basement up to all the rooms of the house to plumbing to replacing outlets to installing linoleum flooring to cutting humongous holes in the ceiling to allow duct repair work and then repairing the ceiling so you can't even tell there was a hole there. Hubby is not, for the record, a professional handyman or construction worker or anything of the sort - he's a financial advisor, for Pete's sake. Seriously, he is amazing. Thank heavens, too, because if he were "game to try but generally clueless and inept" like I am, we'd be totally screwed.

Back to the tales of discovery... Of course, within five seconds of Hubby announcing he'd shut off the water, I was overtaken with the simultaneous need to get a drink of water, pee, wash my hands, run a load of laundry and run the garbage disposal. (Which, by the way, I manage to turn on at least three times a day thinking it is the switch for the over-the-sink light. Which it isn't, no matter how many times I flip it on. How long do you think we'll live here before I remember that the first time I reach for the switch, rather than the fourth?) And here Hubby thought he was being smart waiting until after Kiddo was in bed.... he should've waited until I was sound asleep, too. Fortunately, he managed to get everything fixed and the water back on in short order.

Other discoveries we've made include the fact that 99% of the painted surfaces in the house (trim, crown molding, baseboards, wainscoting) are oil-based paint which requires a LOT more preparation to paint over than latex-based paint, and the above-mentioned duct repairs, which we realized we needed when we had our HVAC dude over to give us an estimate on sucking 44 years' worth of Oldster Dust-n-Such out of the air ducts and he quickly noticed that the air return ducts didn't actually connect to anything. Apparently the previous owners lived in this house for 44 years without having any air actually drawn back out of any rooms, but rather were getting their "fresh" air drawn from the spaces between the joists in the ceilings/floors (um, depending on whether you're talking about the upstairs or the downstairs rooms).

Another digression: yes, yes I am very impressed with my newfound ability to bandy about words like "joists" and "spackle" and "GFCI outlet" and "Shop Vac" with assurance and ease. This does not actually translate to any real-world expertise, as evidenced by my complete inability to relay the two things the HVAC dude told me to tell Hubby to him accurately, clearly or in a way that made any sense. (Me: "Um, so Rob said that we have to shave off 3/4 of an inch from the basement door when they put the carpeting down in the family room unless they do that automatically, and then he can cut a hole in the floor since the registers in the family room now don't go to anything." Hubby: "Huh?!?!" Me: "*big dramatic sigh* Rob said the door has to be taller and we can put the grill back on the register or cover it up but he can cut another hole to make a register that goes somewhere....?" Hubby: "Um, that makes no sense." Me: "Rob says call him.") I do love saying the words, though, especially spackle. It's a great word to say, you really should try it. Seriously - say it now, a few times, so you see what I mean. Spackle. Spackle. Spaaaaaackle. Isn't that great? And if anyone says "Um, why are you repeating 'spackle' over and over to your computer screen?" you can just say "Oh, I'm reading Heather's blog." No further explanation necessary.

Back to the list of discoveries (hey, did Sacagawea just walk by my window? - or maybe Norm Abrams?) we've made in the past three weeks... The bathroom sinks and Kiddo's bathtub are all cast iron. For Kiddo, this means she can't take any of her patented 45-minute-to-an-hour-long baths without needing me to run up to the bathroom and reheat the water twelve times because the cast iron sucks the warm right out of the H2O molecules. For Hubby, this means that when he is trying to remove the sink from the downstairs bathroom in order to put down the new linoleum floor, the sink will simply fall through the hole and go crashing to the ground, where it will sit as though made of gravity* until he has practically ripped his back and arm muscles out in order to move it out of the bathroom. Also, we appear to have a family of chipmunks living inside the walls of the house. Well, hopefully just the walls, and not the attic as well, especially with all the holes Hubby has to keep cutting into the ceilings - we may wind up with some new pets for Kiddo, and not of the canine variety she so desperately desires. I discovered the Chip and Dale invasion while standing on the back patio the other morning, and seeing Chip - or was it Dale? I never can tell those two apart - scamper across the patio, pause at the back of the house, and then shimmy his little chipmunk butt and tail right up into the teensiest, tiniest of holes above the basement window and disappear underneath the siding. This last discovery we are pretending we haven't found yet, as we won't have time to freak out about wild rodents dwelling in our walls for at least another week.

One other potentially devastating discovery has been the humidity problem in the family room. This is the room with the wood paneling that we've painstakingly painted over in Garden Moss Green with Bright White (yes, there are in fact eleventy million shades of "white" by the way) trim. Well, last week we were painting away - I believe this was the shellac primer layer necessary to get the wood paneling surface ready for actual paint primer (remember, I have no idea what the hey I'm talking about most of the time here) - and it was rather fumetastic, so we opened the windows to the family room. The same windows that appeared not have been opened since they were installed, judging from both what the previous owners told us ("we kept the windows closed - we're more AC than fresh breeze people") and from the archeological nature of the layers of cobwebs, dust and dead bugs found within the stuck-closed storm windows and stuck-open screens. Well, it was a relatively hot and humid afternoon and within a matter of two hours, instead of fresh air in the family room, we had puddles of condensation soaking the icky, asbestos tile floor. This resulted in the constant running of fans for over a week, various other "get the musty smell" out strategies being employed (Hubby's strategy: buy a volcanic rock/negative ionizer thingy at the hardware store, my strategy: buy an electric oil air freshener from Yankee Candle) and the purchase of a new, super-quiet, high-efficiency room dehumidifier that has been running constantly (and thankfully really *is* super-quiet, as we're going to be living with it in the family room for the foreseeable future). Can't exactly carpet over damp tile, you know...

So, yep, that's us, Hubby and Me aka Lewis and Clark. (Though I'd rather be Sacagawea - she was a veritable babe!) I'll leave you with one, final discovery, made by Hubby and photographed by me earlier this morning as we stood on the lanai (oh, and by the way, I find it utterly hilarious that Kiddo now uses the word "lanai" when speaking of the back porch. Cracks me up every, single time!) and gazed at the back yard:



Sorry about the maximized zoom = grainy, pixelated photography. That was the best my camera could do from inside the house. Yep, that's a woodpecker perched on the back fence (which actually belongs to the neighbor behind us, as do the lovely, flowering bushes you see and the neatly manicured lawn. Our yard is a mass of green: green hedgerows, green shrubs, green grass, green pachysandra - nary a colorfully flowering speck to be seen, except for my pansies and petunias on the front porch.) With our luck, he's gearing up for a summerlong feast upon bright yellow, cedar shingles...

So, what discoveries have you made recently in your neck of the woods?

* I wish I could take credit for the "sink made of gravity" line, but alas, I merely read it in a posting on Craigslist a week or two ago. It was a listing for a utility sink in someone's basement and the owner described it as being "made of gravity, I think, because I cannot lift it" or something to that effect. It cracked me up, so I had to borrow the phrase when the opportunity presented itself!

Phriday Photo Phun - Love is in the Air

So, we're moving. (And there was much rejoicing.) Thursday, to be specific. This means that today was the last spring Friday morning Hubby and I will be awakened by the sounds of, to put it delicately, extremely amorous waterfowl on the pond behind our property.

Now, over the past nine and a half years we have very much enjoyed the view out of the back of our house. It contains a small pond with a copse on the other side, so we have seen many different forms of wildlife throughout the years. Deer, rabbits, foxes, groundhogs, beavers, snakes, frogs, toads and all manner of birds from geese, ducks and gulls to more exotic looking herons. You name it and chances are if it is a native species or a migrating species that passes through western NY, it's been out back at some point. It's downright bucolic.

Except, that is, when it is spring and love is in the air. Love, that gets downright loud, especially in the wee, small hours of the early morning. Love that can easily awaken one from an already fitful sleep (due to, of course, the utter Freaking Out Levels of stress about the upcoming move). It is moments such as these when I can look forward to our upcoming new backyard view, that includes the back of someone else's property and nary a pond or woods full of breeding wildlife to be found.

In case you think I'm kidding, I submit the following photograph of one of the trees in our yard, snapped on my walk back up to the house (the last time I'll take Kiddo to the bus stop on a Friday morning in this neighborhood!) about 20 minutes ago................

Birds do it, bees do it, and apparently even sometimes snails do it...

Let's hope the new neighbors aren't exhibitionists... though that would certainly make for some good Phriday Photo Phun pics though, now wouldn't it? The kind that are more of the sort that certain Google searches seem to be seeking when they drop by my corner of the blogosphere, rather than a pair of smooching snails. Bow-chicka-wow-wow!!

Wanna check out more Photo Phun, or play along? Pop by Candid Carrie's weekly Phriday Photo Phiesta!

Also, please drop by my dear bloggy friend Em's Comments For Cans post sometime today, leave her some commenty love and force her to drive over to donate the cans of food she's promised to buy with the tail end of her SUV positively dragging on the pavement behind her!!

Boo hiss, Branta canadensis

Branta canadensis is the bane of my existence these days. What is that, you ask? (What, no ornithologists read my blog?) Here's a hint:


The above pictures were taken earlier this summer, back when the Canada goose population in our neighborhood was just beginning to burgeon with goslings. (Now that it's fall, my burning bushes are starting to burn and my lilies are pretty much done...) I know that many suburban areas are dealing with the annoyances of vast populations of Canada geese. In our area, there are three small ponds within a quarter mile, including one smack dab behind our property. This means that we don't just have flocks of geese, but hordes of them. It is a veritable plague of geese in our neighborhood. Every morning, the kiddo and I must tread carefully on our way to the corner, lest we step in a Canada Goose Land Mine. The sidewalks, streets and unfenced yards are strewn with goose droppings. The geese have also been known to hold up traffic by sauntering across the street, single file, hissing and flapping their wings at the cars they are blocking.

Now, I try to shrug off the holding up traffic; I realize that the adults lose their flight feathers during gosling season (though it seems they could do us the courtesy of hurrying it along when crossing the road - they are positively meandering and don't give a hoot - or a honk). I even try to frame the fecal extravaganza in positive terms - all that poop must make great fertilizer for the lawn (at least in our front yard; they don't go in our back yard thanks to the fence. Geese like to have a large, clear sightline in order to land, so the fence keeps them out quite handily.)

The reason I'm so anti-Branta canadensis comes from one, simple thing. These birds are LOUD. Not just the honking, though that woke Hubby and me up again well before our alarm clock this morning, but also from when they make a water landing. Graceful, these birds are not! Now, we have a few gray and white herons that visit our pond regularly - gawky birds with massive, pterodactyl-like wingspans. The herons' wings are so large that you can hear them beating the air, helicopter-rotor-like, when they fly over, whump whump whump. But when they touch down in the pond, there's nary a splish. Not so much the geese. They sound like someone is gluing large cats to frozen turkeys, then tossing them into the pond from a great height. THUNKsplashsplashsplashsplash, and of course HONKING all the while. The noise is quite disconcerting and loud enough to rouse one from a deep sleep. It sounds like someone is fighting a sea monster there in our back yard.



or

? Hard to say...........

"Well, Heather," you say, "at least the geese are migratory. Won't they be gone soon?" Nope. Can't even cling to that hope. These geese are here until well after the pond's frozen over solid. (That is an even more disturbing sound than the water landing - a mess of geese all trying to land in the same, small spot of unfrozen water.)

So, this is why I'm grumpy this morning, because we were once again woken up before 5am by the clamoring ruckus of the Canada geese. Mother Nature is one evil witch sometimes, let me tell you!

Miscellany: Sweet 16, The Silence of the Voles, Google hilarity

Sixteen years ago tonight was my first date with Hubby! He picked me up at my apartment in his teeny-tiny Ford Festiva and we went to Pizzeria Uno for dinner, then to see Last of the Mohicans (its opening night). After the movie, we went to Friendly's for dessert, where I was impressed by Hubby managing to put away an entire Jim Dandy sundae -



- that's FIVE scoops of ice cream, y'all! (I should point out Hubby was only a 19 year old college student at the time, and hasn't eaten a sundae half as large in over a decade...) We sat and talked 'til the restaurant closed. Then, we headed back to my apartment where Hubby came up (oh hush now, I'm not like that on a first date) and we watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, because I was horrified that Hubby had never seen it. (That's a movie that we still quote to each other on practically a daily basis, and it's a good thing Hubby liked it as much as I do, as that was part of my future-husband-material litmus test.) After that, we talked some more and he left my apartment around 4:15 in the morning. And that was the Great Beginning, sixteen years ago today...

***

So, yesterday I mowed the lawn. It was far overdue for a mowing, and the back yard was especially jungle-y. When I got to the back, I dragged Kiddo's playhouse up onto the deck, as is customary, and shook my head when I saw the obvious signs that some of our community of voles had set up an outpost - vacation home perhaps? - underneath the playhouse - vole poop, little trails, two voles scurrying away and under the fence, etc. We never put any rat poison underneath the deck this summer, where their primary metropolis exists, and I've seen evidence as always that they were utilizing both my food garden and planting beds as their own personal salad bar, so I wasn't surprised to see that they'd been under the playhouse. I began the mowing, iPod on and my Aerosmith playlist cranked up so I could hear it over our loud, old, gas-powered push mower. As I was going over the area where the playhouse had been, I mowed over a largish tuft of dead grass that I had figured was the voles' vacation bed. Coincidentally, as the front edge of the mower hit this tuft, the song I'd been listening to ended and there was a moment of silence just long enough for me to hear some hideous squeaking as the mower blades momentarily caught on something in the grass. I immediately stopped the engine, but it was too late - what I'd just run over with the Grassy Blades of Death was not an abandoned pile of grass for bedding, but a nest containing several small and now quite diced and dead baby voles.

I felt just horrible about it, as I hadn't intended to slaughter an entire nest of helpless babies, rodents or otherwise. I fetched a shovel from the garage, scooped up the gooey, gory remains and carried them ceremoniously down to the pond, where I gave them a burial at sea. (I figured the fish or herons or other pond-area wildlife would appreciate some Vole Tartar.) I mean, as much as I hate the stupid voles and do intentionally try to off them in their adult form (via the rat poison under the deck), I didn't mean to kill a whole passel of babies. To paraphrase Hannibal Lecter, now it will be some time before the voles stop screaming............... It also will be some time before I offhandedly mow any lumps of grass, as well. I imagine those baby voles are now sitting up there in animal heaven, alongside the squirrel I ran over when I was 17 and the bird that flew into my car earlier this summer, leaving grisly bits embedded in the front grill, and they're all waiting for their turn to cast their judgement upon me, the careless machinery operator who sent them to their doom...

***

So, from time to time I read posts other folks have written about the weird Google searches that brought people to their blog. Well, I certainly have my fair share of those too, and now's as good a time as any to share them with you. Here goes with a sampling from the past week's searches:

goldfish getting fat

Perhaps installing a tiny treadmill in the tank would help?

coke-bottle glasses thick

Yep, that's me. I could start fires in seconds by holding my glasses up to the sun. Seriously.

kids gotta pee

Yes, they do. True story.

how to make a loud burp without soda

I'm a bit sad that I didn't have any actual answers for this person on my blog...

the mom haircut
and
Mrs. Brady hair

These both appeared several times from different places. Who knew so many folks out there are interested in either mom hair or the mother of all moms, Mrs. Brady's hair?

neti pot hurt eardrum

Well, I told you I don't ever want to use one of those things, and here's just one more reason why.

why is my child barfing all over the bed

Um, I'm not sure, but sorry - perhaps a throw-up bucket would be a good idea?

funk

In which regard: bringing it, smelling it, or listening to it?

How to look like Angelina Jolie

Sorry, I certainly can't help you there. Getting Brad Pitt as arm candy might help, though.

apple bread more with less

This one just doesn't make sense. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

food getting stuck in teeth all the time

Have you tried flossing?

moms in jeopardy

I don't know what you were looking for, but I was on Jeopardy and I am now a mom...

How to remove very big splinter from childs skin without screaming

Well, I certainly would also love the answer to that one!

Boobs in a swimming pool

Yes, there frequently are.

Now, I have had many search hits every week for things like "naked locker room" or "embarrassing public nudity" thanks to some of my older posts, but I'm guessing that the people doing those searches aren't getting the results they were hoping for when they stumble upon my little blog. Hee!

Okay, I could keep rambling on, but I have a list of errands to do and I'm burning daylight here. Hope everyone is having a great day out there in the blogosphere!

(egg) Breaking News!!!

I just took down the petunia baskets to water them, as they're quite droopy between the sun and the brisk, hot breeze, and look who decided to pop out:



This is the baby out of the presumptive sparrow egg, (as you can see) the five matching, smaller eggs are still intact. Mama Finch was super ticked at my disruption of her motherly duties - I watered as fast (yet carefully) as I could and rehung the basket while she cheeped and cheeped at me. She went back to the nest as soon as I'd closed the front door behind me. I'm guessing we'll have more babies in the next couple of days, as the egg that hatched today wasn't the first one laid. Woo-hoo! (Also, I haven't seen the sparrow hanging around in the past couple of days, either in the front near the nest or in the back yard, where this year's birdfeeder frequenters are eating us out of house and home, or at least out of gigantic bags of seed.)

In other nature and wildlife-related news, yesterday after church I was mowing the lawn when, in the back yard along the back of the kiddo's sandbox, I came across this:



It's about two feet long, and isn't a complete specimen. I skeeved Hubby out by picking it up with my bare hands and bringing it inside to show him and the kiddo. (The kiddo who promptly requested to bring it in to school today to show to her class, which she did with great excitement this morning.) Once it was safely contained in a gallon-sized baggie and my hands had been thoroughly washed, Hubby was more inclined to inspect the snake skin. Now, we've only ever seen garter snakes around our little piece o' property, and the largest of those that we've ever spotted was maybe a foot long. Neither of us believe this came from a garter snake, and I have no idea what kind of snake it belonged to before it was shed. Here's a close-up of the skin in case there are any herpetology enthusiasts out there who might be able to identify it.




I was thinking of taking it (with the kiddo) to the zoo and seeing if anyone there might know, but with the AC issue (as described in painful detail in my previous post) I didn't want to do any extra driving today. Let's hope that whatever type of snake it is, its diet consists primarily of many, many voles and that if so, s/he sticks around for the rest of the summer. It'd be awfully nice to be vole-free, especially without having to resort to placing boxes of rodent poison way under the deck (well out of any human or feline's reach) as we've had to do a few times in previous years when the vole infestation has been particularly prolific.

We're positively brimming with wildlife 'round here! Between the birdies, the snake, the toad I almost ran over with the mower, Bunny Foo-Foo (who has munched a good portion of this year's food garden, now replanted and surrounded by organic Keep-Bunny-Away granules), the vole community under the deck and the geese, ducks, herons, deer, muskrats and what appears to be a beaver family in the pond out behind our back yard, well, call up the ghost of Marlin Perkins and have him bring a camera crew on over!