So many people have mentioned this page. I hardly thought anyone would read it, let alone love it. Thank you to all of you who have followed this journal. I know I haven’t written much lately. I had been frantically trying to finish my house (which is currently at 95 percent completion) when I was involved in something life changing. I will add details as I can. Events sometime shake us up and this one did me. In the meantime thank you for coming back here. I will post a note on our front page when I have returned to this corner of my website to leave my words, which I find hard to find, literally, I can’t retrieve them with the same vigor I once could... Funny what a head injury does to ones synapses. If you believe in God, pray for me if you don’t throw a penny in fountain and send good thoughts my way. I appreciate it. Hope to be back soon, Lynn…

Somewhere in Between June 9, 2006 and August 9, 2006

Ethical Dilemma – For me anyway!

Ethical dilemma: two bird nests perched in the corners of my eves and stucco crews coming to cover the entire house in chicken wire and black tar paper, the eves in particular are to be covered with wire mesh. Covering the nests over would be certain death for the birds so they would have to be moved. The question, would the mama birds find their babies if we moved them? One of the bird’s nest was filled with barely hatched babies, their cracked eggs still littering the bottom of the nest like day old snow, while the other nest was brimming over with full breasted young birds, feathers ruffled and beaks open, who were crouched together in their tiny nest like a large family in the small old Soviet style Russian apartment.. I particularly worried about the newly hatched birds because they didn’t even have a voice to peep with. The stucco crews would schedule our job then not show due to routine delays which for the birds meant a week long reprieve, but for me it meant another seven days of angst over just what to do. I even considered delaying the stucco crews but that would mean weeks. You’re insane, I thought to myself when I woke at three in the morning, a freight train of anxiety running over my chest, a flood of increasing concern over the dilemma with the baby birds. I knew it was an old wives tale about birds abandoning their babies once they had a human scent but what I didn’t know was could or would a mama bird still invest her time and energy into a nest of babies that were moved or would she simply abandon them. In the case of the latter I knew how to blend a cocktail of meat baby food and feed them with an eye dropper thanks in large part to the Junior Lindsey Museum where I grew up however I wasn’t sure I could manage two nests full of hungry birds on what has been becoming an increasingly strangulating time budget. Besides it badgered me like a bad habit that my stucco might cause those mama birds to feel the loss of their young.

On the morning of lathe (chicken wire and tar paper) I woke early and recruited my reluctant husband and oldest son into what would be a bird rescue. I had scoped out several locations in nearby trees for the right branches. Like an admiral making war plans I had spent several hours planning where I would strategically place each nest. They had to be in close proximity to the eve from which they came and the branches had to have a crotch with enough vegetation around it to shelter the nests from sun and wind and even rain. It had to be high enough off the ground to keep predators at bay but not so high that I couldn’t peek in on the babies’ progress. The nests were considerably more fragile than I had anticipated, woven with thin sticks and long white pieces of horse tails, but we managed to get them to the trees and position them so they were cradled from below by the brushy branches. The little birds didn’t make a peep which of course concerned me because their peeping I imagined was how the mama birds would find them. Around noon thunder storms started to brew, the sky deepening into a bruised purple and the wind picked up. I noticed one nervous mama bird in a nearby tree; she would go to the eve then back to the nest in the tree frantic as though she knew how devastating this new place could be even if I didn’t. As the wind and rain ratcheted up I joined her frenzied chorus hiking up and down the hills to the trees to make sure the wind didn’t knock a nest loose or the rain wasn’t making it beyond the roof of branches I had strategically planned during placement of the nests. There were fleeting moments when the nagging, self doubting voice in my head tried to caution me, your fooling with mother nature, this can’t turn out good. As the weather worked against me I also grew increasingly concerned for the other older fledglings nest as it hadn’t had a single visit from an adult bird all day. I was sure the rapid machine gun like fire of the staple guns would drive even the bravest wildlife away.

To add a little extra chaos into the mix, as the crews worked one of them discovered yet another nest, propped in the eve behind a post and packed full with four more baby birds. He made a special effort to come and notify me, having smiled at my labor earlier to relocate the others, a smile that I couldn’t tell whether it said, look at this crazy “gringo” or a shared encouragement for my effort . I had not planned for this nest and so had no place plotted out to reposition it. I was also on my way to town and couldn’t spend the afternoon on location strategies so I improvised and tucked the little nest full of birds safely inside in my bathtub, out of the wind gusts and rain. I had decided earlier in the day that the “move” would only be temporary and when the crews were done we would fashion some sort of hammocks to suspend the nests back in place. The stucco crews worked the better part of a 24 hour day, 14 hours or so. They finished for the day but they planned to return the next day, with a few odds and ends to complete. We went to work right away and fashioned two hammocks out of chicken wire and one out of a red Starbucks bag, the bag suspended cleverly with each handle nailed to a corner eve and the base filled with paper towels. We placed each nest back in its original spot and waited. For a long time no birds came but as the evening wore on I noticed three birds perched on the scaffolding. Two of them it turns out were the parents for one nest, and they were not the least bit deterred by the new arrangements. They flew in and out with bugs in their mouth until the rest of the daylight faded. The third was the nervous Nelly who had continued all day to fly between the eves and the tree where her nest was and she too was satisfied with the nest hanging in a wire hammock and brooded over her young. The last nest, hanging now in a bright red tote, finally had two visitors who flew in and out of it. As I watched them fly in and out of the bag, I estimated the overpriced Starbucks merchandise had finally found a worthy purpose. All was well for the night. I slept sound. The next morning as the crews rolled in and descended on the covered porches, I learned to my dismay one of the nests had to be moved again. A young man in broken English informed us he had simply relocated the hammock, nest and all directly across from it’s position on the eve and fasten it to the side of the house. He had taken great care to fasten the hammock and at that minute I understood his smile the day before. The two parent birds again were undeterred by the location change and continued to fly in and care for their young, even as they were propped dandily on the side of the house. Since this tallied a third move for this poor little nest we decided it would not survive another relocation. In fact the bottom of it gave out late that evening. I came out to discover two little bird feet flapping down through the wire hammock. Again I recruited my husband to climb up the ladder and rescue the stuck bird. We made paper towel liners to put underneath the nest but how to get the little feet back through the wire? Push them through I eagerly offered my husband. He did and the pressure caused the little guy to crap all over his leg. I shouldn’t have but I laughed my ass off! This is where that nest stayed, safely mounted with three layers of two ply paper towels between the nest and the hammock. Two days later two of the three the birds in the Starbucks tote died. They had feathers so I hoped that the third at least had successfully left the nest but of course will never know its fate. The other two nests faired well for the next several days and weeks and the babies have since left the eves. Me I am still patiently waiting on the stucco crews to come put the sand over the lathe…

A plague is defined in American Heritage Dictionary as, “A widespread affliction or calamity, especially one seen as divine retribution”

Mormon Crickets look like giant flees, at least from the approximate distance between the windshield and the road. As they pop and die under the car tires there carcasses are then descended on by a cluster of other hungry crickets, which, from the windshield of a car now appear to look like a golf ball sized roll of legs and antenna. Seeing them from this distance of course is gross enough for me but getting out of the car and facing these Crickets in mass is quite another story. Up close they are even more repulsive, less like a giant flee and more like a cross between a cockroach and a cricket on steroids. They come in black and tan, and a deep almost sun burnt colored red. The red ones I believe are the older ones. I know this because I was hiking up my ridge and came across one that was hanging upside down from a giant piece of granite out of what was left of its black and tan “skin” apparently shedding out of it somewhat like a snake. It was at least three inches long and an opaque red like it hadn’t yet acquired the dark red shell that perhaps comes from hopping in the desert sun. I first faced these god awful creatures last year hiking in the painted mountains, but they never made it past our mail box in their migration pattern which is a good several miles from our house. Unbeknownst to me they were actually mild last year, although the folks in the suburbs who had them crawling up their stucco might not agree. All that harsh cold and snow apparently wasn’t favorable to their eggs. This year the weather has been much more sympathetic for them and so their offspring from last year are out like armies. This year I had to really face them since they covered my half mile driveway and every inch of dirt on our property, not to mention the surrounding roads, the hay fields, and the paved highways. In fact there were so many Mormon Crickets in our pastures that the fields seemed as though they had come to life. Without the cover of sage brush and wild grass, long ago stripped away by the horses, our pastures were a blank canvas over which these creatures decided to brood their eggs for next years incursion. 

My neighbors have joked that since our arrival we have brought horrible destructive weather patterns not seen in a hundred years and now a plague. It might be just our luck to finish the house and discover it is the END OF TIME. The roofers screwed down the last sheet of metal roofing Saturday, a forest green, energy efficient, standing seam metal roof. There are pipes running threw most of the walls of the house now, like veins threw a skeletal system. Contractors are the anti Christ of the day for us, evil, conspiring, scam artists who have to have a short leash to do their job to completion. My framer cried on my house pad, not a little tear in the eye cry, a quivering chin kind of cry, apparently unable to take any criticism about the performance of his crew. He informed me he was “sensitive.” (“This unto itself is a separate entry, which I will call “The Case of the Crying Contractor”) So progress comes at its own pace it seems, no matter how hard we pursue a speedy end to this project. The weather remains a schizophrenic opponent, bringing two inches of snow the first weekend of June, followed by record breaking heat a week later, more like August than June. Water to the house remains illusive as we have a leak “somewhere” in the 300 feet of lines up the driveway. Dave has dug up the lines every hundred feet and put a check valve in to narrow down the distance we have to search for the leak. It’s like the Saturday morning cartoon of the farmer chasing frantically and fruitlessly the gofer that lies under his garden reeking havoc. In hind sight we should have spent 20,000 dollars on a tractor; we paid out around 40,000 over the last year in hiring one out! I hear myself humming “only fools rush in.” Love and house building is definitely for FOOLS.

Our mare (Sweeper) foaled Saturday, watch for my next entry