Broody Hen

This hen has been sitting exactly like this for 21 days. I suppose she gets out to eat and drink when I'm not looking. But when I'm there, she's like a statue - a statue with sound effects when I poke under her warm, damp bare breast to assess the eggs she's sitting on. She takes a quick peck at my hand and emits a long raspy complaint at the disturbance.

The first chick hatched Friday. More on Saturday. Sunday she was still waiting for the rest.

I usually try to keep my hands off on the theory that she knows better than I do. But by 4:00 Sunday I couldn't stand it anymore. It seemed like that Friday hatchling must need a drink of water. So I eased the five little guys and a few unhatched eggs into a box. The hen grumpily followed as I set the box on its side on the floor. She deposited the biggest, smelliest chicken poop I've ever seen, suggesting she'd been stuck in the next for quite a while.

The chicks merrily tumbled out into the straw as she chirped instructions to them. She demonstrated drinking from the waterer and showed them where to peck for food. She had no interest at all in the remaining eggs. She periodically called the babies back under her wings and purred to them 'til they ventured out again.

Monday morning the chicks were exploring the entire floor of the hen house. I had placed a board across the outside door so that the hens can get out but not the chicks. I want to be sure she doesn't take them outside somewhere that I won't be able to find them when it's time to close the door in the evening. They'll be safer in the hen house for now.

Too Many Words

I'm getting pretty tired of white men whining about racism. The real problem is that Sotomayor, like so many of us, uses too many words per sentence. You know me. I'm a grammar nut and when you're a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

"I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Check it out. It's 32 words. MS Word grades it as readable just above a 12th grade level. Still, I can see how a listener may try to cut out a few words in the effort to get his head around the concept. The most important word cut in most of the quotes I've seen and heard is "wise."

The quote is near the end of her 4,000 word speech to a law school audience describing the effect of personal experience on judgement. If it had been addressed to the popular media, no doubt she would have phrased it differently. Try this:

A wise Latina woman might reach a better conclusion than a white man without her experience.

Fifteen words readable on a seventh grade level. Still I fear people would drop the pesky prepositional phrase at the end. One of my best friends has the annoying habit of jumping to conclusions in the middle of my sentences. I often warn him: "The point's going to come at the end of the sentence. Wait for it!"

My advice to speakers: Use only the words you want listeners to hear.

My advice to listeners: Trust that the speaker needed all the words. If you don't remember them all, don't try to draw your own conclusions.

Good Grief!

If it's not one thing, it's another. Magda brought this bunny in. He's got a small puncture behind his neck, but he seems okay. I think there's more blood on my hand from taking him away from the cat than there is on the bunny.

I don't know why Magda insists on bringing me her catches. I'm upstairs minding my own business. But if she brings them to me, she should know by now that I'll take them away. Except, maybe, for mice. They're fair game.

Atonement

For all the things I may have neglected or screwed up this week, I saved this hummingbird's life today.

I can't take much credit. I was in the right place at the right time and I was paying attention. I'd seen the hummingbirds courting where I was gardening this afternoon. I was in the kitchen fixing dinner when I barely heard the thump that always gets the cats' attention.

It's easy enough to distract the cats for a second and I was able to pick up the limp little bird. She closed her eyes in my hand and I wasn't very hopeful, but she still seemed able to move. As I held her and tried to decide what to do, she flicked her tongue out. I feel incredibly blessed that now I have this mental image of a hummingbird's tongue.

I had hummingbird food in the fridge. When I held it near her beak, she took a few laps at it. I watched the male at the feeder and hoped for the best. In a few minutes she got her balance in my hand but she was pretty ruffled. Aha! I guessed she must be cold and held her closer. Her eyes opened and her feathers started to smooth down.

By then I was really starting to wish for a picture. I was able to pick up the camera and I'm grateful for this slightly out of focus photo. Just after the shutter clicked she took wing in that abrupt way only hummingbirds can manage and landed above the roof in the walnut tree.

I'll be watching their nest this summer and feeling a special kinship with their offspring.

Yet Another New Year's Day

May Day, six months from Halloween, marks the end of winter and the beginning of the growing season. It's a great day for a celebration: a bonfire to celebrate the strengthening sun (and to clean up the yard); treehugging and decorating a tree with streamers as a Maypole; a bouquet, perhaps violets, to celebrate returning flowers;

Unintended Consequences

One of the unintended consequences of my job in town government is increased exposure to the moon. Late meetings keep me out after dark about three nights a week. On my drive home I continue to be frustrated by my inability to understand my actual and metaphorical place in the universe.

The past few nights there's been a lovely waxing crescent moon in the western sky. I know this "toenail" will grow fatter each evening 'til it's a half-moon overhead. And fatter still 'til it's full and rising in the east just after sunset. I know where I am on earth and I know what the moon's going to look like in the sky over time. It's nice and orderly, like this chart.



In my imagination the sky is curved overhead. The sun is somewhere beneath my flat earth casting the earth's shadow on the moon. I can set this image in motion and see the crescent moon setting at midnight. With some effort I can even imagine the moon "under" the earth in the morning and I guess if I search in the eastern sky at midday I should be able to find the moon.


I try to visualize this from somewhere in space - on the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun for simplicity's sake. I block out the stars and other planets and see a flat western hemisphere. There I am at 42 degrees latitude with my feet pointed toward the center of the earth. The moon is setting to the left of the flat earth. The sun is behind my dark, flat western hemisphere and I'm moving toward the right. East? Counter clockwise?

Then I start to lose my grip on these inter-related concepts in four dimensions and I remember Flatland. Not only can I not visualize time as a fourth dimension. I'm absorbed in a two dimensional world in which I can't imagine the third dimension.

Distractions

Bless Maggy for regularly sending me fun things to think about. Not that I don't already have enough to think about - but I'm pretty burned out on cell tower technology and alkaline hydrolysis. So this week's ideas from Maggy (which I saved for today) are Taking Up a Hobby and the love/hate topic of Personal Organizing.

I was a bit put off by Slatella's introduction of the hobby as a distraction from tough economic times. (Keep in mind this article is in the Fashion section of the Times.)

"I’ve been spending my time, like everyone else I know, obsessing over bigger problems — how will I pay for two kids in college and still be able to buy white wine ($9 a day)."

As I read on, I realized I'm not like the obsessed writer. I'm the friend who drags her into the hobby:

"She’s my competent friend, the one who has all kinds of practical skills. She knows how to make pies and how to cut fabric on the bias. She even knows what a “bias” is. What does she have to worry about? If a giant meteor hit the earth and debris from the impact blocked the sun, she’d survive just fine in some homespun coat she made out of super-warm wool. And the coat would be cute, too."

Maggy knows I've recently started making jewelry. I haven't worn jewelry for years. It turns out my new-found interest is more about the look and feel of beads and wire.



But a decade or two ago I did wear beads on a regular basis and people gave me many lovely necklaces. Now every single one of those looks to me like a source of beads to remake into new jewelry.



Beads aren't just ornamentation for the body. They're equally decorative on the wall. Ideas are beginning to form in the back of my mind for spectacular beaded embroidery artwork.





Which brings us to Personal Organizing. The only empty desktop space you see in this photo is the spot where my camera was before I picked it up to take the picture. Maggy and I share an ADD type organizing challenge. We both need to be able to see our stuff. And we share a sense that "She who dies with the most organizing books wins."

Rimer's organizer thinks the key to organizing is the label maker. I have a label maker. I'm not exactly sure where it is, but I'm pretty sure it's still in the package. B gave it to me a year or two ago for my birthday or Christmas or some such. Apparently owning a tool isn't really the answer. There always seems to be actual work involved.

The real thread these two articles have in common is the need for distraction.

Ms. Whited came to the label maker a few years ago, when she had a major health scare, and one of her first worries was about her husband and three small children: “How is Pete going to know where everything is?”

She began labeling everything she thought her husband might need to find in her absence: children's medicine, cat treats, paint thinner, bread... Bread? Doesn't bread come with its own label? The fact is, the labels may have helped her husband, but they really helped her endure the time while she waited for her medical test results. Happily the results were negative. By the time she got the news, the label maker was her new best friend. I think I'll go find mine now.

Irish Heritage

I think President Obama is right. On St Patrick's day everyone searches for a trace of Irish heritage to celebrate. Mine's pretty direct. My grandmother, Agnes Bannon, was Irish. But that's as far as I can trace it. As I recall from my mother's stories, my grandmother was an orphan.

My mother was born in 1923 and her sister was 13 years older. There was an older sister who died of tuberculosis in her teens. So, perhaps it was 1906 when my grandmother married Edwin Crowther. In my mother's stories, he was a house painter. He died when my mother was very young, so she never knew him.

My grandmother worked as a seamstress in a laundry. Young though my mother was during prohibition, she remembered my grandmother and friends enjoying beer in the back room of a neighborhood ... um ... establishment.

I liked my grandmother. She laughed a lot. I don't remember her ever being angry. And once, when she was staying with us while my parents were travelling, she let me go to school with my hair down.

Turkeys Are The New Deer

This is sort of what I meant about turkeys looking better when they appear shyly at the edge of the woods.



The Toms, of course, not so shy, but still good looking.

Spring!

I have several pictures of Winter Aconites covered with snow. But I still feel they're a sign of spring. This year, even more so because most of the flowers have bees in them.


Poor bees, can't leave the huddle in the hive 'til the temperature is over 50 degrees. They're out in force on the first warm day of the season. Have I mentioned that it's a bad idea to hang out your laundry on that first warm day? The bees have been steadily consuming their stored honey all winter, but they don't poop in the hive. So those first poops in the spring are BIG. Tempting as it may be to hang your sheets outdoors for that fresh air smell, you'll probably have to wash them again before you can use them.


This is one of my favorite bouquets every year. It's practically full size in this picture - about 4" tall including the tiny brandy snifter vase.

On My Nightstand

Hyperion, Dan Simmons

I Was Told There'd Be Cake, Sloane Crosley

People of The Book, Geraldine Brooks

Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood

Last month I read and loved Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood.

Last year I thought about quitting my bookclub 'cause we'd chosen a few books I didn't care for. I couldn't put my finger on why I didn't like them 'til I found this in an old interview with Ernest Hemmingway:

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you."

In March It Is Mud...

"Housewife's Lament" is the first song I learned to play on the guitar. Well, it's C, F and G7. So, learning to play it wasn't a big deal. But, much to my kids' dismay, I like to sing it.

In March it is mud, it is slush in December.
The midsummer breezes are loaded with dust.
In fall the leaves litter, in muddy September,
The wallpaper rots and the candlesticks rust.

Oh, life is a toil and love is a trouble.
Beauty will fade and riches will flee.
Pleasures they dwindle and prices they double,
And nothing is as I would wish it to be.

This was the view last week:

Mourning Doves huddled up in the cold and snow.




And yesterday this was the muddy view: 24 Turkeys on the lawn.

You know, I like wildlife. But I have to say, deer and turkeys in particular are cuter when they peek shyly out from the edge of the woods than when they take over the entire lawn like this.

Punctuation Police

People at work know that the only two times I've nearly lost my temper, the issue was bad writing.

Just so you know I'm not the only crazy person (and that you can find a blog about anything) may I present The Blog of Unnecessary Quotation Marks.

Stinkbug

This morning, as I shuffled across the kitchen to feed the cats, so they'd get out of the way while I poured my coffee, I unconsciously stepped over a stinkbug. I heard myself saying, "Oh, great. A stinkbug. It must be getting warmer."

Some people get swallows. Or robins. Or crocuses. My harbinger of spring is a stinkbug.

My photo of a stinkbug is on my other computer. So rather than drag myself downstairs again to boot up the other computer or take another picture, I lazily googled stinkbug. Wow. Other people have much prettier stinkbugs than I have. Of course, mine is not the "true" stinkbug. Mine is technically a leaf-footed bug - which happens to have the same delightful ability as stinkbugs, to release a strong scent when disturbed. I don't happen to think it stinks, but most people do.

It turns out that other people have prettier leaf-footed bugs than I do, too. By now the coffee's kicking in, so I went back to take a picture. Okay. Close up he's kind of good-looking. Not colorful, but not bad.

My point, and I do have one, is that if I didn't have this habit of blogging in the morning while I listen to Washington Journal, I wouldn't have paid much attention to the stinkbug. I certainly wouldn't have seen the pictures of other species of stinkbugs or read enough about them to learn that there are only two families of bugs that release this scent when disturbed: Coreidae, like mine and maybe next time I look it up I'll remember the name of the other family.

Will I ever need to know this? Probably not. But I was planning to write about economics and this was more fun.

Like Sands Through the Hourglass

I don't mean to make this all-deer-all-the-time. But it's a real soap opera out there.

Remember earlier this month our herd of two became four. And they co-existed peacefully for a couple of weeks.


But recently the mama deer has decided there's not enough spilled birdfeed for four. She's been aggressively chasing off the two that are apparently not related to her.

Happy Groundhog Day

Yet another new beginning.

If I turn my back on the shadows, can I get an early spring, too? It's worth a try.

Thanks, again, to Jack Lambert.

Squandering Time

This is what I've been doing mornings while I listen to Washington Journal. This is what's been keeping me away from blogging. It's All-Star Puzzles, a puzzle, like a jigsaw puzzle but with square or rectangular pieces. And the pictures are nice. I rationalize that I'm exercising my mind, tho' I know I should be doing Pilates.



I missed the opportunity to commemorate Benjamin Franklin's birthday on January 17. My favorite Franklin quote:

"If you love life, then do not squander time. For that is the stuff life is made of."

Not for the Faint of Heart

The day started badly when B realized the scratching at her door wasn't the usual nuisance - Jake signaling for Murphy to come out and play. But Jake had neatly peed in her shoe and was futilely scratching around the shoe to cover it up. (Did I mention that B and Jake don't like each other?)




She came downstairs in her stocking feet to start Saturday morning chores. Stepping into her boots, she found them filled with black walnuts. She dumped them out and tried again only to find there were still nuts crammed into the toe. Red squirrels are compelled not only to gather every walnut they can find, but to move them around periodically to thwart any other squirrel who might have discovered their various hiding places. (In fact, later in the day when I put my boots on, I found the squirrel had retrieved the nuts B had dumped out and stored them in my boot.)


Soldiering on, B filled the birdfeeders and scattered some feed on the ground for the turkeys and crows. Then off to take fresh water to the chickens and add some straw to cover the chicken coop floor. Chickens are alarmists about the tiniest sudden movement. So, naturally, scattering the straw completely panicked them. The youngest rooster fled out to the yard, landing in a deep snow bank. He was half immersed in the snow but with his feet not reaching the ground - effectively immobilized. I wish I had a picture of that.


Heading back to the house, B found the deer happily licking up the feed she'd left on the ground for the crows and turkeys. What's the use? B likes crows and turkeys, but not chickens or deer and especially not Jake.

The Herd

I've adjusted to the deer wandering through the yard nibbling the shrubs.


I know that after avoiding them on the long drive home at night I still have to look out for them as I pull into the driveway.


I've even accepted that our bird feeder herd has doubled from two to four.

But somehow this image of them loafing in the garden just seems like the last straw.

Fresh Starts

In this imperfect world I find myself irresistibly drawn to blank slates, tabulae rasae, fresh starts. I need as many New Year's Days as I can possibly find.

In ancient Pagan traditions, November 1 is New Year's Day. It makes as much sense to me as January 1 (basically no sense at all) so I'll take it. There's the first day of spring; the first day of school; and frankly, every Monday morning.

Happy New Year.
Thanks to friend and artist Jack Lambert for this reminder of HOPE in 09.