Pre-Ramble:  In an effort to keep the baby-birds-in-nest habitat near the front door of our house as tranquil as possible, I’ve taken to re-routing all nonessential traffic to one of our alternate entrance/exit sites — much to the consternation of my girls, (who are perfectly happy to run around the neighborhood with their peeps for hours on end, but ask them to take ten extra steps to the back door and their tail-feathers get all bent out of joint.)

Also, to minimize disruption, I’ve cut back on the number of times I check on the nest to just 50 times a day. Still, each time I think I’m sneaking up on the foyer window as my stealthiest self, I’ll focus in on the nest only to find Mother Chipping Sparrow looking directly at me with her death glare, all, “Seriously? … You’re looking out here again?” 

In spite of the suboptimal accommodations, the Chiplets seem to be doing just great. Mom and Dad have been fetching take-out – bugs mainly — and all four chicks are looking discernibly fuzzier.

The other big buzz today centers on the 82nd Scripps National Spelling Bee which moves into the nationally televised semifinals in Washington D.C.  If you haven’t seen the award-winning film, Spellbound, you have no idea just how … well, spellbinding, the National Spelling Bee can be.

… one of the highest-rated specials on ESPN (a sports channel), … a nail-biting face-off among hundreds of teens who train as rigorously as any Olympic athlete on their heroic quest for glory.

A few fun facts about the bee:

• The National Spelling Bee was begun in 1925 where nine students participated in the event
• The program, which hosts a record 293 spellers, is open to students attending public, private, parochial, charter and home schools
• Participants range in age from 9 to 15 years of age; most of the kids are either 13 or 14 years old
• English is not the first language of 33 of this year’s spellers, and 117 of them speak languages other than English
• According to the Bee’s official website, the spellers’ favorite words include Weissnichtwo and humuhumunukunukuapuaa (my spell check just shorted out)
• Most bees are fuzzy and carry an electrostatic charge which aids in the adherence of pollen. (You didn’t think I would get through this post without some stupid reference to honey bees, did you?) 

The Take-Away: I think we can all agree that we are more than thankful that we are not in front of a microphone trying to sound out the word “ameliorate” …   And just to drive that point home, here is a spelling tip from the official spelling bee primer:

One of the hardest tings to remember about werds from Latin is weather an internal consonant (like rr in interrupt) is doubled. To reinforce your memery of the correct spelling, try to remmember related werds all together (like interrupt along wit interrupshun or necessary along with necesscity).

Pre-Ramble: I was all set to write a little Memorial Day blog about war heroes, and explore the sentiment around the military from the perspective of one of my daughter’s friends who will be headed off to West Point in the fall.  As I went to hang our stars and stripes from the hooks on the front porch for inspiration however, I realized that, patriotic or not, all that flag flapping would probably scare Mother Chipping Sparrow as she bided her ol’ time on the nest. (I’m sure she’s already annoyed with the paparazzi.)

As you can probably tell by the title and photo, when I looked out at the nest Sunday morning, the four little blue eggs had begun to hatch into baby Chipping Sparrows (the “Chiplets”) … little pink faces that only a mother could love.

As you can also probably tell from the photo, the strong winds that tore through the neighborhood earlier in the weekend knocked ALL of the needles off of the branches surrounding the nest. Suddenly, the prime, secluded nest location is stripped bare — like a bedroom with no drapes.

The Take-Away:  There is probably a profound parallel to be made between the hatching of the eggs and going off to a prestigious military academy, but I haven’t had enough coffee yet this morning to put that together.  Instead, I’ll just hope that the Chiplet’s favorite food is fresh mosquito larva and bid you to stay tuned…

Pre-Ramble:  I’m not sure why, but as I’m reading through the daily newspaper I’ll occasionally glance through the obituary section. I guess it is somehow curious/interesting to sample the variety of people who have … lived. (Stick with me here – I promise there’s a happy ending…)

While being confronted with the reality of death in the names and faces of actual people can be sad, it can also be inspiring to read about all of the interesting experiences and accomplishments that these folks have been able to pack into their lives.

There are often listings of people in their 80’s and 90’s accompanied by a handsome photo from when they were young. I’ll think that they must have had rich and fulfilling lives, and can picture them sitting in a big floral recliner surrounded by the happy noise of a family gathering. Sometimes there will be a woman around my age who has died, and I’ll wonder what her life was like and hope that she had had a chance to do everything she had wanted to do (but knowing that probably she did not). Harder to consider are the lives of young adults and teenagers whose lives have been taken too soon, often in early morning car accidents. I naturally think of my own two girls and can’t even begin to let myself imagine the profound sadness that their family and friends must feel at their loss. And sometimes, more frequently than there ever should be, there will be a picture of a very young child who has died; photographs intended to mark the beginning of a new life, brought to recognition of its end. I can’t bear to read those.

But sometimes, like today, the obituary stories describe a unique and lovely circumstance that can’t help but brighten the collective Universe’s day…

Wayne Allwine, a Walt Disney Studios voice-over artist who was the voice of Mickey Mouse for more than three decades, has died. He was 62.

Allwine made his debut voicing the world’s most famous mouse in 1977 on ”The New Mickey Mouse Club” and went on to supply Mickey’s voice for Disney movies, TV specials, theme parks, records, toys and video games. His credits include, “Mickey’s Christmas Carol,” “The Prince and the Pauper,” “The Three Musketeers,” “Mickey Mouseworks,” “House of Mouse,” and “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.”

And then you read:  “For the past eighteen years, Allwine was married to fellow voice-over artist, Russi Taylor – the voice of Minnie Mouse.”

The Take-Away:  Can’t you just see the two of them sitting at the breakfast table in their “mouska-ear hats”? … Hey there! Hi there! Ho there! 

Pre-Ramble:  According to a recent snippet on the Wall Street Journal’s sports page (?) Alex Rodriguez, the “much maligned” third baseman for the New York Yankees, took a pie-to-the-face at the hand of teammate A.J. Burnett during a postgame interview.  The foamy high-jinx, captured on youtube, shows the pie grazing  the right side of unsuspecting A-Rod’s face (photo of aftermath shown right) as he reflected on his two-run homer slammed at the bottom of the 11th inning to seal a Yankee victory over the Minnesota Twins (6-4).

Give that man a Q-tip!  I’m sure there are a bunch of dugout dynamics that I (admittedly a fair-weather fan) am not privy to.  Apparently, a pie in the face is some kind of celebratory baseball tradition … ? Who knew?  Well, apple pie, maybe … and I don’t mean to be a poor sport here, but when did hitting someone in the face with a pie become an acceptable standard mode of communication — celebratory or otherwise? 

While my girls were quick to offer help with some first-hand research, less sticky sources describe “pieing“  (yes, there is an actual verb for it) as the act of throwing a pie at a person. Fair enough. Variations on motivation and meaning around pieing:

This can be a political action when the target is an authority figure, politician, or celebrity, and can be used as a means of protesting against the target’s political beliefs, or against a perceived flaw in the target’s character (arrogance, hubris, etc.). Perpetrators generally regard the act as a form of ridicule to embarrass and humiliate the victim. (wikipedia)

Pieing had its origins in slapstick comedy in the early 1900’s, coming into its own as a comedy bit in the Laurel & Hardy classic short film, “The Battle of the Century,” where a legendary 4,000 pies were engaged. Other comedians and cartoon characters known for pieing include the Three Stooges, Bugs Bunny, Charlie Chaplin, Monty Python and Soupy Sales. The 1965 comedy,” The Great Race,” reportedly features the largest pie fight in cinematic history. (To be fair, some cakes were involved in that melee.)

Astonishingly, there are entire websites devoted to the art and science of pieing. Here, from a site called sjnetwork, are some general pieing pointers:

• whipped cream – works well, but can be troublesome to make in large quantities and has a tendency to melt; blending some sugar into the mixture gives the substance more body
• Cool Whip – melts quickly if used alone; mixed with sour cream or yogurt, it will maintain its shape for several hours
• aerosol whipped cream is “worse than useless,”  melting/losing its shape in microseconds and leaving a film on the piee’s face that is very difficult to wash off
• shaving cream – doesn’t have the feel of real whipped cream, but “can be fun;” use the sensitive skin variety, which doesn’t sting the eyes; give it a creamier texture by mixing it with pancake batter …
• actual pies – pies purchased from a bakery “tend to be expensive and risky“ as they contain stabilizers which make them heavy and greatly inhibit the “splatter factor“
• A note on crusts – graham cracker is readily available and comes pre-formed in the pie tin, however tends to break up on impact; frozen crusts require thawing, forming and baking, but “make for better throwing and are well worth the extra effort“; using a paper-plate-as-quasi-crust is completely lacking in style and is just lame

Since the 1970’s, a broad collection of regular folks have been pied … more than one might imagine, including Anita Bryant, William F. Buckley, G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, William Shatner, Andy Warhol, filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, Bernard-Henri Levy, conservative pundit Ann Coulter (while fundamentally opposed to pieing, I would have thrown that one), David Horowitz, Ralph Nadar, Fred Phelps, Jean Chretien (then-Prime Minister of Canada), Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and celebrated economist Thomas Friedman.

Call me a stick-in-the-mud, but I am just not a fan of this whole ”punked,” ”pranked,” food-fight, “let’s trash this” mentality. Maybe it’s because I’m usually on the clean-up end of these events, but I just don’t see where it’s so funny. And it goes beyond that. It’s about consent. Throwing a pie in someone’s face outside of a situation where the likelihood of the act is known and agreed upon in advance, is not only not funny, it’s a physically aggressive thing.

In the movies — it’s written into the script as a comic device; and, I would venture to say that many actors would rather take a pie to the face than have to speak aloud some of the truly inane lines that are assigned to their character. … Among frat-boys and baseball players — sure, whatever; there is probably a whipped cream clause in fine print at the bottom of A-Rod’s $275 million contract. … Paintball, laser tag, and that community fair favorite, the dunk tank, are all cases of implied consent (the guy who crawls onto the platform and dangles his feet over the vat of disgusting green water knows full well what is coming). … In cases where a person is clearly smug, pompous, or otherwise full of themselves, that fact is usually more than obvious and self-incriminating. In a situation where a regular person is exercising their right to free speech however, a pie-in-the-face is mean-spirited and demeaning — and it’s a physical assault.  

The Take-Away:  Flying whipped cream is not protected under the First Amendment. If you want to stand up and yell, “Pie in your face!!” that would be unfortunate and disruptive, but it wouldn’t cross the line into unacceptable behavior that is punishable by law. The minute that pie leaves your hand, it’s a whole new ball game.

On a similar note, I would consider the grand scale food-fight which occurred in the American Idol mansion this season to be a disrespectful, wasteful and sad variation on the pie-in-the-face theme. Maybe we’d be singing a different tune if they had scraped the $6,000 worth of flour, sugar and egg off the floor, walls and each other and shipped it over to the starving children in Darfur for whom they were soliciting earlier in the show.

Pre-Ramble:  At the risk of sounding like Dr. Seuss on a backyard nature hunt, I was all ready to call out the fact that yesterday, our little bird nest had gained a third egg. ! 

That’s right — every day for the past three days, Mother Chipping Sparrow has added another tiny blue egg to the brood. I am just fascinated by this nest … I must check on it fifty times a day. My husband isn’t nearly as taken with the whole thing. Basically, he just rolls his eyes and says something dismissive and passive-aggressive like, “Great.” 

So, then I got to thinking — really — do your readers care about some bird laying eggs on a front porch in suburban Minnesota?  Where’s the witty commentary on the important issues of the day?  The keen observations on innovation, creativity, and human behavior?  Where are the uplifting stories? The wise-cracks about celebrities and political figures?  Advice for the President’s dog?  … So, I figured a couple days of this birdy-cam news is all anyone really needs…

UNTIL TODAY!!  

This morning, plain as day, right there in the bottom of the nest, was A FOURTH EGG!!! 

Try as I might, Mother-B (shown above — not actual size) returned to the nest before I was able to scramble for the camera. I haven’t been able to catch her in an on-leave moment ever since.

Four eggs in four days … this Quatro-chick is really delivering!  The bird book said 3-5 eggs per brood was the range … and here we are at egg number four! Will there be a fifth tomorrow?  Will she exceed the national averages and go for egg number six?? This is almost more exciting than the American Idol finale! (Ok, maybe not.) (And my husband rolls his eyes about that too.)

The Take-Away:  Sometimes, you just need a break from all the gloom and doom …, the tabloid drama …, and take a look at the stuff going on in your own backyard.  Sure, the market might be down and gas prices might be up, but, hey – we’ve got four eggs in the nest!!

Pre-Ramble: Quick update on our bird nest …. According to the National Audubon Society’s Sibley Guide to Birds, our resident feathered friend (as discussed in May 12 post) is a Chipping Sparrow (Spizella passerina, shown right).

… a small, gray brown bird with a clear gray chest, rusty crown, white eyebrow with a black eye line, a thin gray black bill, and two faint wing bars.

Apparently, the female builds a “cup” style nest and lays 3-5 blue-green eggs with brown markings (!).  The incubation period is 11-14 days and then an additional 10-12 days of toddlerhood. The tell-tale detail though was this: “Nest is placed low in dense shrubs and is almost always lined with animal hair.” (!!!)

The Take-Away:  Another egg showed up in the nest this morning (see blurry photo below);  T-minus 1-3 more …

Pre-Ramble: The other day, much to my surprise, I spotted a tiny bird’s nest in one of the potted “trees” next to our front door. There was no bird in it, and no real signs of activity. I’ve been keeping an eye on the nest, hoping that the tidy, intricately woven little structure hadn’t been abandoned before it had had a chance to host a little bird family.

This nest was remarkable for several reasons:

1. just big enough to hold a golf ball, the architectural symmetry and detail of the nest was a wonder to behold;
2. as I looked closer, I realized that, mixed in with the blades of grass and twigs, the inside of the nest was lined with hundreds of strands of Daisy’s white dog hair. (Amazing, both in terms of the dexterity required to pick up a single stalk of dog hair in one’s beak, and in the incredibly putsy and undoubtedly time-consuming process of weaving all of that stuff into something livable.)
3. of all the luxurious, secluded locations available on our 2 acres of heavily wooded lot, Mother Bird picked a dried out tree topper (hastily jammed into containers last Christmas) that flanks the front doorway of our house — one of the highest trafficked areas possible, and right at Daisy’s nose level.

Well, so, this morning, after several days of the empty nest, just when I had nearly given up hope, I heard an unusual chirping coming from the front of the house. I won’t admit that I dashed over to see if the noise could be coming from the nest, and sure enough, a bird was now scrunched into the perfectly round little space… !

Immediately, I texted my girls with the good news; who, I assure you, are sitting at school right now going, “My mother is a nut-case.”

But wait — it gets better … (I know, you can barely stand it) … When I looked out the front window a few minutes later, the bird was gone, and cradled in the bottom of the nest was a single tiny blue egg… !

Yep — another text to the girls — and a photo (above right).

The Take-Away:  With spring break already a distant memory and grad parties in the air, many folks are lamenting/celebrating the fact that their youngest child will be headed off to college. I am happy to report that we’re not empty-nesters yet!

Pre-Ramble:  My kids are all over this Mother’s Day thing. They know just what I like – nothing too expensive or over the top, and preferably, something that they had a hand in making themselves.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I loved the rake I got last year, we needed one and it has come in really handy. I also love flowers, of course … Mother Nature’s perfect blend of beautiful colors, shapes and scents, gathered in a bundle to look at in the house. I love all of that.

But, try as they might to identify and present the perfect gift, children have no way of knowing that they are able to surpass the surface value of that effort by one-thousand-million times just by being. 

This year, knowing that I am constantly struggling to keep up with the times, particularly in light of my deficit in tech-skills, my girls presented me with a cardboard cut-out of an Apple iPhone and my very first iTunes gift card… !  They told me that I could practice buying songs from the iTunes store for my iPod (a hand-me-down from my husband that I use when I go running), and if I had mastered that by the time my birthday rolled around this summer, I could graduate to my very own iPhone… just in time for 3.0! (My girls each have an iPhone and I accost them regularly with requests to check the day’s weather forecast, find directions to somewhere, or check out some other neat new app.)

While their gift might seem self-serving (I don’t know how to use the iTunes store, or my iPod, for that matter), it is actually their way of sharing a piece of themselves and of their lives that I could never buy in any store.  In sharing their experience as a member of the generation into which they were born (thank you very much), they are in essence, nudging me out to the edge of the nest … welcoming me into a piece of their world, and teaching me the secret handshake.  They know that I want to know how all of this works, I just need a little help. (Ok, a lot of help.)

The Take-Away:  The greatest gift we can ever receive as parents is the knowledge that, while our children no longer necessarily need us to be a part of their lives, they want us there.  I am the luckiest mother in the world.

Post-Note: I forgot to mention that a CD of hand-picked songs to play in my car was also part of this year’s Mother’s Day package.  This is particularly significant and meaningful because, along with the CD, they were able to show me where the CD player was in my new car.  

Seriously — I have been driving that thing for several months now and, for the life of me, was not able to find the damn CD player.  (And it wasn’t just me — the boys down at the dealership couldn’t find it either. In their defense, it was a used car and maybe they just weren’t familiar with this make and model … )

My daughters ushered me into the garage to sit in the car, pushed some random button, and like a scene out of the Transformers, whole chunks of the dashboard morphed around to reveal the elusive slot.  I almost cried.

Pre-Ramble:  When I got out of bed this morning the sun was shining, the birds were chirping, and life was good. Little did I know that the power and reach of modern technology would be able to foul my day so swiftly and completely.

You’re probably thinking, “OH NO, Kath had another traumatic computer event … POOR THING, … third time in three years… she should just cash it in and take up knitting.”

Or maybe you’re thinking that another hideous photo of me has been tagged on Facebook. (This would be true, but isn’t the source of my woes this morning.)

Contrary to the massively unspectacular spread of  H1N1, you may be concerned that my system has contracted some sort of  debilitating virus … which, thankfully, is not the case.

No - it is far more insidious than any of those things …

… this morning I had an email message in my inbox from the Minnesota Golf Association (MGA) … giving me an update on MY CURRENT GOLF HANDICAP!

Thanks.  Thanks for that.  No amount of coffee can prepare a person for such a rude assault … and so early in the day.  This intrusion is clearly out of bounds.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the sport (and let me congratulate you on your ignorance), the golf handicap system was introduced by the USGA (United States Golf Association) in the early 20th Century.

With a handicapping system, a weaker player is given strokes on certain holes on a golf course. That is, on a particular hole, the weaker player may be allowed to “take a stroke,” i.e., deduct a stroke from his or her score for that hole.  At the end of the round, the two players of differing abilities can figure their “net score,” i.e., their gross minus the strokes they were allowed to take/deduct … A player’s official USGA Handicap Index is derived from a complicated formula that takes into account adjusted gross score, course rating and slope rating.

Simple.  And apparently, “once armed with a course handicap, a golfer is ready to play on an equal basis with any other golfer in the world.” (I’ll take that bet.)

The Take-Away: Look – I know that I am a bad golfer…  Anyone who has played with me knows that I am a bad golfer … Certainly, by the steady uptrend of the ridicules scores I have posted over the past couple of years, the folks at the MGA know that I am a bad golfer… So, do we really need to revisit that fact?  

I think what we have established here is that, not only is technology capable of pointing out (via some intra-meta-tech twist) that I am technologically challenged, but it also has the capacity to remind me, in an unnecessarily cruel random-hit form of technological water-boarding, that I am a severely challenged golfer as well. Perhaps, as with the technosphere, the Universe is suggesting that I should consider trading in the clubs for a set of knitting needles?

Post Note: I have news for both cyberspace and the MGA – I have already staked my claim in this realm, and have the hand-knit, two-inch wide scarf/jumprope to prove it.

Pre-Ramble: While generally a mild-mannered person, I have been known to exercise my inner rebel by wearing wild pajamas. Without going into untoward detail, Target has an awesome brand of PJs made out of some kind of wonder-micro-fiber. Stretchy, wrinkle-proof, and more comfortable than all get out, these jammies come in a variety of bold colors and designs and are the perfect wardrobe choice for sleeping, lounging, (and blogging).

While perfect for many occasions, these jammies are not ideal for going out to get the morning newspaper. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that the end of my driveway was on some sort of parade route. Invariably, as I dash out to get the paper, I’ll be darned if somebody doesn’t come by at precisely that moment. We’re not talking about a distant drive-by — we’re talking about somebody, on foot, walking directly toward me in my pajamas. 

Busted!  It’s not like you can just turn around and bolt back into the house — you’ve already been sighted. No. Instead, like Wile E. Coyote standing on the “X” waiting for the anvil to fall, you’ve got to complete your mission, strolling casually out to the box and retrieving the paper as if there is nothing unusual about the situation. And, as if it’s not bad enough that you’re standing out on the street in wild pajamas, the oncoming person is probably close enough that you have to acknowledge them with some kind of eye-contact, or worse, an audible greeting. (I’ve found it best to say something like, “Good morning,” than what you really want to say.)

So today, while standing behind a tree while my husband fetched the paper, I heard some rustling overhead only to discover that there were two full-sized ducks sitting 40 feet up on a nearby tree branch.

Ducks! In a tree!? 

Probably any duck hunter worth his feathers knows that ducks hang out in trees. But to the average person, it just looks goofy. Ducks are bulky; they have a fuselage style body, and huge, flat, webbed feet. Ducks are not built to be up in trees, they are built to swim.  A duck in a tree is like Michael Phelps on the balance beam.

Turns out that these were wood ducks … elaborately decorated waterfowl, (shown above) which are generally found in wooded swampy areas in North America, and commonly nest in trees. Who knew?  Wood ducks will also build a nest in special “nest boxes” elevated four feet or higher near a lake or swamp. (Apparently a bunch of people knew about this; these boxes are all over the place.)

The Take-Away: This is just another reminder of why I love living in a wooded area — you just never know what kind of nature is going to happen. Today it was wood ducks in a tree; last year it was woodchucks in the backyard (and the five tiny woodchucklettes that would line up along the edge of the deck every afternoon to bask in the sun). 

The point is, having nature happen in your own backyard is both a pleasure and a privilege. We owe it to our fellow creatures to do what we can in our own sphere of influence to make the Earth a hospitable place for all of us. I’m not suggesting that you need to head over to Home Depot for wood-working supplies; just go a little green … recycle more stuff … spray less poison around in your yard … break for squirrels … Do what you can  

Post Note: If you are so inclined — to learn more about the “best practices” around wood duck nesting boxes, consult the Minnesota Wood Duck Society website. Unfortunately, we missed their annual meeting which was held on April 4th.