What are you not doing right now?

I am not standing on a mountaintop in the Japan Alps, feeling a shiver run up and down my spine and eating a York Peppermint Patty.

I'm not putting away the rest of the groceries or feeding myself or opening my Amazon boxes. There's a cat asleep on my footrest so it's impossible.

I am not running barefoot through the forest like a free and joyful dryad.

I am not towering in lofty glory and dignity like some huge dumb rock that the locals obsess over incessantly, even though it never DOES ANYTHING.

I am not drinking wine OR eating anything, which is a sad state of affairs.

I am neither kicking ass NOR taking names.

I am not going outside to try and catch the squirrel in the garden even though it's so cute and fluffy and I love it.

Wuuhuhuhuh

I admire your restraint. Similarly, I have resisted the urge to try to catch our resident coot chick.

Omg a COOT CHICK.

I love the word coot as it is. "You old COOT!" But when I found out it was a BIRD, I couldn't even. And a COOL BIRD, too. They migrate at night! Those who migrate, migrate at night.

Oh hey, the practice of calling an old man a COOT derives (apparently) from the prior phrase "bald as a coot" which refers to the featherless frontal shields they have on their heads. Which makes total sense! First you're comparing old bald dudes to coots for the baldness, then they become coots themselves. And they don't even have to be bald! Albeit, most of the old coots I picture in mind are bald, with a few prickly white strands, survivors projecting from that otherwise shining and liver-spotted pate. YOU OLD COOT! HAHAHAHA YOU OLD!

It's adorable, avian-based abuse and derision of the elderly somehow. Oh, let's not go there. I'm more than halfway to a coot m'self, "Don't ask for whom the coot hoots, 'e hoots for ye."

ezeebee wrote:I am not going outside to try and catch the squirrel in the garden even though it's so cute and fluffy and I love it.

Wuuhuhuhuh

I quite love squirrels! There's one outside on the bird-feeder now. It's designed so squirrels can't get into it - there are little roosts on either side, but they're levers and if an animal of greater weight steps on - CLICK! The seed door shuts! What a gyp!

So the fucker's climbed up to the top and is trying to gnaw the string, dump the whole thing on the ground. Heh heh heh heh fucker! You've got to admire the tenacity and curious exploration that passes for ingenuity in nature.

There are a lot of squirrels around here. I love the NOISE they make when they're chasing after each other. It's like a bark but it sounds kind of like "chuck." I wonder if woodchucks make a similar noise. I especially love their daring leaps from rooves to tree branch, catch and swing down, then scramble up like a sailor!

Squirrels are SWASHBUCKLERS. That's what they are. The daring arboreal swashbucklers of the animal world. There should be a pirate captain who has a squirrel on his shoulder.

I really should have closed the wikipedia page about coots before I got to this. You MAY WANT TO SKIP, especially if you've a lot of affection (as I do) for the word "tousling":

wikipedia wrote:Chick mortality occurs mainly due to starvation rather than predation as coots have difficulty feeding a large family of hatchlings on the tiny shrimp and insects that they collect. Most chicks die in the first 10 days after hatching, when they are most dependent on adults for food.[6] Coots can be very brutal to their own young under pressure such as the lack of food, and after about three days they start attacking their own chicks when they beg for food. After a short while, these attacks concentrate on the weaker chicks, who eventually give up begging and die. The coot may eventually raise only two or three out of nine hatchlings.[7] In this attacking behaviour, the parents are said[by whom?] to "tousle" their young. This can result in the death of the chick.[8]

It's animals, tho. We can no more criticize them for it than we can take the claim seriously that the Rolling Stones are or ever were the World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band.

I could've done with a better comparison there, but I'm a tad distrait over tousling and coots, so there it is.

Over time, I have realized that in an emergency, I can drive while so tired I do not remember my middle name

How do you keep your eyes from sliding off everything. That's what I run into. I hate the force of will you have to bring to bear on that crap. FUCK YOU force of will!

dogimo wrote:I really should have closed the wikipedia page about coots before I got to this. You MAY WANT TO SKIP, especially if you've a lot of affection (as I do) for the word "tousling":

wikipedia wrote:Chick mortality occurs mainly due to starvation rather than predation as coots have difficulty feeding a large family of hatchlings on the tiny shrimp and insects that they collect. Most chicks die in the first 10 days after hatching, when they are most dependent on adults for food.[6] Coots can be very brutal to their own young under pressure such as the lack of food, and after about three days they start attacking their own chicks when they beg for food. After a short while, these attacks concentrate on the weaker chicks, who eventually give up begging and die. The coot may eventually raise only two or three out of nine hatchlings.[7] In this attacking behaviour, the parents are said[by whom?] to "tousle" their young. This can result in the death of the chick.[8]

It's animals, tho. We can no more criticize them for it than we can take the claim seriously that the Rolling Stones are or ever were the World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band.

I could've done with a better comparison there, but I'm a tad distrait over tousling and coots, so there it is.

This was exactly the mistake I made. But it does explain the drastic reduction in coot chick numbers over the last week or so.

Ai, my heart