Happy birthday to a wonderful Smooch!

A tiny bird in the toaster

Yesterday we had the front and back doors open to get a nice cross breeze and to let the cats come in and out. I was sitting on the couch with the computer watching Tyra (yes, Tyra, she's hella entertaining) when Justus came into the room and said,

"Smooch, why is there a bird in here?"

I looked up and sure enough there was a tiny bird perched above the window. We spent some time trying to get it to fly out of one of the open doors but it just flew back and forth. It eventually landed on top of the built in book shelves and so Justus opened the front window (sans screen) and we got it to fly out. Few. No more bird. Until............

Three hours later it was time for the babies to come inside. We wrangled them up and closed the doors. About 5 minutes later I felt a draft go over my head and noticed the bird again and this time I yelled,

"Bird! Bird!"

This got Justus to come racing into the living room where he found me trying to keep the cats from mauling the poor little guy to death. We figured that the bird did not in fact fly out of the window earlier in the day but hid behind some picture frames only to be coaxed out later by Maurice. We got the bird to fly into the kitchen and were trying to coax it out the door but at this point in the day it was not flying too well so it would fly from perch to perch in the kitchen. It finally landed on the toaster and then dove head first right into one of the slots (this was a tiny style bird). We quickly unplugged the toaster and I carried it outside, turned it upside down and gave it a little shake and out come the bird. It flew to the fence in the backyard where I am hopeful that it made a full recovery from it's traumatic experience.

Maurice spent the following 30 minutes looking behind the picture frames to see if any more birds would fly out. None did.

No suburbia for me

Last night we watched "The end of Suburbia" which I totally recommend by the way.  Basically, we have reached the peak of oil extraction from the earth and we are on our way down. We can no longer live the way we do. We need to move to local economies now. It was really eye opening. Things I can do:

*try to get a job closer to home

*continue to grow fruits and veggies for consumption

*get some chickens (I mean if I had to I could eat veggies and eggs)