Hi, friends! I hope your weekend went well. If you’re a federal employee in the US or work a job which observes federal holidays, yay glad you get Juneteenth off tomorrow.
Do you have small things your stress majorly over? Things that won’t change your life but are consuming a lot of our available brain processing capacity?
I get caught up in little things sometimes because the nature of *checks reality* is so negative in many ways. Currently I’m freaking out because I finally was able to get a hummingbird feeder up yesterday and no one has been spotted yet. Typically I have several lil hummers hitting up my feeder, so the fact that I haven’t seen any yet makes me worried last year’s lil friends didn’t make it. I do have some plants that have already bloomed which are known nectar sources, so hopefully they’re still around.
Anyways, that’s my hyperfixation of the weekend. How has yours been?
I got a couple of these and the hummingbirds are feeding!
https://www.lowes.com/pd/Wild-Wings-Clear-Glass-Hanging-Nectar-Hummingbird-Feeder/5013805765
I like them because they’re basically Mason jars so you can run most of them through the dishwasher between refills. They also don’t need a ton of solution, which I think tends to go bad before long.
Also, less than $10.
Good luck. I bet you’ll get some.
That thing would be empty in less than a day at my house! I have 2 feeders that fit about 3 cups each & currently they are emptied in about 3 days. The transients are here in force & they will fight all day for control of each feeder from the local Anna’s. Although they will on occasion share the feeder with a friend, the Anna’s don’t. I’m laying on my coach now watching my daughters make me dinner after a day at the farmers market & Szechuan food at a brewery for lunch. Not a bad Father’s Day . Still have a special wine I’ve been wanting to share with my daughters tonight that famous winemaker Chris Figgins made to celebrate his daughters. Seems like a perfect end to the day.
Happy Father’s Day to you, Shaq. I always wanted to be a father. We would have had to adopt, though, or go to a surrogate, because neither of us possesses a womb. Nor would we want to, quite frankly.
Thanks Matty, I think you would have been a great parent! Your kid would have great stories, appreciate & hopefully make excellent food, & be the trivia master of their school.
My problem is, we would have had to play good cop/bad cop.
We thought we could adopt two non-white female siblings. Non-white because the white ones are rare and they get snapped up. Female, because, you know, two men. Even I get creeped out by the thought of gay male celebrities raising sons.
We wouldn’t have sent the girls into the public schools, they’re horrendous, so I surveyed my child-having friend group about this and got some tips. A couple of the mothers also volunteered to step in when the girls reached puberty, which is when everyone goes insane.
But anyway, with the girls, I would have been like, “That’s really fascinating. Have you ever heard of a book called Peyton Place? I think I have a copy of it somewhere, but if I don’t, I can—”
With Better Half it would be, “Your room [because we would only have one, unless we moved to the ‘burbs] looks like Hoarder House. Clean it up!”
So I would get up and BH would no doubt say, “Not you, idiot. The girls. There’s like a week’s worth of laundry in there.”
But I would go with them anyway and say, “So Peyton Place is this quiet little village where everyone has a secret. I read it when I was about your age and I really enjoyed it.”
I read Peyton Place when I was about 8. I happened to mention this in front of my second- or third-grade class and that occasioned another call from the teacher to my mother. And my mother, once again, said, basically, “Fuck off.”
Did I ever tell you (all) about the mockingbird that used to haunt this neighborhood? Yes. I think (and I may well be wrong) that they have two nesting seasons a year. I’d be out walking Faithful Hound and the mockingbird would descend on us. It would helicopter next to Faithful Hound’s head and let out its scream, which kind of terrified Faithful Hound.
I would say to Faithful Hound, “Attack it. Kill it. Stand your ground.” But Labs are more retriever dogs. You’re supposed to kill the prey and they’ll retrieve it for you. So, during these nesting seasons, and knowing full well that we have one of the strictest gun control policies in the country but half the neighborhood is locked and loaded, but not me, because I’m middle class, non-drug using, and law abiding, I would bring some printer paper with me. So lame. But with it, I could kind of wave the mockingbird away. But it was relentless, and would keep kamikaze-ing us. And it would follow us around the block.
I don’t know how long mockingbirds live, so maybe it’s dead by now. Or someone found the nesting spot and removed it. Or it died from Covid, who knows. In any case, it seems to have disappeared.
The googles says they live around 8 years on average in the wild.
So it might have died or maybe found a better place to nest so it’s not constantly defending the nest from the Faithful Hound.
There were many theories about where its nest might have been, but an inaccessible residential rooftop was the most plausible locale, according to my “birding” friends. It was really fascinating to see close up, and quite beautiful, but quite loud and, like Merrick Garland says about parents who show up at school board meetings, a “domestic terrorist.”
Ope! Playing my favorite game tonight – am I hearing fireworks or gunshots?
We had, for some reason, an exceptionally noisy and active Thursday night. I don’t know why. The asshole dirt-bike/ATV drivers, the gangbangers in their stolen cars with their stolen speakers in the trunk that blast that shitty garbage music, the sirens going off every 10 minutes. It was crazy. There was nothing particularly interesting going on on Thursday night, I don’t think.
Meanwhile today, Father’s Day, was very serene. I’ll see tomorrow when I read the New York Post’s weekend murder round-up (always a good read) how bad it was, but Father’s Day is always a little contentious around here. What happens is, let’s say an unmarried woman has three children. She has some kind of city-subsidized apartment. The three children have three different fathers. They descend on the apartment and “have beef.”
Luckily, nowadays it’s easier to buy pot than it is fresh fruit and vegetables up here, so maybe that’s mellowing everyone out.