My Day Takes Flight.....

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm terrified of birds, at least when they're indoors. And free.

Wild birds, loose in the house---hysterics time. I've gone through a thousand permutations of panic-and-get-someone-else-to-fix-it over the years: closing up the room the bird is in until somebody else is home, leaving the house until someone else comes home, you name it. Except now, there's no one else home, or ever coming home.

About five o'clock this morning, I was awakened by some banging and squawking that experience told me meant that Sarah the Siamese had come through the cat door bringing Company, presumably Unwilling Company. And the volume level said that she'd chased whatever it was upstairs, and was now chasing it back downstairs.

Well, another thing people know about me is that I Don't Do Mornings---at least not 5 am, unless it means I haven't been to bed yet. So I got up, closed the bedroom door, and said "I'll deal with this when I get up."

Eventually, of course, I did just that. Got dressed, came trucking downstairs, looking around cautiously. One or another of the cats had barfed at the bottom of the stairs, and I thought "Oh, maybe all it was was two cats arguing..." and headed for the kitchen for the paper towels.

Screeching halt.

There on the kitchen curtain rod, cheerfully hopping back and forth, is a full grown male robin, looking quite healthy, if spectacularly bored.

Well, one of the prices of responding to birds in the house by panicking is that either you're outside, locked in the bathroom, or sitting with a blanket over your head when the birds are being caught. You have NO clue what the procedure is. So I called my daughter Beth and asked her what to do.

"Just throw a towel over it, then kind of wad up the towel and take it outside."

Uh-huh.

I get a towel---and a box, just in case I need it to put over either his head or mine---and head into the kitchen, where I discover what happens if you throw a towel over a bird who is hopping back and forth on the rod of cafe curtains.

He just goes behind the curtains, then flies out and back up on the curtain rod. No Significant Progress Here.

OK, Plan B. Hmm, Beth didn't have a Plan B. Well, what can we come up with?

The bird is in front of a *window*. Windows go outside. Let's work with this....tiptoe over, gently open window....tiptoe outside, and pull off the screen. Now we can go back inside and shoo him out the window.

Well, maybe we could do that if Taliesin and Sarah didn't immediately park on the windowsill with big "Hey, Birdie, Birdie!" grins on their little cat faces. We've found parameter #1 in the intelligence of this bird: he ain't that dumb.

By the time I'm back in the house, I'm not sure where he is, until I spot Floofy staring. Bird's in the back room, just sitting, looking.

As it happens, the back door of our house is in that room. So I open the (wooden) door, and go outside to prop the screen door. Bird seems to get at least part of the concept, as he decides that the wooden door makes a great perch.

I come around the house and back in the front door and look at him: he's two feet away from freedom, sitting on top of the wooden door, looking anywhere and everywhere except outdoors. Parameter #2 in the intelligence of this bird: he ain't that bright, either. :)

Eventually, by wiggling the door from time to time while telling him repeatedly "Stupid, the door's open...", he managed to get the idea and flew away......leaving me to close the door and go back to dealing with cat barf.

Which I guess is pretty anticlimactic if you're reading this, but it was kind of a big deal from my end........

A New Holiday....

This week Jews and Christians are ramping up into the spring holiday season with Pesach and Easter, and leaving the pagans behind, since the Vernal Equinox has already passed.

Your average pagan, however, is generally Up For A Good Party at any time, and rather dislikes being left out of things. In this vein, I'd like to propose a new holiday.

The Official Hatching of the Solstice (or Equinox) Peeps.

The original Peeps, of course, are the baby chicks, and we all know that baby chicks come from eggs. Since they're all related, no matter what odd shapes they come in, I think we can assume that as unlikely as it may appear, *all* Peeps come from eggs.

So given that eggs, baby chicks and many other less-than-religiously-obvious "Easter symbols" have their roots in pagan antiquity.......

Pig hereby pronounces that All Peeps are Laid on Solstices and Equinoxes (depending, of course, on their holiday associations).

And that this week is the Week of the Hatching of the (spring) Peeps.