Houston, We Have Hatchlings!

Yesterday my son said, "Mom! Bird!" And I looked out the window to see both brown thrashers out in the yard, hunting food in the grass. Hmmmm. Later one of the dogs did notice a thrasher going into the rosebush, and charged over there and tried to ram his head into it. (Ouch.) I made him (the dog, not the bird) go indoors, and after a couple of minutes, I cautiously took a look.

I did not ram my head into the rosebush. Although I've been known to take my glasses off and knit with 000 or 4-0 needles inches from my eyes, I draw the line at sticking my whole face into a rosebush full of backward-curving thorns! But I was able to see at least two hatchlings in the nest for sure, maybe more.

So now I have to keep a sharp eye on them. When they reach the stage of leaving the nest, I'll have to keep the dogs from chomping them. If I'm very lucky, they'll hop out and go straight out the fence. If they are as sneaky as their parents (I can hope!), maybe the dogs won't even notice them.



My thumb drive now has its finger-loop-braided lanyard. :)
Funny how just the addition of a neck cord makes it so much less lose-able.

And look! My brain finally let me know what edging it wanted to put on this. I am knitting a pointed, sideways edging. No, you can't see the points, because they are rolling under. Every time I get to this stage with a knitted doily, I try to remember things are not hopeless, they are just "scrumply". There is still blocking. If all else fails, there is still starch!

One of my friends emailed me and said, "You Michigan people are so funny!" I hate to disappoint her, but we're not born that way. We get funny from hitting ourselves in the head repeatedly.

When I was a little kid in school, every so often a bully would grab my hand and use it to hit me with, saying clever things like, "Why are you hitting yourself?" [whack!] "Hey, stop hitting yourself!" [whack!] "Quit hitting yourself!" [whack!]
har-de-har-har

I was thinking about this yesterday as I was [whack!] hitting myself. I was outside, trying to pick (and eat) ripe wild strawberries. Michigan is very shy on poisonous spiders and snakes, but we have mosquitoes up the wazoo. Alexis de Toqueville mentions in his journal entries when he was travelling through Michigan, "A cloud of mosquitoes attracted by the water soon make the place intolerable for us" and "Inexpressible torment caused by mosquitoes." Buzzing, whining, biting little pests.

This is also why we have screens on our windows and doors, although I have seen mosquitoes land on the screen and walk patiently all over it, just in case there might be a mosquito-sized hole in it somewhere.

A friend of mine from the southern US commented once, "But of course the mosquitoes don't come indoors!" Apparently down south the mosquitoes are so polite, they wait at the door for you to come outdoors!

They don't have the Eastern house mosquito, which is quite happy to come indoors. Into the bedroom. After you've gone to bed, and are laying there in the dark, listening to the whine, and trying to decide if you should turn on a light and kill her (the biting ones are females), or wait until she bites you and just slap yourself.