We bought a house with a swimming pool. I don't think I'd do it again, but what's done is done, and the pool has water, and ducks like to swim in water, and every spring before we open the pool ducks come and try to swim in it. This sometimes prompts a most curious scene as Lori or Aaron try to chase them away... though they always come back, at least until the water warms up.
In some years ducks have started nests in spots near the pool. One time was a duck war, all the eggs were smashed, and a male duck with a very broken neck ended up in the pool. Another time, a duck abandoned its last egg. The children tried to hatch it, but nothing ever happened.
June 19: 9 ducklings, unable to make it over a bubble in the cover.
On June 19th, our history changed. Lori suspected we had another duck with a nest, and its nearby male partner, but on this chilly morning we found out. Ducks in the pool! Or, since we had covered the pool the previous night, it was ducks on the pool! Mama ducks like to teach the ducklings to swim right away, and don't seem much bothered by little details like... the water being covered. One mother duck and 9 ducklings stepping across the new pool cover.
Ducks and ducklings in home swimming pools can cause several problems, though. For one thing, they poop a lot, and no one wants duck poop in their pool. For another, ducklings just aren't very strong. The ducklings weren't even strong enough to navigate a small bubble in the pool cover to follow their mother's voice; a few found a gap between the cover and the wall and made a go for it. Four got trapped under the cover; only three made it out alive when I removed the cover. So then we had a mother duck and 8 ducklings in the pool, and one dead duckling.
June 19: Eight surviving ducklings follow mama's voice but are stuck in the pool.
But we had another problem beyond a dead duckling: the other ducklings couldn't get out of the pool. Oh, from time to time one or two made it out by managing to hop on each others' backs, but they couldn't all get out of the pool. In millions of years of evolution, the duck species accounted for lakes and places where the newborns could walk in and out of the water... but they never accounted for a step of even a few inches. Mama duck would hop out and the ducks would follow her quack, but inevitably they remained in the water, forcing mama duck to come back in. They wouldn't hop on a raft or a board to climb out, either.
Finally, Aaron came up with a solution. First, he got mama duck out of the pool. Two ducklings managed to hop out as well, but the other 6 huddled together. Aaron then used a net to scoop the 6 up and deliver them to mama duck, out of the pool. Mama duck and her 8 survivors quickly made off for the other side of the property, where we'd spotted a male duck waiting some time earlier. We haven't seen the ducklings since.
But that evening, Aaron saw a female duck and a male duck hanging out together at the pool... without any ducklings. Could the ducklings have perished that quickly? Or was this another pair?
July 8: Eleven ducklings! Mama duck also appears to have a bit of a wing injury.
This morning, we got our answer: A mama duck with eleven ducklings, in the pool! This crew was quieter than the first one... maybe because they could go straight in the pool without having to deal with a deadly pool cover. Of course, these ducklings had no more hope than the first of getting out of the pool on their own. Mama duck got out, and a couple tried to jump... typically smacking their beaks halfway up the wall from the top of the waterline. So Aaron got out the net. We got the mama duck out of the pool, and the net... held eight ducklings! So now we had eight out, three in, and a very confused and somewhat distressed mama duck. No matter what she did, she'd be abandoning some of her ducklings. Finally, we got her out of the pool and with her eight ducklings, while Elianna rescued the other three one at a time. One duckling tried to flee, and another tried to play dead, but Elianna got them all. Once Aaron released them, they'd follow mama duck's quack to reunite in the bushes. Mama duck then led them away, we don't know where.
July 8: Rescued ducklings, forced to wait for mama.
Where did the two duck families with their 19 surviving ducklings go? Did the ducklings all survive? Did they avoid predators and cars and other deadly hazards? Will we have a dozen ducks trying to nest here next year? We might need more nets.
We went down to the courthouse Wednesday morning, and the judge issued the order: As of this day, which is also our second child's 18th birthday, our child shall be known as Ezra Stanley. We filed the order with the clerk, ordered the new birth certificates, and save for some administrative details, it's done. Name Day! The old name is sealed. It's still in the records, it's in this blog . This is the same person who once had a bat mitzvah, the same person who sang and danced with Bruce Springsteen , the same person who swore that unicorns are real and that they eat unicorn food. I will leave those bits of history untouched. This is also the same person who has made art under the old name and new, and the same person who made a mess of our kitchen while we were away on Tuesday, leaving us to discover the concealed chocolate disaster zone. The shift between what was and what is... in some ways that was very slow, and in some ways it was sudden. There were behavio
Since starting this blog, blogger says I've created 138 entries. Some are just pictures or quips, some are writings, and some probably have links that need to be replaced. But in some way they were all original works. Except, however, for this intro and a couple of the pictures to follow, this one is from Scott Williams, a young man from the Youngstown, Ohio, area. Scott attended Bruce Springsteen shows in Auburn Hills and Cleveland , found my email address (along with btx and a few others), and sent this report. And, Scott: Yes, "Youngstown" totally rocked. Greetings! Recently I had the most amazing day of my life! Since it was spring break, a teacher friend and I wanted to see if we could get another concert show under our belts before the summer (we were also going to Cleveland the following week). Since we didn't have to worry about school, we knew we had the whole day to work with, and seeing as the only concert that week with tickets still
A few days ago, an article appeared in the Hollywood Reporter. The headline read, "Bruce Springsteen's New Album Is His 'Angriest' Yet." Uh-oh. Bruce Springsteen is "liberal." When he goes off, self-described "conservatives" go wild. Laura Ingraham wrote a book called Shut Up & Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the UN are Subverting America. It was a best seller, even. I don't personally know anyone who actually read it, but that doesn't matter: When Bruce speaks out, there's inevitably a chorus of comments across the country: "Shut Up and Sing!" Sometimes, it goes a bit further. In March, 2011, Springsteen wrote a letter to The Asbury Park Press, commenting on a story that had appeared in the paper 4 days earlier. The letter read, in part, "Thank you for your March 27 front-page story by Michael Symons. 'As poverty rises, cuts target aid.' The article is one of the few t
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