Pigeon Antics

The pigeons have been relaxing a lot on the lawn. I think they were watching the Olympics, some of them have been practicing synchronized swimming under the sprinkler.

The Old German Owl on the right has the best style. The young bird on the left is just learning. Their outfits don't match very well, they'll have to work on that.

Meanwhile some of the other pigeons were messing around with one of my peonies. I've heard that deer don't eat peonies, and I've never had the cottontail rabbits that sometimes wander into the yard bother mine. But the pigeons have decimated it.

It will be okay, but I don't know what the pigeons find so tasty about it. They graze on the lawn sometimes, but they have always stayed out of the flower beds. I've never been able to get them to eat treats like bread crust or scrambled eggs, or any of the things that make chickens come running. It would be fun to walk around with a pigeon on my shoulder, or have one that would do tricks, but they're too dignified for that.

DMV is so Dumb

Disclaimer: I worked for DMV for 1.5 years in the 1960s.

I got a letter from the California Dept. of Motor Vehicles today. Effective in September my vehicle registration will be suspended because they don't have a record of insurance coverage.

I just paid my insurance. When I did, CSAA assured me that DMV would automatically be notified. So what's the problem?

Well, it turns out this is not about my RAV4, the car I drive every day. It's about my 1978 Chevy truck. The one that hasn't been on the highway for more than 7 years. The one that I haven't paid registration on for more than 7 years. The one that hasn't run for maybe 10 years.

I would have been paying for the registration, but DMV stopped sending me registration notices 25 years ago. The only way I could pay was to go to a DMV office and ask them to find the information on their computer. Every year for 18 years this happened. Every time I went to DMV I asked them to check what the problem was and please fix it. A couple of times the person behind the counter said, "It's not our responsibility to send you a notice, it's your responsibility to know when it's due and come in and pay it." Duh. Isn't that what I was doing, standing there in front of them?

For years I paid for insurance on the truck, even though it didn't run.

When I switched my insurance to CSAA and discovered they have an internal DMV desk at their building, I took the paperwork for the truck and asked if they could help me. They could not, they said, because the DMV file was not operating properly and they couldn't access it.

This year when I paid my car insurance, I finally had the truck taken off the policy. That must have triggered an automatic switch at DMV. (I'm guessing it was a dip switch.)

I see on this notice that I have 3 choices. I can go to the DMV web site, I can mail evidence of insurance, or I can call the automated voice response system and follow the prompts.

In bold print at the bottom of the page it says: DMV Staff at field offices and call centers cannot provide vehicle insurance program services.

In other words, there is no way you can talk to a real person; there is probably no way this problem can actually be resolved. There will be no button on the web site for "This is the result of a DMV error." If there is a space to type comments, it will only take 500 characters for my 2500-character explanation. I will get frustrated. The only thing I can type in 500 characters or less is curses. I could do that, but I've turned over a new leaf since being driven crazy by stupid men. I'm trying to be reasonable and logical.

I could mail a letter about the whole problem. Again. I've done this at least twice over the years and never received a comment. Most likely I'll get a piece of paper with a check by the box that says "No insurance evidence was attached."

I'm not taking a trip through automated-voice-response hell. DMV has an especially frustrating version of this.

DMV isn't the only dumb California agency. I also got a letter today from the Board of Equalization. What is this, you foreigners might ask? That's the board that collects our state income taxes. What do they equalize, you wonder? I don't know. In this case the letter has nothing to do with income taxes. The State Dept. of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) is charging me $115 because I own a structure within a State Responsibility Area (SRA).

I already pay taxes to a Fire Protection District. The closest State fire truck is so far away it would never get to my house in time, that would be handled by the local Fire Protection District. This new tax was supposedly brought about because in the flammable foothill and mountain counties people have built houses everywhere. When there's the inevitable big grass or forest fire, the state sends trucks to watch the houses burn, while the local fire departments are trying to save them. The state says it costs too much money to "protect" houses in the highly flammable areas and that those property owners should pay extra for catastrophic protection.

Well maybe. But I don't live in an area like that. I'm surrounded by irrigated fields and bare dirt. The levee used to have grass on it and occasionally there would be a small grass fire on it (put out very quickly by the local fire department). But the levee is bare dirt. The levee district now sprays it with Round-up in the late spring.

Yes, my house could catch on fire. Yes, the outbuildings could catch on fire. But it wouldn't be from any catastrophic fire that Cal Fire is responsible for. The houses at Rancho Murieta are in more danger from that than my house is. I wonder if those people are being taxed?

I sit here today with not one, but THREE stinking stupid EIRs to read and comment on. Three more totally dumb ideas from people outside this area who are determined to screw over everyone in our area just so they can make a buck.

I am so damned tired of this. We have an election coming up, but there is no place on that ballot that has anything to do with all the daily doo doo that citizens have to put up with. The ballot is so irrelevant to reality it might as well ask "What's your favorite flavor of ice cream?"

Is all of this carefully constructed by devious politicians? I doubt it, they might be devious but they're not notably clever and they don't cooperate well enough with one another to accomplish anything clever.

I think I'll go water the birds now. It's been another hot, nasty day. Maybe I'll give them some sweet corn as a treat. Smiling chickens might be able to pull me out of this dark mood. Then I'll watch another episode of Dog Whisperer.

Women are Crazy

I saw this on Facebook last week. All the men I have seen this week are working very hard to prove it true.

Let's start with the carpenter I hired to finish the back porch project. No, let's start before that. This project was been ongoing for at least 7 years. Hubby John started it and walked away when it got too complicated. Son Bob restarted it at the beginning of this summer when he thought he had all the time in the world. He wasted a lot of that time, and then suddenly he had a job and summer school.

So I had to hire someone to finish it. I won't bore you with how many guys I called who never called me back, not even to say "no thank you." And I thank those of you who sent me recommendations, maybe one of those people will be available for the next project. If there IS a next project.

When I asked at the local ACE hardware store, they gave me a business card for someone who claimed "No job too small." He called me back and said he'd be here the next day with a helper and that they'd have the project finished by Saturday afternoon. It would take them 10 hours.

Uh huh.

It took 7 days. Three of those days he didn't show up because he had to babysit. But he didn't tell me that ahead of time, so I stayed home waiting for him. There was never a helper. To keep things moving I bought and painted all the trim boards myself. I went after all the supplies myself. The tools and the debris sat around waiting for the carpenter to be here. You know how much I love stacks of crap. One night there were thundershowers and I had to drag all this stuff under shelter. Myself.

The washer and dryer were taken out of the room the first day. I wasn't been able to wash clothes for a week. The lint hose was taken off the dryer, which made it convenient for lizards to crawl inside.

The carpenter was a very nice young fellow. I think the work he did was fine. And I know that compared to a friend of mine who has been waiting for years for work to be finished on her house, 7 days is not a lot. But hiring guys to do work drives me crazy.

When he finished the job, which wasn't really FINISHED because he puttied over the nail holes and left that for me to paint, he said, "Well we both know this took a lot longer than I originally estimated," and he handed me a bill for $600 more. Really? I didn't argue, it was hot and I was tired and had no diplomatic words to fall back on. It was either pick up a pen to write the check or pick up the machete.

When I get the last of the painting finished and some shelves installed, the back porch will finally look like part of a real house and not like the inside of some miner's shack. It won't be a spider haven and I won't have to rewash clothes if they fall on the floor. Yes, it was THAT bad and I tolerated it for YEARS. Give me a medal, please.

There is only one thing left to remind me how far we've come with this house. I left the door to the cellar in its original, peeling paint, just for old time's sake. This is the basement cellar.

I don't go down there, the stairs are too steep for my clumsy feet. Because the stairs are old wood I'd get slivers if I sat and scooted down them. The hot water heater is down there. John and I stored wine down there. Bob and his friends drank it 20 years later when they were old enough. Basement Wine is legendary around here, the measure used to designate how bad a wine can get. (Example: "It's pretty bad, but not as bad as Basement Wine.")

Bob cut a special board to go over the cellar door and suggested I should paint something on it. I did.

This will give all the stupid men a place to go when they finally drive me totally crazy.

Disclaimer: I don't claim that all men are stupid all the time. Just the ones I seem to end up dealing with when there's a project. That would include the guys at Home Depot and Lowe's.

The Experiment

It's a bit late in the year to be hatching chicks, but I still have some in the incubator. This one is the first baby from a pullet that hatched earlier this year, in February. The mother is a Cuckoo Old English Game Bantam. The father is a bantam Dominique. Cuckoo is a color pattern, like Barred only more random. Dominiques are cuckoo colored. This chick is a new breed: a Cuckoonique. Or maybe a Dominoosh.

Old English bantams are pretty small, and pullet eggs are very tiny. No one recommends that you try to hatch them, it's best to wait until the females have been laying for a while and their eggs are larger. I thought I could save a year on my experimental project, though, so I put a dozen or so in the digital incubator.

I'm crossing some OEGB into my bantam Dominique line to see if I can get some smaller birds in a generation or two. My Doms are really nice, they have good color and type. But they tend to be too big.

The baby above is probably a pullet. She's pretty dark and her legs are the wrong color. They're supposed to be yellow. That's okay, we can work on that. She has a rosecomb, that's good. Right now I'm just working on getting her to eat. She's so tiny, it's hard to use tweezers to put cut up mealworms in her mouth. But that's what I'm doing. She's getting stronger every day.

There's another egg pipping this afternoon, so maybe she'll have a sibling soon. She's in with an older daughter of the little white OEGB hen right now. They don't like each other, but the older chick can demonstrate how to eat and where to get water.

It's very hot here today. Tomorrow it's supposed to be 108°. My pens are all under trees, but I'll still need to keep an eye out and make sure everything has fresh, cool water.

Wood Shed Babies

These are two of the Little Mama's babies. She has moved them back to the wood shed. That's good because I can feed them there, it's relatively safe if all the food is gone before dark so there's nothing to attract raccoons, and it keeps rodents out of the wood shed.

These two little girls (I know that because they're calico) have actually come out of hiding and eaten while I was standing a couple of feet away from them. I don't think they knew I was there because they never looked up. A third kitten stayed in the wood pile and would not come out. I have only seen 3 kittens; there were 5 when they were born.

These are not cute little cuddly kittens, they're quite feral. They are strong and healthy, they appear to be getting enough to eat, their eyes are clear and bright. I'll sneak some kitten wormer into their food soon.

Little Mama tolerates me if I bring food, but she still hisses and spits like a pissed off panther. I got the message, I stay at least 3 feet away and I'm keeping my hands to myself.

The Old Gal

Many years ago when he was a 4-H kid (it seems like a lifetime) Bob used to show white Old English game bantams. He acquired his first pair purely by accident when he was about 9 years old. He bought raffle tickets for a pair of large Rhode Island Reds, which he won. Another 4-Her offered to trade a pair of white OEGB for the RIRs, and Bob agreed.

Those whites were good birds, but they hadn't been kept in show condition. They were pretty ratty looking, really, and the cock bird was missing the tips of a couple of his toes, possibly chewed off by mice.

So the original birds, Wonder Bread and Princess, were never shown. But they had some babies that were very, very good and won a lot of trophies.

Bob stopped showing when he was 19 and other things in his life began to keep him busy. That was 2004. This was one of his remaining show birds back then.

By 2007 she was the last white OEGB on the place. I was showing a different breed. This old girl was just here to live out her life. One year she bunked with a Dominique bantam and I raised two of their crossbred babies, One Spot and Two Spot. I still have them. Like their mother, they are pushy, stylish little hens. I started to wish we had a white OEGB cock so we could raise some purebred babies while the old hen was still alive.

I couldn't find one. In a pinch I ordered some babies from a hatchery. They were beautiful birds, but way too big to show. I kept one and put him in with the old hen. She laid 7 eggs that year and all of them hatched (thank you, Katherine, hatcher extraordinare). I kept two of those babies and kept looking for the right male for the old hen. A friend found one in Oklahoma at a show and brought it back for me. This was him last fall.

I really hoped the old girl would live another year and lay even a couple of eggs so I could raise some babies. She did. This is a picture of her I took this afternoon.

She looks a little raggedy because she's old, she's getting ready to molt, AND she has laid 42 eggs this year. She has 22 babies already, there are still a few eggs in the incubator, and she's still laying. Her eggs are very small, her babies tiny little pipsqueaks, but like her they are pushy and proud. I hope at least a couple will be proper show birds. I like showing my Dominique bantams, but I love hauling snotty little white OEGB to a show. They have such at attitude.

Just Hangin' Around

These are the lazy days of summer. Not just for dogs, lazy for cats also.

Life is so boooorrrrrringgggg!