Saturday, May 08, 2021

Bless the tongue

Electric Kool-Aid Cauliflower Test


This food thing, wow. It's going well, it's just taking forever. So far, I regret to inform you, I seem to have troubles with blackberries, avocados, and...garlic. 

In other medical news, I got a voicemail from my doctor's office confirming an appointment for my annual physical, and the medical robot lady spelled out C-O-V-I-D five times ("if you think you have been exposed to C-O-V-I-D 19, please call our office..."

I now offer you a content warning for dead animals below, along with the following story. It's about the bird in the stove, I may have hinted at this previously. We heard a bird inside the galvanized pipe that vents our (currently, and for several years) unused pellet stove. I thought maybe it was building a nest in there, and maybe that would be fine. But I was also worried it would get stuck. Mark and I dithered for a while — should we encourage it to move along? Should we leave it alone? It continued to flap around inside, and we decided we should shoo it away and take the pipe off the house and cap it so nobody else could get in there. But it wasn't in the pipe, and we could still hear it flapping around. We spent almost an hour trying to figure out where it was, using flashlights, pulling parts off the stove, and eventually disassembling the entire thing, only to find the bird had worked its way into the depths of the stupid stove and smothered to death in a little heap of ash. Mark took its little body into the front yard and tried to clean it off, tried to give it bird CPR. We both leaned over it in front of our house, weeping. 

Oh reader, it was terrible.

Since I'm on the subject of dead animals: the very next week I left an empty flower pot out in the yard during a burst of rain, and the next morning I found a wee mouse, like some character from Beatrix Potter, had perished in it. I assume it fell in and drowned before the water could drain out the bottom. 

RIP Stuart Little


I'm hoping to murder zero animals during the month of May.

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