Where are the eggs?

On St Patrick's Day the local trio of Muscovy ducks deposited 11 eggs in a nest right next to one of my down spouts. Very cool, I thought, since I love to see the babies when they hatch.
Over the next several days the total swelled to 30! At first the two Momma ducks seemed to be paying very little attention to them & were hardly ever sitting on them, so I was wondering if I was going to end up with a pile of smelly eggs after a while.
Then one morning about a week later I came out and saw two of the eggs lying several feet away from the nest...one demolished and empty of contents, the other was cracked open and losing the filling on the ground. After that, the Momma's started sitting on the rest of the remaining eggs most of the time, although they would still get off, usually taking turns while one wandered off to the pond for a while.

In the mean time, my yard has turned into local wildlife central...spotting a wild rabbit a couple of times, and a snake skin of a decent size, followed the next day by seeing the black snake it probably came from, and he looked about 3 feet long, but not very thick. In other words I don't think he was large enough to be stealing rather large duck eggs! I never did see what might have gotten the first 2 eggs and after a few days even the shells had disappeared.

Most of the time when I go out to give some bread to the sitting Momma's I can still see a lot of eggs on the nest, but I noticed yesterday while they were standing a few feet from the nest, taking advantage of the shade, that one of the eggs in the nest was damaged, so I took a closer look. Now there are only 20 eggs in the nest! No sign of any shells anywhere around the yard, so it's a mystery to me where the other 8 went! Some folks around here have suggested that I harvest the eggs & eat them, but I'd rather not! Hope that isn't what is happening to them.

I read on line that this breed of duck has a 35 day gestation period, so I guess I'll find out later this month how many little ducklings have survived for me to be their honorary Granny. Then I just have to hope that the grouchy couple across the pond doesn't start killing them off like they did a couple of other batches that have hatched in the last couple of years!

Facebook

Well, I broke that habit several months ago. BUT now I've gotten back on there. Just about everything else I belong to now has a page there.....and if you don't have an account you can't enter any of the prize drawings! CRAP!!!
So I first went and deleted all the games an apps I used to play with...maybe that will keep me from spending more than 15 hours a day like I used to. The bad news is I had over 3000 friends from all those games and it's gonna take me hours to delete them all. Looks like I will be spending a lot of time there again until I get everything sorted out again. Guess I'll be there until tomorrow......uh.....is it tomorrow yet??

HIVES!!

NO, not beehives.....the fickin hives I get from using hair conditioners....among other things that manage to catch me by surprise. Like a lot of cleaning products, bleach, my own sweat (such fun being allergic to myself!) sometimes from nerves. I don't think I'm nervous, and I did just use hair conditioner a couple of days ago. It's the same one I've been using for months now, but it was the end of the bottle, so maybe it got its ingredients all mooshed together and they ganged up to attack me.

Anyway, I've been having a lot more reaction then usual and my hand is swollen up....itchy....painful...and just plain annoying as hell! Of course it had to be my right hand, so if anyone gets out of line and I need to make a fist to pop them one, I'm out of luck....sigh. Lucky for me, I use pretty much zero physical retaliation when something or someone gets my adrenalin pumping....all bark and very little bite.

So I've finally gone on another remedy hunt...gotta love Amazon.com...they have everything I've ever looked for. I should be getting this homeopathic remedy in just a couple of days, sure hope it works. Of course with my luck, the symptoms will probably have faded by then anyway.

But if this is an indication of a repeat of what happened with the hives when they first started in '03, then it won't go to waste!

EEEK! I'm Dead!!

Just got informed by email that I'm dead! What a shock, I thought I just had a small cold. I wonder if this means I don't have to pay any more bills??!! Maybe if I respond to this one the next email will say I've received a large inheritance and I can be "dead" in complete luxury. Since they are already "writhing" I think I should reply and confirm that I am dead! ROFLMAO

This is the email:

Re: Payment Notification:

We are writhing to know if it's true that you are DEAD? Because we received a notification from one MR. GERSHON SHAPIRO of USA stating that you are DEAD and that you have giving him the right to claim your funds. He stated you died on a CAR accident. He has been calling us regarding this issue, but we cannot proceed with him until we confirm this by not hearing from you after 7days.

Be advised that we have made all arrangements for you to receive and confirm your funds without anymore stress, and without any further delays. All we need to confirm now is your been DEAD Or still Alive.

Because this MAN'S message brought shock to our minds. And we just can't proceed with him until we confirm if this is a reality OR not But if it happened we did not hear from you after 7days, then we say: MAY YOUR SOUL REST IN PERFECT PEACE" YOUR JOY AND SUCCESS REMAINS OUR GOAL.

May the peace of the Lord be with you wherever you may be now.
Your Faitfully,
Mrs Farida Waziri

It's been forever....

OK, so I haven't blogged in a really loooong time. Things have changed a LOT since then.

I'm no longer in TN.....My previously mentioned panic attacks got worse, I turned hermit, still no job, no income & living off my credit cards (yeah, I know!) by August of '08 stuff was starting to get turned off....like the electric, cable and phone. I still had electric until just after my birthday on the 21st of September, but without the cable I started watching every vhs tape and every DVD I owned, but then the electric went too. So I had nothing to do but read until it got dark, then light up a lantern until it was time to go to bed.

Of course all the bills were past due, including the house payment. And it chooses to turn cold early. With no electric I can't run the heater even tho it is gas, but it has an electric blower. And my waterbed heater was no longer keeping that nice and toasty. So I resorted to dressing warm, sleeping on the couch under about 5 blankets and encouraging all the kitties to lay on me. I was very happy that I had that wood burner heater in the living room and put all that firewood that had just been rotting away to good use.
For refrigeration I bought ice every few days and kept my few remaining groceries in an ice chest.

Did I mention my cell phone was also turned off in September, so I had no outside world contact. Later I discovered that my son had tried to call me on my birthday and got the canned message that this account was no longer in service. He tried to make contact with anybody in the area to send them to check on me, but had no luck.

By the time November rolled around, I had no food except when my neighbor would come by and drop something off...about every other day or so...and enough for one small meal was it! My cats were actually hunting things to eat...they put a serious dent in the chipmunk population! But I could not bring myself to stop them since they were actually eating what they caught and not just playing for fun.

After a non successful attempt to dispatch the entire situation by sitting in my garage with all my cats and my parrot and the engine running on my car.....5 hours in there and all that happened to any of us was feeling pretty warm and slightly dizzy! I just don't understand how folks manage to die every so often from fumes leaking into there car or into their house from the garage. Guess it was just God's way of saying you DON'T get to take the easy way out!

Anyway, I finally broke down and used my neighbor's phone to call my son and tell him my situation. He said he would come up and get me....I could keep my bird, one of the cats and some small furniture pieces, but there was no room at his house for all my stuff. Soooo before his arrival I contacted an auction guy who said an auction was no good for my situation, but he sent me several people around to buy a lot of stuff. I used the money from that to get the electric turned back on and buy a throw away cell phone and caught up on the gas and water bills. Then I started packing up.

But first I had to choose which cat I was going to keep....kept Sarge, the Himalayan.....but took the latest stray who wasn't in the best of health to the local shelter. Found a local no kill lady to adopt the other 3 and turned them over to her....sobbing like a baby the entire time......they were my babies!

My son, his fiance and a friend of theirs arrived on the Friday night before Thanksgiving. On Saturday morning one of them went down to the store and got poster board, made Estate Sale signs and put them up down on the highway in a few places. I didn't know they had done this but suddenly people started showing up and within about 20 minutes there had to be 50 folks wandering all thru my house and all over my property! Nothing had prices on it...it was like a free for all with the kids hollering up and down the house and up from the garage....how much did I want for this or that. I was running back and forth all over the place selling stuff myself and giving them prices....but if I was busy, they just sold stuff for whatever the heck they figured they could get. The only 2 bad things from all that was a set of vases that I dearly loved and didn't want to sell at all got sold for about a dollar.....and my almost new Oreck vacuum cleaner that I paid almost $400 for got sold for $5......eek!

But we made a bunch of money, rented a truck and loaded my motorcycle and the stuff I was taking with me, and my son took off in that by Sunday afternoon, with his fiance and their friend following behind. I stayed and packed a few more thing in my car and attempted to get some sleep to leave in the morning for the drive back to SW Florida. But I woke up after maybe getting one whole hour of sleep, aching knees, and groggy headed. I put Sarge in his carrier on the back seat, put Woodstock in his small travel cage on the passenger seat and departed the house about 4AM for the supposed 13-14 hour trip.

It was about 35 degrees! I stopped to fill up the gas tank and it took me almost 15 minutes to be able to stand up...and I'd only been driving for about 30 minutes so far. The rest of the trip went the same way....every time I'd stop for gas or a potty break it would take me longer and longer to be able to stand up and walk. Guess all the running up and down the stairs and the hill had put the finishing touches on my already bad knees. So I didn't get to Cape Coral until almost 9pm. And it took almost a month before I could walk normally again.

More about living with my son Robert, his fiance Lexi, and their baby Riyah in the next blog. FUN........NOT!!!

Granny! Yikes!!

Well....it's happened again. My son just called me a little while ago to report the birth of my newest grand-daughter. He had called me a couple of weeks ago to report that his fiance was in labor, but got sent home since it was just Braxton-Hicks contractions. She wasn't due until April 16th anyway.

He called me earlier this week to say that she'd lost her plug, but nothing else was happening on the birth front. They had scheduled induced labor for next Monday, but I warned him they tried that on me when he was born and I ended up going into labor over the weekend, so be ready. So he calls me last night and says poor Lexie has been in labor for two days....back and forth to the hospital and doctor's office since she is only one finger dialated.....but she's been a screaming banshee and he's had no sleep. His boss, who seems to think the world revolves around the custom bus they're currently building, is giving him grief about taking time to run Lexie around. So last night she's finally having contractions about a minute apart and they're headin for the hospital and the boss wants to know if he can come to work today to make up some of the time he's missed......uh....NO! Guess he finally got a clue since he called later to say he understood and offered to pick them all up at the hospital in one of the limos when it was time to go home.

So after being in major labor all night long, Riyah arrived at 9:20 this morning (south Florida time) 8 pounds 7 ounces, 21 1/2 inches, strawberry blond hair, steel blue-grey eyes and already sucking down her first meal.

So, I'm a Granny again......Ah Spring!

Spring has sprung!

Okay, so I can finally admit that Spring is officially here now. Yeah, the trees & whatnot around the yard have been doing the flowering & leafy thing for a few weeks now, and the grass (weeds) have begun to grow again. The temps have been mild, growing warmer and it's rained quite a bit. I even saw a few deer wandering across the yard last week. I even opened the windows and turned off the switch for the gas heat, stopped wearing a sweat shirt and opted for the old baggy t-shirt instead.
But in my mind, yesterday's events really marked the beginning of Spring. It was a warm day & the weather babbling on tv was all about the approaching storms that they'd been going on about for two days already. It was a fairly narrow band of nasty looking thunderstorms showing on radar that stretched from Texas nearly up to the Great Lakes. They'd been saying this was going to start affecting Middle Tennessee by Thursday, but here it was, Friday afternoon and still not anything happening around here except for the wind picking up nicely.
I'm playing couch potato.....shuddup....watching one of the channels that never broadcasts anything but it's scheduled programs (no sudden announcements) and it's time for them to switch to the news, which happens to be for Chicago and I'm not much interested. So this is when I change to the area news for around here....well.....sort of around here but it's really for Nashville. I'm figuring to coast thru an hour of it before I change to some afternooon comedy stuff and it helps me avoid that stupid Tyra Banks that wastes air time from noon to one.
But the news is non-stop warnings about the storms that have finally started arriving and it's not good. Seems there are tornadoes predicted and at least one has already touched down near the Kentucky border. I watch the radar with all the fancy, new 3-D imaging which is supposed to be able to see the formations almost down to the ground.....but the weather folks seem fascinated with it, even though they don't completely have the hang of how to interpret it yet and keep switching back to the usual systems to see if what they're saying matches up.
Anyway, there are suddenly signs of tornadic activity about 50 miles southwest of where I live and heading northeast. Then the reports start coming in about damage to homes and buildings all along the path the storm cell is taking. Before too much longer the system seems to be approaching my county, but so far, no warnings are issued for us. Then that changes and one is called for here....a couple of minutes later the town warning sirens starts wailing, which I'd never be able to hear if I didn't happen to have a window open.
Mind you, it still hasn't rained a drop at my house and the winds keep picking up, then dying down completely. The non-stop chatter from the weather babblers keeps talking about egg-sized hail and winds of 100mph, so when it finally does start to rain here, I'm looking out the windows to see if there is any hail....but I got nothing. Now the warning from tv is saying the arrival time for here is 2pm...and this tidy bit of info is given at 1:57 but I've already seen some flashes of lightning and the UPS for my computer has beeped several times from the power surges and the cable has gone off and on twice.
Now they are suddenly talking about damage to an area about 5 miles west and just slightly north of my house and that a possible tornado is passing by. I'm ready to head for my bathroom in the basement, but all of sudden there is nothing.....no rain, no wind, even the sky seems less cloudy. Yep...you guessed it....passed me right on by a few miles to the north.
It rained pretty hard a few more times and one more warning for this county was issued but got cancelled in about 5 minutes when the swirling formations to the south just fell apart and zipped off to the east without getting any closer.
I opened the window again, went out on the front porch to look for any trees blown over, but the only thing I saw was one fairly small limb down on the driveway by my neighbor's house.
So I settle into one of the rockers on the porch for a while....just watching the wind pick up a little every so often and an occasional bit of rain, one of the cats snuggled on my lap. First time this year I've sat down out there. The birds are singing and I spot a little movement off by the power line....it's a blue bird! Then a couple minutes later a hummingbird shows up at one of their feeders....of course they are all empty and nasty from hanging there all this past fall and winter....so I get rewarded with what I can only assume is a nasty look and he zooms off. Being the sucker I am, I got up and took one of the feeders inside to clean it up and go thru the mixing up of sugar water routine and hang it back up. Several minutes later the hummer is back but gets chased off by another one. One of them came back later, but didn't seem like he was finding the one feeder I'd fixed up.....but I'm not getting sucked in like I did last year. That time I cleaned and filled all six of them but only saw one hummer for the next three months and ended up having to go thru it again when the rest of the flock finally started showing up in July. I wonder if seeing the first one this early is some kind of record.
But now Spring is here....first tornado, first hummingbird, first bluebird and first day sitting on the porch....all in the same day. Of course, the prediction for Sunday is a low overnight of 34 degrees....go figure!