Mama Mia

My life is not always as dull as it seems, sometimes I get out and have a great time. This week I got to see the national touring stage production of Mama Mia! I went with Melanie (my former workmate) and her guy, Adam. We had the best seats EVER...front row center. As Melanie said, the actors could spit on us, we were so close.

This will be my next sewing project. I'll make it for Melanie, she could totally wear it. It's her color, too.

One of the things I love about ABBA is the fans. We are all people who like to have fun. 

I still have only 2 CDs in my car. Both of them are ABBA and I play them all the time. So, of course, I know all the songs. That makes it easy to sing along. The people who wrote the play seem to know this about ABBA fans, so at the end of the play there is a medley of songs that encourages the whole audience to stand up and dance and sing along. This is something Melanie and I would have done anyway, but it's more fun when you have lots of company. It reminded me of the 15,000 people in Las Vegas who sang "Hey Jude" along with Paul McCartney a few years ago. 

With all the dissension in this country, most of it the result of butt stupidity, it's so neat to be able to share a good time.

Aparagus!

These photos were taken by Rick Grimshaw. The fields are muddy for the first time this winter.

But there's asparagus to pick. And eat, of course. We're having some for dinner.

It's officially springtime in Sloughhouse.

Water Aerobics

Getting myself up out of bed at 7 a.m. on a stormy day to get to the water aerobics class takes as much effort as the class itself. Some of it is mental effort, I have to invent new lies to myself. ("I have to wash my hair anyway, might as well do it at the gym.") This morning, with steam wafting from the 85° pool, I was reminded of the hot springs macaques of Japan. There were 8 of us this morning. We looked a lot like this, except we were all wearing hats.  

Bad Parenting?

The past couple of weeks have been rough ones in the pigeon pen. I've found 3 dead babies on the ground. This past week I found a baby in the middle of the floor, it's sibling nearby and dead. Two days later there were two very small babies moved out of their nests. I'm not sure if it's bad parenting, or if there is a child abuser in the flock.

This is the first baby I found alive on the pen floor. It took about an hour for this baby to adapt to being tubefed and kept in a warm, clean place in the house.

Now it whistles when it sees me coming, opens its beak for the tube, and cooperates nicely to have pigeon peas rolled down its throat. I'm not sure how I'm going to integrate it back into the pen when it's older.

I had my eye on this baby and its sibling from the time they were hatched, hoping nothing would bother them, and thinking I might have to bring them in if it looked like there was a problem.

I wanted to leave them with the parents as long as possible. It's very hard to handraise a newborn pigeon, it gets easier when they're a few days old.

This baby's sibling had been dragged out of the nest and pecked, all in about an hour after I checked them. I brought them both in right away, hoping they were old enough to tubefeed. The injured sibling didn't have bad wounds, but it did have an impacted crop. It's parents had been feeding it full-sized peas. I wouldn't do this, myself, until a baby was as big as the one in the top picture. I tried massaging the crop and that seemed to loosen up the stuff inside it, but this morning the baby was dead.

The remaining small one seems to be doing fine. I mixed a little yogurt with its food, something I read about online and am hoping will help. So far, so good.

These babies are in aquariums in the den along with the chicks and Bob and his computer. There are now 9 barred bantam OE (1 succumbed), 4 Anconas, and 4 bantam Dominiques. Next week I can move them to larger brooders in the GARAGE!!!

Goodbye and Good Riddance

To all my friends and relatives who have put up with my complaints about the crap in my garage over the years, this was a great day.

First time the Jeep has seen sunshine in 27 years. First time I've been able to walk through the garage and not trip over boxes of useless (but precious, of course) junk in 25 years.

Pony Fun

I met some friends at a small horse show on Sunday. Most of it was boring, western pleasure especially is a snoozer. Even the horses look half asleep. There was a little excitement when a so-called horse trainer got dumped in the ring. That was interesting. She was not hurt.

Most of the people at this show did not have huge fancy trucks and trailers and immaculate horses that have been trained to perfection. They seemed to be regular people with backyard horses who were out having a good time.

There were a lot of kids showing. Not the kind whose parents were doing all the work for them, the do-it-yourself kind. It was so much fun to watch them. This group of kids had miniature horses that followed them around like dogs. (You can see how warm it was by the girl's shorts and tank top.) These kids had body-clipped their little horses. You can see they don't have the sturdy little legs and cobby body of a Shetland.

Some of the little guys were still shaggy in their winter coats, like the one below. This boy was spending a lot of time talking to his horse. They were buddies.

One of the parents said that the little horses had been rescued from a bad situation and the kids were in a group that was taking care of them and learning to handle them. The kids were all waiting to show their animals in a halter class. They also participated in showmanship. The horses - let's just call them ponies, okay? - are too small to be ridden.

Here's a pair in the showmanship class. The girl is checking to make sure her pony's feet are properly positioned. The pony is making her work.

Showmanship is a great way for kids to learn how to handle their animals. It doesn't matter if they're showing horses, sheep, pigs, guinea pigs, chickens, or rabbits, the lessons and skills are the same.

This is an actual pony, not a miniature horse. I'm not sure what breed, it seems bigger than a Shetland and smaller than a Welsh. This was my favorite pair to watch at the show. The little girl was all business and in the first class or two the pony was not cooperating. He whinnied and bucked and didn't pay attention, as only an annoying little pony could do. They placed last in the first class. The girl was not pleased with her little troublemaker. Her mom met them at the exit gate. "He didn't do very well, did he? You know why? Because you're not being fair with him, you're in his mouth and picking on him. If you don't want to do this right and give him a chance, just go load him in the trailer and we'll go home today." (To be entirely fair, the pony WAS being a stinker, but the mom did a good job using the situation as a learning opportunity.)

By the end of the day, the pair was working like a team, and they won their last class (they are on the left).

The two little girls on the right were also fun to watch. Their regular-size horses were ancient. The oldsters were content to carry their riders around the ring as long as they didn't have to be too far apart.

Showing horses can be very hard, horses are just so big and they aren't eager to please like a dog is. They can get you and themselves into trouble, they can get distracted and walk all over your feet, snot on your clothes, whack you with their heads. But little girls don't care.

See? She smiled like this all day. This is little girl heaven. I know, I've been there.

We watched some classes with adults in them, too, but they weren't as fun.

What's Going on Here?

When you're messing around with the zoom lens on your camera, sometimes you get the strangest pictures. Can you figure out what this is?

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Does this help?

Taken in a warm-up ring at a horse show. The two people in the middle weren't even that close, the lens just makes it seem like 2 centaurs smooching.