Boys Like to Climb

This one is 77 years young and still ascending.

goodnight moon

(praying for rain)

Duck Escape

Ducklings are cute, but they have the nasty habit of, in a nanosecond, polluting any water they may have access to. They probably don't care a whit if they're swimming in a mucky mess, but it offends my sensibilities as a caretaker. Every day or so while Audrey was gone, I lifted the edge of their outdoor cage, retrieved their swim dish, dumped it, and refilled it with sparkling H2O.  Until the other day. 

At that time, the only way INTO their pen was to lift the side, because their "pen" consisted of an upside-down garden cart that had wire mesh sides.  So you had to lift the whole wagon, or at least most of it, every time you wanted to move anything in or out of the pen.

The water needed changing, so I lifted the wagon side and caught up Abernathy.  Buford, however, made a run for it, and gleefully escaped into the wide world, peeping the joy of freedom at top volume and circling his little legs around so fast they looked like the leg-wheels you see on fast-running critters in cartoons.  I chased, trying to nab the speedy Buford with only one free hand, since Abernathy was beating his little wings violently in my other palm, trying to break free and loudly cheering encouragement to his friend.  Round the spirea bush we went, and then Buford made a dash for the elm tree; we circled it a time or two, and then back to the spirea.  I ducked  :)   and pounced and swiped the air with my free hand, while Abernathy cheered and waved his downy pom poms.  John was in the kitchen, just the other side of a glass patio door, obliviously reading the paper.  I knew he was there, but I didn't dare leave the chase to get help, for fear that Buford would have competely disappeared when I returned. 

Buford's legs may be faster, but my brain is bigger.  I chased him into a corner, caught my prize, and stuck them both in a small indoor cage in the house while I pondered my next move.  The birds are too big, noisy and messy for me to put up with them in the kitchen any more, but I can't risk a cat showing up during a ten or fifteen minute duck rodeo every time the water needs changing.  So now the ducks have a new home.

This old stock tank, with big rusted-out holes in the bottom, was lounging around by the cattle pens.  I took a SawsAll to it to completely remove half of the bottom, and you can see the rest of my handiwork.  It is not perfect---a REAL DuckMaster would have put some screen windows in the sides for ventilation and better duck-viewing---but it was fairly quick, is easily moveable from spot to spot, was cheap and didn't require a trip to town for supplies.  Best of all, one can catch and remove the ducks, if one so wishes, without giving them free range access to a thousand acres of earth and two cats.

Stock tanks are multi-purpose.  When they are new, you can fill them with water and let your livestock drink out of them.  When they are old, you can make them into a duck pen.  Or, if you don't have ducks or livestock, you can make them into decorative planters -- read all about it here.

Don't Miss Out!

The Day the Music Died, Part 2

The music really died a long time ago for this puppy.  She's an old girl from maybe the 60s, and she's had a hard life.  Long vacations between visits from the tuner, followed by lots of solitary confinement in our basement dungeon after we bought a nicer piano.  In between, she took her share of kid-pounding, including the day I vacuumed bits of ground piano out of the carpet.  A visiting toddler had thought the music would be louder if he used a tool instead of his fingers to bang on her ivories plastic keys. He was right of course, but the piano never got over it.

Last week we decided it was time for her to yield up her parking space in the basement.  Audrey, John and I grunted and strained our way up the stairs with her.  Then John and Merrill took over with the loader bucket, giving the piano a graceful,open-air ride across miles of gravel to her final resting place.  Not as much fun as the last time we parted company with a keyboard---read about it here----but maybe our taste for fun has changed.

Pizza is the New Soup

Our grandmas used to clean out the refrigerator (or icebox) and throw it all into a pot for soup.

My fridge was bursting at the seams last night, but it's way too hot around here for soup.  Fortunately, I found pizza parts hidden in amongst the tidbits and tadrats that were hanging out in a half-dozen Tupperwares.  A bit of leftover ground sausage, one grilled chicken breast, a handful of residual hamburger meat, a few black olives, two rings of red onion, half of a garden tomato plus two tablespoons of canned tomato left from some earlier culinary adventure.......throw in some olive oil and a little cheese, chop a few sprigs of basil from the yard................... and Voila'.

The fridge is cleaned out, the supper is good, and we didn't have to eat soup on a ninety-degree summer evening.

The sail,

photo by Audrey

the play of its pulse so like our own lives:  

photo by Erica

so thin and yet so full of life,

photo by Erica

so noiseless when it labors hardest,

photo by Erica

so noisy and impatient when least effective.

---Henry David Thoreau

country road

Art Imitates Life

Erica and Audrey are gliding down this outdoor escalator in a swank, trendy part of Atlanta.  It is full of wrought iron and glass, huge brightly colored umbrellas, and everything upscale including.... 

a set of planters made from the most fashionable....

stock watering tanks.

Who knew we were so vogue?

Summer Again.

Isn't it great that summer rolls around so regularly?  The older I get, the sooner it's summer again.