Yeah yeah May the fourth be with you too blah blah blah,
I have another hobby. I have about 20 hobbies now in my quest to stay mildly busy, to learn new things and be more adequately engaged with my life, I've found something else to occupy my time that is interesting and I can put a science spin on it. Before you even get started I don't need nor do I want your advice about what I should do next. Every time I start to talk about this some well-meaning schlub starts in with the "You should do this or that " spiel about how they think I should spend my free time.
It usually starts off where they give me their wonderful great advice to go be a volunteer at someplace like a homeless shelter or the animal shelter or another place. I just think to myself " I don't want to involve People, That's what I am trying to avoid!" That aggravates the crap outta me because my objective is not to be busier, it is to learn new things. I am way too lazy to be any busier, ask LaDonna or Megan, they will tell you. It's not like I'm looking for something to interrupt my afternoon nap.
Having said that I know one of my close friends is already calculating a way to get under my skin with this. I guarantee before the morning is over, Susan will get more advice about how to quit whining, or stop bitching or something and then BLAM, under the bus I'll go. Well, not so much under the bus just aggravated and made fun of really. It doesn't bother me that much as I know she cares enough to do it and we both laugh about it. I know that most of you just think I'm crazy and I should move on and grow up anyway.
I have begun to provide care and support for wild birds. I also send dog food to our local animal shelter every two weeks. Apparently I also care for rabbits, mice, and squirrels although all of them are sort of incidental. See we cleared out a bunch of the tree line that borders my property over the last couple of years, and when I say we, I mean I paid someone else to do it, as no way I can do that kind of work anymore. Then we created a path that I could travel in my wheelchair. After that, we installed a birdbath, 5 birdhouses, 2 big seed feeders, 3 squirrel logs and the poles to hang the feeders on, and about 12 suit feeders. I've been working on this idea for about 3 years now and it is complete to this point. I'm farther along than the bypass is and I only took me 3 years from start to finish, with a lot of help from Brian and others.
There is a bird highway rest area now, complete with 5 hotel rooms and about 15 different restaurants to eat at plus free-range insects at the all you can eat ground cafe`. I sit on the deck in the morning and watch the squirrels destroy everything and eat all the seed, and whenever they are full the birds come by and make a ton of racket while they feed. It is pretty cool for a city boy like me. My friend PJ helps me to keep everything full whenever we can, but my wife has been helping me lately because we are under a quarantine order. It's really cool to do stuff with her too, usually, she is so busy keeping the house and the job in order or getting what little sleep she gets that I don't bug her with it unless I absolutely have to.
Is it weird that I don't try to identify or count the different species that visit? I've seen a little bit of everything including Cardinals, Wrens, Robins, Cat Birds, Sparrows, tons of Bluebirds, and a few others. It's pretty awesome. Birds make a shit ton of racket though. You get a bunch of them together eating and it sounds like a busy bar on a Saturday night and every ten minutes a bar fight breaks out.
It is something else to behold. The side benefit is that birds like insects and ticks and they eat the crap out of them including the wretched ants. I watched it yesterday while these birds went to town on the friggin insects. It was great. Also after we harvested the weekly grass (Its what I call grass cutting an acre and a half), the birds went to town on the back forty and picked the yard clean. I wanted to go out and give them all coupons for half off dining but cha know.
By God I'm going to invite more birds to come over and play!
5 Opinions that nobody asked for but got anyway
- Up until I was at the beginning of 8th grade, I was a military brat. I lived on one Air Force base or another until then. I look back at that time with real fondness as we had a great time being kids on the base. The culture then and at that moment was worlds apart from what came next in the civilian world. Everything was different from going to the movies to what was considered normal.
For example, usually, even 10-year-olds carried your ID cards on them if you were out playing without your parents around. God forbid if you lost it. If you had to get Mom (Please no not Dad), to take you back to Pass&ID to get another ID card, you more than likely were going to get your ass beat for losing it. It didn't matter how you lost it or why you lost it, you just didn't lose it. Period.
Consequentially because it was a military installation, you occasionally would have to talk to the Air Base Police, or Air patrol (AP) for various things. Being in a restricted area, playing in a construction zone, taking a shortcut through the flight line, talking to the Generals daughter through her bedroom window at 9 p.m., walking on top of the missile silos or playing in the ammo dump would all get you questioned. They would say things like "How in the hell did you get in here and nobody saw you?".
Mundane things like being out after curfew or when the base was locked down either during an exercise or during an alert, would get an inquiry too. The worst part was every time you got talked to or questioned, they would contact your father and report the contact for whatever the reason was. Man, that sucked. The cops would call your dad and then deliver you in a cop truck to your parents, even if you were within walking distance to your house. It felt like the last mile you would ever walk. - I want to go and see the movie Venom2 whenever it comes out. In terms of what movie upcoming excites me, this one is it. Also Deadpool3 but I don't know when that one gets released. The last James Bond movie that Daniel Craig will play Bond is on the list too. What other movies are on the horizon?
- Hollywood celebrity Emily Ratajkowski didn'\t make the news this week for being naked for once. That's her go-to mode for generating headlines I think. She has appeared nude on the internet so often that they don't even include her images in search results for naked movie stars anymore. Or so I've heard, I don't know for sure, as I don't like to look at naked movie stars.
Anyway, this week she has lost her mind and held a wedding ceremony. For her dog. She married off her dog to, wait for it, another dog. Another one of her dogs.
These people are unfathomable. - The headline is all I have on this one. A man goes to clean out his mother's apt in Manhattan after she passed away. He finds a body in a duct-taped shut freezer. It is so deteriorated the body's sex cannot be easily determined. It has been there for at least 10 years and the man has no idea who it is. Now, imagine this is your mother and your mother's house. All of your relatives are accounted for.
Who in the hell is in the freezer? Wow. - We have a Space Force as a 6th Military service. It has already happened. so nothing to bitch about here. Apparently it ain't about planes and bombs though according to the pentagon. Coming to light this week is a revelation that we have had a spaceplane called the X37-B in orbit for around the last 3 years and nobody will explain what it does or why its there. Not that they should have to at all, I just find it interesting. Right now its all-black files and budgets that are part of about 100 Billion dollars in appropriations that you cannot see the details of. Apparently also it has a relationship to Reagans SDI initiatives of the '80s and '90s and it is all about satellite tracking and space-based defenses for the time being. It is interesting as hell though.
This is Houston, Challenger you are a go for throttle up,
BigMike
I absolutly love this
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