That Mallard is still nesting in our planter. I've been afraid to mow our lawn lest I should upset her or somehow usurp nature's balance with an internal combustion engine. Our house was starting to look like one of those garbage houses that you hear about on the news, where the water has been shut off for the past 6 months and the people inside have been pooping into garbage bags.

I couldn't stand it yesterday so I finally mowed the lawn. Much to my amazement the girl was as cool as a cucumber and allowed me to do my thing. I got about my business as fast as I could and now we are no longer an aesthetic blight on suburbia. Except of course that we still cannot plant anything in our planter, because there's a duck already planted there. Squatters, I tell ya!

Here are some pictures I took this morning.
I'm not bashful anymore.
I just opened the front door and leaned out and took these.



I shot a video too:

Labels: Ducks, Flowers, House, Nature, Summer, Video, Yard

The Mallard Hen is now living in our planter full time. The drake has disappeared; according to wikipedia that is normal. I guess he had to run off and do drake things for a while.

A took these photos from the truck when I drove around the front of the house. I just rolled down the passenger window and snapped off a couple of shots.


Here are a couple of closeups (Be sure to click on them to see full size):

From what I read, gestion takes about four weeks. Given that the eggs have been there for a week now and supposing a week or so before they leave the nest, I won't be able to use my front door for the next month, and really shouldn't be mowing my front lawn, either.

I think I'm going to be really popular with the neighbors this summer.

Labels: Ducks, Flowers, House, Life, Nature, Summer, Yard

Two weekends ago When I was clearing the yard I noticed that a bunch of the dead flowers had been removed from the planter out front on our steps.

Last weekend we spotted four eggs in the planter:


On Monday I spotted a mallard couple wandering around in our front yard, and this morning I was able to spy through the sidelight on our front door and actually see the hen, sitting in our planter. Now there are 7 eggs.

These waddling squatters are a welcome addition to our yard, especially after what happened last year. In the mean time, the planter can wait.

Another pleasant surprise this spring were the hostas that I transplanted from my parent's place last summer. Out of the middle of one of the plants sprung up four royal purple tulips, which had obviously mingled into the hosta's root system and been transported unwittingly by me. So mom has been gone for a year and a half but she is still sending me surprises.

Labels: Ducks, Flowers, House, Mom, Yard

Do you know what an "Oh Crap!" moment is?

For me the most illustrative example I can take from my childhood is when I would find myself on a roller coaster, right before hitting the peak on that first big hill. The point where I would come to my senses and realize that I was moments away from taking a seriously scary-ass plunge down the other side of the hill.

It is a moment of clarity, where you realize that you are totally dependant on a whole slew of people that you don't know - The engineer who designed the coaster, the greasemonkey who takes care of it, the administrator in charge of paying the greasemonkey, et al - The point is, you got yourself into this mess and now you are going to have to ride it out and pray that everybody else has done their jobs.

"America is addicted to oil"
-George W. Bush

Who, me?

Pretty much everything I consume is procured by oil, and a startling amount of the crap I buy is made from the stuff. And such is the case with pretty much everyone I know personally. Most people who care to think about such things agree that oil is a finite resource. But if it's going to run out someday, how much do we have left and why isn't that information being talked about or made readily available?

The answer could lay in the notion that the earth, if farmed in a pre-industrial (Read: non-mechanized) capacity, can yield enough crops to feed about a billion people. With modern agribusiness, using mechanization and chemicals, we are straining to feed 6 billion people now, with the population growth showing no signs of slowing. Without trying to sound like a black helicopter lunatic from the fringe, I would submit to the four people who read this blog that there is the makings of a global crisis - If not within my own lifetime at least within my son's. Not talking about a global crisis that could wipe out 5 billion people is probably only partially a lunatic fringe conspiracy. I would say moreover it's not talked about because such an event is unspeakable.

Now my thoughts turn to home, where my heart is. My house is a suburban McMansion (It is quite modest by suburban McMansion standards, but nevertheless a palace compared to a homestead in rural Kentucky). It is heated with gas, depends on electricity for cooking & food storage and is serviced by city water & sewer. What this translates to (On the other side of the hill) is a dwelling that is isolated by great distance from my place of work, completely dependant on the grid. There are no alternatives in terms of heat, water, or waste removal. The real kick in the nuts is that my neighborhood is built on an old sod farm. The builders put about two inches of topsoil down on top of a bed of sand and laid sod. So in effect it is still a sod farm, one with houses. One that is costly in terms of the amount of water needed to keep the grass alive due to the poor water retention of the soil. I only bring this up because as attractive the thought of subsistence farming on my own land in order to augment my food supply, the simple fact is that as it is right now my land could not grow much besides a bumper crop of tumbleweed if it came right down to it.

Oh Crap.

I'll be posting more on this vein in the months to come. I feel as though I have been awakened, to the sound of something rattling around downstairs. I cannot in good conscience go back to sleep without investigating the sound that has brought me out of my dreaming. I sense that it is most likely that I will never go back to sleep again.

Labels: House, Life, Peak_Oil

I don't mean to be premature but I believe that the war against vermin in my home is complete. After nailing the initial invader I got another one in a trap a couple of days later. They ate the entire box of poison (Tossed the box to the side like an empty) and have otherwise not been heard from. I spotted the third (& last) invader one night when I was backing my truck into the garage. He had been waiting in the garage and charged out when the door opened. I jumped out of the truck and chased him down the driveway. He crossed the alley and jumped into a snowbank, no doubt thinking himself home free. I brought my foot down on the entire area where I saw him go in. Scratch one more mouse. Got that one with a bunker buster.

Does this all seem trivial and not very noteworthy? That could explain why I haven't posted anything for two weeks. Life has been very routine and quiet lately. Not exactly something to complain about but then again not something to brag about to all 4 people who read this blog either.

For anyone it was lost on, the title of my last entry ("...to pieces") was a tributary reference to the Hanna-Barbera cat Mr. Jinks, famous for his line, "I hate meeces, to pieces!"

Labels: House

They say that you can appreciate nature in the most mundane and/or unnusual places, but the last place I expected to see it was on my kitchen counter, reared up on its hind legs. Last night when we returned to the house after work and a stop at the grocery store, I entered my kitchen to plug in my cell. Out of the corner of my eye I caught some movement; I could not believe what I was seeing as I watched a mouse wiggle behind the airpot, like a truant middleschooler fleeing from his principal.

Naturally I did what any man worth his salt would do - I armed myself. Unfortunately on such short notice the best weaponry I could muster was a large carving fork and a pair of BBQ thongs. I stood poised with the fork in my left hand, pointed directly toward my adversary (or at least where I thought him to be) and the thongs raised to shoulder height in my right. I'm not exactly sure what my plans were with the thongs. I don't know if I would have tried to club him with them or to snatch him off the counter like some kind of white Mr. Miyagi, going after a fly with a pair of chopsticks. I realized that I must have looked like a very pathetic martial artist. Crouching tiger, hidden rodent.

I sent the wife around in a flanking manuever, in an attempt to flush out my prey. He popped out from behind a diaper bag and scampered head first down the front of the cabinets in an eerie defiance of gravity. He squeezed his fat little mouse butt in between the baseboard and the dishwasher and was gone before I could so much as bring down the thongs or take a poke at him with the carving fork. Clearly I was no match for him in hand-to-hand combat.

My wife and I silently ate our dinners, each coldly assessing the other's overabundance of piled-up crap around the house, wondering to ourselves if the other had somehow unwittingly been harboring this fugative. Money changed hands and I was dispatched out into the night to purchase some mouse-sized anti-personnel weapons.

At the supermarket I opted for some traditional snap-over mousetraps for the kitchen and a cheese wedge-shaped box of D-con for the crawlspace below. As I approached the checkout the cashier had to ask loudly if I had some mouse problems. "Not for long, I hope." A young woman nearby looked at what I was buying and asked in an annoyingly pained voice, "Omigosh, you're not going to kill them, are you?"

I don't consider myself as a person who leans to strongly to either the right or the left of the political spectrum. I'm as much for saving the whales and other endangered species as the next person. But when it comes to the common mouse, especially one that has taken up residence in my house, we are talking about the mammalian equivelent to a cockroach.

"God willing," I said.
"Ew! That's just so mean! Couldn't you just buy live traps and then let them go?"
I tried to think of some cleverly analogous war on terror slogan, but I could not.
"It's them or me," I shrugged.

I spent a good part of the night cleaning the kitchen, removing the unnecessary clutter and basically trying to make the place as unfriendly to mice as possible. I set the D-con in the crawlspace and before I went to bed I baited four traps with peanut butter and placed then along the baseboards of the cabinets near the diswasher, stove and fridge. The fourth I placed near the garbage in the mudroom.

I drifted off to sleep, listening for the "schw-ack!" of a trap but heard nothing. In the morning I found my adversary in the trap near the stove, killed cleanly. My first instinct was to quietly dispose of the corpse, but on second thought I gingerly carried the trap (by the unoccupied end) up to the bedroom. I poked my head in the door and told the wife that I got the mouse and asked her if she wanted to see it. To my suprise she did and was not at all squeemish about looking at it. All for the best, because seeing is believing and now she knows that I didn't just imagine that I got one.

With a partial night sleep behind me now I realize that most likely our little friend had been hibernating in our christmas tree when we brought it into the house and been our houseguest for the last month or so. As I sit here at work I keep telling myself that, and hoping to myself that he was a very, very lonely male bachelor. For the mean time we will keep the traps out just in case he had any immediate relatives.

And I will master the art of the BBQ Thongs & Carving Fork assault.

Labels: House

These photos were taken out on the patio earlier tonight:

Labels: Flowers, House, Nature, Outside, Yard